Yoga improves the mood and mental wellbeing of prisoners, say psychologists who report that after a ten-week yoga course, the convicts reported improved mood, reduced stress and were better at a task related to behavior control than those who continued in their normal prison routine.

An unknown physiologic mechanism of evolutionary biology has been the ability of mammals to manipulate the sex ratios of their offspring as part of a highly adaptive evolutionary strategy. A new paper analyzing 90 years of breeding records from the San Diego Zoo says that mammalian species can "choose" the sex of their offspring in order to beat the odds and produce extra grandchildren.

According to a survey, fewer Americans overall feeling the blues, with rates of depression in people over 50 on the decline.

Sunshine is out. If you aren't slathering yourself in SPF 150 chemicals to keep it off of you, you're going to get skin cancer and no one will feel bad.

It's not that simple. As we grow older our bones become more fragile and a team of researchers have shown that this bone-aging process can be significantly accelerated through deficiency of vitamin D - which we naturally get from sunshine.

Vitamin D deficiency is a widespread medical condition that has been linked to the health and fracture risk of human bone on the basis of low calcium intake and reduced bone density. Working at Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light ALS , the international team demonstrated that vitamin D deficiency also reduces bone quality.  

Every cell in an organism's body has the same copy of DNA, though different cells do different things so some function as brain cells, while others form muscle tissue. How can the same DNA make different things happen? Science is a step closer to answers and maybe even to putting in a piece of the autism puzzle.

Scientists know that much of what a gene does and produces is regulated after it is turned on. A gene first produces an RNA molecule, to which tiny RNA binding proteins (RBPs) bind and control its fate. For example, some of these proteins cut out parts of the RNA molecule so that it makes a particular protein, while other RBPs help destroy the RNA before it even produces a protein. 

Wind power may be hard on endangered eagles but greater prairie chicken populations are still okay, say ecologists.

The work, led by Kansas State University professor of biology Brett Sandercock concluded that wind turbines have little effect on greater prairie chickens - and that female survival rates increased after wind turbines were installed. Yes, wind power led to great life expectancy for females, a combination which should make this study worthy of the New York Times.