It used to be a stereotype that being fat meant you had a happy personality.  Then culture went out of its way to vilify fat people and make them miserable - when they weren't vilifying culture or food companies for making people fat.

Now researchers claim new genetic evidence about why some people are happier than others - and it involves a gene implicated in obesity. The gene FTO, which is correlated to obesity by the 'being fat is exculpatory' segment of science, has now been similarly associated with an eight percent reduction in the risk of depression. In other words, it's not just an obesity gene but a "happy gene" as well, if your correlation and causation errors roll that way.

Elsevier has launched a new open access, online journal, Leukemia Research Reports. It will publish  a range of peer-reviewed short form papers, including brief communications, case reports, letters to the editors, images and debate articles about basic and/or applied clinical research in leukemias, lymphomas, multiple myeloma and other hematologic malignancies. 

The editors of Leukemia Research Reports are: Dr Suneel Mundle (Janssen Services LLC and Rush Medical College, Chicago, IL) and Dr Meir Wetzler (State University of New York at Buffalo School of Medicine and Roswell Park Cancer Center, Buffalo, NY).

The All Wales Strategic Medical Group (AWSMG) has approved Zebinix(R) (eslicarbazepine acetate) for the treatment of partial seizures in highly refractory patients who remain uncontrolled with, or are intolerant to, other anti-epileptic medicine combinations.

Eslicarbazepine acetate is licensed in Europe as an adjunctive therapy for adults with partial-onset seizures with or without secondary generalization. 

Women scientists in primatology are poorly represented at symposia organized by men, but receive equal representation when symposia organizers are women or mixed groups, according to an analysis published in PLOS ONE. 

The authors examined female participation at major scientific conferences for primate scientists and anthropologists, where symposia are largely by invitation but posters and other talks are initiated by participants. They found that within the field of primatology, women give more posters than talks, whereas men give more talks than posters. Their analysis also shows that symposia organized by men on average included half the number of women authors (29%) than symposia organized by women or both men and women (58 to 64%). 

While in deep sleep, our hippocampus sends messages to our cortex and changes its plasticity, possibly transferring recently acquired knowledge to long-term memory.

How exactly is this done? Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics have developed a multimodal methodology called "neural event-triggered functional magnetic resonance imaging" (NET-fMRI) and presented the very first results obtained using it in experiments with both anesthetized and awake, behaving monkeys.

The dwarf planet Makemake is about two thirds of the size of Pluto and farther from the Sun - but closer than Eris, the most massive so-called dwarf planet in the Solar System after the confusing reconfiguration by the International Astronomical Union that said Pluto was not a planet but then was, only a special non-planet along with others.

Like Eris, but unlike Pluto, Makemake has no atmosphere, making it even less sensical as a planet.