University of Delaware psychologists say that jealously may literally impair vision.

In a recent study published in Emotion, the researchers found that women who were made to feel jealous were so distracted by unpleasant emotional images they became unable to spot targets they were trying to find.

It has long been known that the emotions involved in social relationships affect mental and physical health, but these results extend the relationship a step further, to the point that emotions affect what we see.

Slender women worry about packing on extra weight, say Brigham Young University researchers who used MRI technology to observe what happened in the brain when people viewed images of complete strangers.

If the stranger happened to be overweight and female, it surprisingly activated an area in women's brains that processes identity and self-reflection. Men did not show signs of any self-reflection in similar situations.

"These women have no history of eating disorders and project an attitude that they don't care about body image," said Mark Allen, a BYU neuroscientist. "Yet under the surface is an anxiety about getting fat and the centrality of body image to self."

The results appear in Personality and Individual Differences.

Mirror neurons are the cells in the brain that fire not only when we perform a particular action but also when we watch someone else perform that same action.

Neuroscientists believe this "mirroring" is the mechanism by which we can "read" the minds of others and empathize with them. It's how we "feel" someone's pain, how we discern a grimace from a grin, a smirk from a smile.

However, there was no proof that mirror neurons existed — only suspicion and indirect evidence. Now, researching writing in Current Biology say they have for the first time made a direct recording of mirror neurons in the human brain.

Scientists assume that all exoplanets orbit in more or less the same plane and  move along their orbits in the same direction of their host star's rotation. But now astronomers have discovered nine new exoplanets that may upset this conventional wisdom.

Researchers say that when combined with earlier observations of transiting exoplanets, the new images indicate that six out of a larger sample of 27 were found to be orbiting in the opposite direction to the rotation of their host star -- the exact reverse of what is seen in our own solar system.

Stanford scientists have harvested a tiny electric current from algae cells, found at the very source of energy production – photosynthesis, a plant's method of converting sunlight to chemical energy.

The research may be one of the many possible first steps toward generating "high efficiency" bioelectricity that doesn't give off carbon dioxide as a byproduct, the researchers say.