If you are apathetic, it would be a surprise to know your brain is making more effort, but a new study finds that some people traditionally perceived as lazy have a biology problem and not an attitude one.

Forty healthy volunteers completed a questionnaire that scored them on how motivated they were. They were then asked to play a game in which they were made offers, each with a different level of reward and physical effort required to win the reward. Unsurprisingly, offers with high rewards requiring low effort were usually accepted, while low rewards requiring high effort were less popular.

An estimated 12 million people in the United States experience diagnostic errors annually, when including a missed diagnosis, the wrong diagnosis, or a delayed one, all of which can lead to harm from delayed or inappropriate treatments and tests.

In an opinion piece published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Hardeep Singh of Baylor and Dr. Mark L Graber of RTI International in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina said the recent Institute of Medicine report on "Improving Diagnosis in Health Care" requires individual and collaborative action from all health care stakeholders nationwide. 

When people are listening to music, their emotional reactions to the music are reflected in changes in their pupil size. Researchers from the University of Vienna and the University of Innsbruck, Austria, are the first to show that both the emotional content of the music and the listeners' personal involvement with music influence pupil dilation. A new paper demonstrates that pupil size measurement can be effectively used to probe listeners' reactions to music.

A new paper proposes an entirely new approach to risk assessment for future violence. Previous approaches have relied on looking at risk factors that happen to be linked to, but may not cause, violence, for example, being young, male, of lower social class, with previous violent convictions.

The new approach is instead based on identifying risk factors that have a clear causal link to violence, and include symptoms of major mental disorder, the patient's living condition, and whether they are taking medication.

Deep within your DNA, a tiny parasite called a LINE-1 retrotransposon lurks, waiting to pounce from its perch and land in the middle of an unsuspecting healthy gene. If it succeeds, it can make you sick. Like a jungle cat, this parasite sports a long tail but little was known about what role that tail plays in this dangerous jumping. 

If you remodel your kitchen or put in a custom library, chances are that money is lost; when buyers look at the comparable sales for homes in the area, they want to pay based on similar square footage. 

Not so for solar installations, in six markets, according to a recent analysis. Researchers engaged a team of seven appraisers from across the six states to determine the value that solar photovoltaic (PV) systems added to single-family homes using the industry-standard paired-sales valuation technique, which compares recent sales of comparable homes to estimate the premium buyers would pay for PV.