Video games can be difficult, even frustrating at the harder levels. That is part of their appeal. It turns out that frustrated people are attracted to video games also. The temptation to steal or cheat is greater if the risk of being caught is low and a new psychology paper suggests that denying people the opportunity to engage in these taboo behaviors may lead them to seek out violent video games as a way of managing their frustration.

People with more money may live longer, if not better, than poor people but attempts to link high socioeconomic status to better health and lower mortality have been ineffective because it's unclear whether the association has more to do with access to resources or the glow of high social status relative to others. Scholars call the latter "relative deprivation."

A new study found that women who take aspirin have a reduced risk of developing melanoma. The longer they take it, the lower the risk, suggesting that aspirin's anti-inflammatory effects may help protect against this type of skin cancer.

In the Women's Health Initiative, researchers observed US women aged 50 to 79 years for an average of 12 years and noted which individuals developed cancer. At the beginning of the study, the women were asked which medications they took, what they ate, and what activities they performed.

Researchers have developed a cloud-computing platform,  the RoboEarth Cloud Engine, that allows robots connected to the Internet to directly access the powerful computational, storage, and communications infrastructure of modern data centers for tasks and learning.

This continues their work towards creating an Internet for robots. The new platform extends earlier work on allowing robots to share knowledge with other robots via a WWW-style database, greatly speeding up robot learning and adaptation in complex tasks.

Research and Markets has released its "Life Science Research Tools Market Size, Growth and Trends 2006-2016" report. 

Viruses and genes interact in a way that may increase the risk of developing schizophrenia significantly - even in a developing fetus, according to an international team which scanned the genomes of hundreds of sick and healthy people to see if there is an interaction between genes and a very common virus, cytomegalovirus, and to see whether the interaction influences the risk of developing schizophrenia.

And it does, they concluded.

Women who have been infected by the virus - around 70 % have - will see a statistically significant increased risk of giving birth to a child who later develops schizophrenia if the child also has the gene variant. This variant is found in 15 percent.

The risk is five times higher than usual.