A pop song goes that rainy days and Mondays bring people down. There was always some truth to that and a new paper in JAMA quantifies the link between a lack of sunshine and suicide. The authors found that lower rates of suicide are associated with more daily sunshine in the prior 14 to 60 days.

Light interacts with brain serotonin systems and possibly influences serotonin-related behaviors. Those behaviors, such as mood and impulsiveness, can play a role in suicide.

Gibbons are small, tree-living apes from Southeast Asia, many species of which are endangered. They are part of the same superfamily as humans and great apes, but sit on the divide between Old-World monkeys and the great apes.

These creatures have several distinctive traits, such as an unusually large number of chromosomal rearrangements, and different numbers of chromosomes are seen in individual species.

Researchers recently completed analysis of the mobile elements in the gibbon genome. This included the characterization of the mobile genetic element called LAVA. LAVA is made up of pieces of known jumping genes and named after its main components: L1, Alu, and the VA section of SVA mobile elements.

By tracking seismic shifts, researchers say they may be able to predict a major quake off the coast of Istanbul.

When a segment of a major fault line goes quiet, it can mean one of two things - an inactive “seismic gap” which is the result of two tectonic plates placidly gliding past each other, or the seismic gap may be filled by an earthquake after quietly building tension for decades.

Researchers say they have found evidence for both types of behavior on different segments of the North Anatolian Fault — one of the most energetic earthquake zones in the world. The fault, similar in scale to California’s San Andreas Fault, stretches for about 745 miles across northern Turkey and into the Aegean Sea.

Males get more diagnoses of Autism Spectrum Disorders than females and it may be related to changes in the brain's estrogen signaling, writes a paper in Molecular Autism.

 Autism Spectrum Disorders are a broad category of diagnoses that include brain development and assessments of impaired social interaction, along verbal and non-verbal communication and restricted and repetitive behavior. The disorders may have a genetic basis and are around four times more common in men than in women. They have been associated with higher levels of the sex hormone testosterone, but whether there is a relationship between the disorders and estrogen signaling was not known. 

It's uncommon for there to be reanalyses of data from randomized clinical trials (RCTs) - once a product has failed, it isn't smart to keep putting more money into it.

The Milky Way galaxy is orbited by more than 150 globular star clusters - balls of hundreds of thousands of old stars dating back to the formation of the galaxy. In the constellation of Sagittarius (The Archer), the French comet hunter Charles Messier found one such cluster and it was given the designation Messier 54.

For more than two hundred years after its discovery Messier 54, was thought to be similar to the other Milky Way globulars, but in 1994 astronomers determined that it was actually associated with a separate galaxy — the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy. It was found to be at a distance of around 90,000 light-years, more than three times as far from Earth as the galactic center.