All those happy couples you see walking around in the throes of new love? It won't last...but the effects of love and romance do, say psychologists in a Journal of Personality (DOI: 10.1111/jopy.12102)
 article.

The authors focused on neuroticism – one of the five characteristics some psychologists use as basic dimensions of human personality which can be used to characterize every human being.

"Neurotic people are rather anxious, insecure, and easily annoyed. They have a tendency towards depression, often show low self-esteem and tend to be generally dissatisfied with their lives," Dr. Christine Finn explains. "However, we were able to show that they become more stable in a love relationship, and that their personality stabilizes." 

Sea levels are always changing, they always have. We can't count how many glaciers there are because the number is different every year. But the big question is if sea level rise is inceasing or, worse, accelerating.

A new model may help figure out if sea levels might rise around the world throughout the 21st century and if the rate of sea level rise is currently increasing.

An international team of researchers analyzed data from 10 long-term sea level monitoring stations located around the world. They looked into the future to identify the timing at which sea level accelerations might first be recognized in a significant manner. 

In a new paper,  researchers used animal models to show that the fragile X mental retardation protein, or FMRP, plays a critical role in the development of addiction-related behaviors. FMRP is also the protein that is missing in Fragile X Syndrome, the leading single-gene cause of autism and intellectual disability.

Consistent with its important role in brain function, the team found that cocaine utilizes FMRP to facilitate brain changes involved in addiction-related behaviors. 

A study of healthy senior men has found that endurance exercise confers benefits on the heart irrespective of the age at which they began training.

The report
by David Matelot, from the Inserm 1099 unit in Rennes
at the EuroPRevent congress 2014 in Amsterdam, said the benefits were evident and comparable in those who had started training before the age of 30 or after the age of 40. As a result, 40 is not too old to start endurance training.

Research from North Carolina State University shows that blueberries produce more seeds and larger berries if they are visited by more diverse bee species, allowing farmers to harvest significantly more pounds of fruit per acre.

"We wanted to understand the functional role of diversity," says Dr. Hannah Burrack, an associate professor of entomology at NC State and co-author of a paper on the research. "And we found that there is a quantifiable benefit of having a lot of different types of bees pollinating a crop."

The researchers looked at blueberries in North Carolina because it is an economically important and well understood crop that relies on insect pollination.

ST. LOUIS – Air and surface sampling techniques currently used by the US government are effective in fighting bioterrorism and potentially saving lives, according to a new paper in Biosecurity and Bioterrorism. 

The authors made the determination after reviewing the data from a series of experiments simulating a bioterrorism attack against the Pentagon.