Why can you not stop eating until you scarf down a whole bag of Doritos?  Is it a special gene? Epigenetics, like your mom ate one when she was pregnant with you, or is Frito-Lay just fiendishly clever?

Ban-happy critics blame fat and carbohydrate content but a new study found that was not the case. If it were, we could just add ingredients to unpopular foods like Brussels sprouts and affect the rewards center in the brain positively so people eat more of those. 

NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center is the official U.S Government source for space weather forecasts, alerts, watches and warnings. NASA and NOAA,as well as the US Air Force Weather Agency (AFWA) and others, keep a constant watch on the sun to monitor for space weather effects such as geomagnetic storms, the idea being that with advance notification many satellites, spacecraft and technologies can be protected from the worst effects.
 

A component of egg whites, already a popular whole egg substitute among cholesterol-conscious consumers concerned, may have another beneficial effect - reducing blood pressure, according to a study presented earlier this week at the American Chemical Society (ACS) meeting. 

The researchers used a peptide called RVPSL. Scientists previously discovered that the substance, like the family of medications that includes Captopril, Vasotec and Monopril, was an angiotensin-converting-enzyme (ACE) inhibitor. It has the ability to inhibit or block the action of ACE, a substance produced in the body that raises blood pressure.

Almost everyone who has had an arm or leg amputated experiences a phantom limb, a vivid sensation that the missing limb is still present, like having an itch.

Neuroscientists at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have shown that it isn't just for amputees - the sensation of having a physical body is not as self-evident as we might think and have evoked the illusion of having a phantom hand in non-amputated individuals.

Brain studies are a mass of contradictions. When you leave your job and your home and your technology behind for a vacation, you 'disconnect' some claim.

"Actually, you've just given your brain a whole new challenge," says Thomas D. Albright, director of the Vision Center Laboratory at of the Salk Institute and an expert on how the visual system works. "You may think you're resting, but your brain is automatically assessing the spatio-temporal properties of this novel environment-what objects are in it, are they moving, and if so, how fast are they moving?

Researchers recently studied the reaction of aphids when a parasitic wasp with genetic variation laid eggs in them and found that different genotypes of the wasp affected where the aphids went to die, including whether they left the plant host entirely. The team also found an example of the emergence of a shared phenotype that was partly wasp and partly aphid.