We know people have positive social behavior in part because of emotional reactions to real or imagined social harm  - we may not like seeing others slighted or we may not want to be perceived as the kind of person who does that sort of thing.

But some are a lot more sensitive than others and a new study says that the neurotransmitter serotonin can directly alter both moral judgment and behavior through increasing our aversion to personally harming others, rather than just controlling violent impulses or helping you sleep.

Ronald Fisher, evolutionary biologist and statistician who introduced the method of maximum likelihood and the fiducial interval into life sciences, said basically that the more complex a plant or animal is, the more difficulty it should have adapting to changes in the environment. 

But there are well-adapted, complex organisms, orchids, humans, you name it, and confusion about 'cost of complexity' offers ammunition to proponents of Creationism, who hold that  intricacy could only arise only through the efforts of a divine designer and not natural selection. 

Unable to exercise?   Some new research may be hope in keeping muscles from atrophy.   Researchers from Stanford University have shown how to use light to induce muscle contraction.

But don't cancel your gym membership just yet.  The study used bioengineered mice whose nerve-cell surfaces were coated with special light-sensitive proteins.

They used a technology known as optogenetics, which involves the insertion of a specialized gene derived from algae into the genomes of experimental animals. This gene encodes a light-sensitive protein that situates itself on nerve-cell surfaces. Particular wavelengths of light can trigger nerve activity in animals endowed with these proteins, modifying nerve cells' firing patterns at the experimenters' will.

Hitler gets a bad rap universally for his genocide but a startling subset of progressives in America view Joseph Stalin favorably despite his killing more people.  Time magazine put Stalin on its cover 11 times.  Then Rwanda, Cambodia and Darfur were essentially ignored while Bosnia was labeled genocide and became a war crime issue despite only a few thousand actual deaths known.

Nations have tugs of war over the official definition of the word 'genocide' itself – which mentions only national, ethnic, racial and religious groups. The definition can determine international relations, foreign aid and national morale.

Scientists know that time passes faster at higher elevations.  It's a curious aspect of Einstein's theories of relativity that previously had to be measured by comparing clocks on the Earth's surface and rockets.

But NIST physicists have made it a lot more personal - a scale of about 1 foot - and showed that you even age faster if you are taller than your relative.   The good news is you won't be able to see the difference, that one foot difference in height adds about 90 billionths of a second over a 79-year lifetime.

The NIST researchers also observed another aspect of relativity, that time passes more slowly when you move faster, at speeds comparable to a car traveling about 20 miles per hour.

It may seem like a waste of time that young people play video games for hours on end but, at least for some, it may help them in surgery one day.  

A new study says reorganization of the brain's cortical network in young men with significant experience playing video games gives them an advantage not only in those games but also with other tasks requiring visuomotor skills.