"Keeping up with the Joneses" is a colloquialism for developing world desire to have the same or better status in society than peers. If someone gets a new car, you get a new car.

In some people, status is so important they suffer psychological distress if they lack status.

But it isn't just for the middle class in Western nations, say anthropologists at U.C. Santa Barbara, who found that the same need exists among the Tsimane, an egalitarian society of forager-farmers in the Bolivian Amazon. 

Adolescence is often a turbulent time for both genders, marked by biological changes and substantially increased rates of depressive symptoms.

But girls seem to take it a lot harder and a new paper in Clinical Psychological Science believes this gender difference may be the result of girls' greater exposure to stressful interpersonal events, making them more likely to ruminate, and contributing to their risk of depression.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Eric Betzig of Janelia Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Stefan W. Hell of the 
Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry and William E. Moerner of Stanford University “for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy”.

Optical microscopy was once held back by a limitation: that it could never obtain a better resolution than half the wavelength of light. Helped by fluorescent molecules the Nobel Laureates in Chemistry 2014 ingeniously circumvented this limitation and brought optical microscopy into the nanodimension.

Pre-school kids have a lot to learn. They often don't even know how to tie their shoelaces or count to 100. But that is an applications issue. When it comes to skepticism, even kids at age 5 show critical thinking skills. 

A new study published in PLOS ONE finds that by the age of five, children become wary of information provided by people who make overly confident claims. 

Dr. Patricia Brosseau-Liard, a
Concordia University
postdoctoral fellow, recruited 96 four- and five-year-olds and then with University of British Columbia psychologists Tracy Cassels and Susan Birch had the youngsters weigh two important cues to a person's credibility — prior accuracy and confidence — when deciding what to believe. 

A new study has pinpointed working memory as a cause of learning difficulties in people with schizophrenia.

Working memory is known to be affected in 1 percent of the population who have schizophrenia, but it has been unclear whether that has a specific role in making learning more difficult, said Brown University postdoctoral researcher Anne Collins, lead author of the paper
in the Journal of Neuroscience. 

Though numerous experts and policy makers have called for hospitals to screen patients for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections and isolate anyone testing positive to prevent the spread "Superbugs" in healthcare settings, it's too economically burdensome.
 
Several states have enacted laws requiring patients be screened for MRSA upon admission but  two new abstracts, scheduled for presentation on Friday at IDWeek, the annual scientific meeting for infectious disease specialists, found universal MRSA screening and isolation of high-risk patients will help prevent MRSA infections but may be too economically burdensome for an individual hospital to adopt.