Perceived attractiveness is the result of compatibility of biological sex and gendered cues--masculinity and femininity as specified within the society--according to a study by researchers at New York University and Texas A & M University. The findings appear in the most recent issue of the journal, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study, conducted by Kerri Johnson at NYU's Department of Psychology and Louis Tassinary at Texas A & M's Department of Architecture, sought to address the following question: Is perceived attractiveness the result of the compatibility of biological sex and gendered cues (i.e., masculinity and femininity as specified within the society)?

A University of Southern California study has found the first proof of structural brain abnormalities in people who habitually lie, cheat and manipulate others.

While previous research has shown that there is heightened activity in the prefrontal cortex - the area of the brain that enables most people to feel remorse or learn moral behavior - when normal people lie, this is the first study to provide evidence of structural differences in that area among pathological liars.

The research - led by Yaling Yang and Adrian Raine, both of the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences - is published in the October issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry.

School violence expert has conducted research involving a long-term national study of the behavior and patterns in the lives of 15 school shooters involved in 13 incidences of targeted school violence from 1996 to 2005 in American schools.

The study, conducted by Ann Marie C. Lenhardt, PhD, professor of counseling and human services at Canisius College in Buffalo, NY, is based on case studies of data derived from archival sources. Individual shooters included in the study perpetrated an act of targeted violence in their schools, acts that were preplanned, not impulsive.

Women who commit sexual offences are just as likely to have mental problems or drug addictions as other violent female criminals. This according to the largest study ever conducted of women convicted of sexual offences in Sweden.

Between 1988 and 2000, 93 women and 8,500 men were convicted of sexual offences in Sweden. Given that previous research has focused on male perpetrators, knowledge of the factors specific to female sex offenders has been scant.

A group of researchers at the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet have now looked into incidences of mental illness and drug abuse in these 93 convicted women, and compared them with over 20,000 randomly selected women in the normal population and with the 13,000-plus women who were convicted of non-sexual crimes over the same period.

People who commit filicide, the killing of their own child, are no more psychotically disordered than other homicide offenders. Research published in the open access journal BMC Psychiatry has shown that prevention of filicide cannot remain the task of psychiatry alone, but health care and society at large must work to prevent the danger.

Hanna Putkonen from Vanha Vaasa Hospital, Finland, worked with a team of Finnish researchers to compare the psychosocial history, index offense, and psychiatric morbidity of filicide offenders with other homicide offenders. She said, "The novel results of this nationwide study reinforce the general impression that filicide offenders are a distinct group of homicide offenders. However, they did not emerge as mentally disordered as has previously been supposed".

In the war on our waistlines, fat is the enemy. It is fat, or adipose tissue, that gives us our beer bellies and our love handles, our man boobs and our muffin tops. And when plastic surgeons sculpt people into slenderness, it is fat tissue they suck up and throw out with the clinical waste.

It seems odd, then, that a type of fat tissue could also be the key to weight control. Not ordinary white adipose tissue, but a special kind called brown fat.

In some mammals, brown fat turns the energy obtained from food into heat, burning up calories without the animal expending any effort. It used to be thought that adult humans had no brown fat, but a raft of new evidence indicates that this is wrong, and it is in fact present and functional in at least some individuals. Differences in the amount of brown fat each person has may help to explain why some of us are slim while others are overweight, and why many of us pile on the pounds as we age.

Researchers are experimenting with various ways to increase the amount or activity of our brown fat, either pharmaceutically or even surgically, by extracting ordinary white fat through liposuction, transforming it into brown fat and re-implanting it. A mere 50 grams of brown fat - well within the range of what some of us already have - could dissipate around 500 calories a day. "I exercise on an elliptical trainer and it's pretty hard for me to burn up 500 calories," says Ronald Kahn, head of obesity research at Harvard Medical School's Joslin Diabetes Center. "If I could do it without working and do it every day, it would be pretty great."

You're meeting a friend in a crowded cafeteria. Do your eyes scan the room like a roving spotlight, moving from face to face, or do you take in the whole scene, hoping that your friend's face will pop out at you? And what, for that matter, determines how fast you can scan the room?

Researchers at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory say you are more likely to scan the room, jumping from face to face as you search for your friend. In addition, the timing of these jumps appears to be determined by waves of activity in the brain that act as a clock. The study, which appears in the Aug. 13 issue of the journal Neuron, sheds new light on a long-standing debate among neuroscientists over how the visual system picks out an object of interest in a complex scene.

In the study, monkeys were given the task of searching for one particular tilted, colored bar among a field of bars on a computer screen. By monitoring the activity of neurons in three of the animals' brain regions, researchers found that the monkeys spontaneously shifted their attention in a sequence, like a moving spotlight that jumped from location to location.

Scientists have discovered that even in adults born with extremely impaired sight, the brain can rewire itself to recognize sections of the retina that have been restored by gene therapy.

The discovery of the brain's surprising adaptability comes a year after three blind volunteers received doses of corrective genes to selected areas of their retinas at Shands at the University of Florida medical center.

Now, more than a year later, researchers say tiny portions of the patients' retinas that have received gene therapy have kept their restored function, as much as 1,000-fold increases for day vision and 63,000-fold for night vision.

But in an unexpected finding, scientists writing in Thursday's (Aug. 13) New England Journal of Medicine say the treated parts of the retinas may have acquired enough image-processing strength to rival the retina's normal center for visual perception, called the fovea, for the brain's attention.

For close to a decade, pharmaceutical researchers have been in hot pursuit of compounds to activate a key nicotine receptor that plays a role in cognitive processes. Triggering it, they hope, might prevent or even reverse the devastation wrought by Alzheimer's disease.

A new study from the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, however, suggests that when the receptor, alpha-7, encounters beta amyloid, the toxic protein found in the disease's hallmark plaques, the two may actually go rogue. In combination, alpha-7 and beta amyloid appear to exacerbate Alzheimer's symptoms, while eliminating alpha-7 seems to nullify beta amyloid's harmful effects.

These findings, reported recently in The Journal of Neuroscience, may shed new light on the processes leading to Alzheimer's and could have important implications for researchers seeking to combat the disease.

Life in the fruit bowl is no longer the pits, thanks to a University of Alberta researcher.

Christina Engels has found a way to turn the throwaway kernels in mangos into a natural food preservative that could help prevent Listeriosis outbreaks like the one that killed 21 Canadians last year.

The findings can also apply to other fruit seeds like grapes, said Engels, who conducted the research to earn her master's degree from the Department of Agricultural, Food and Nutritional Science at the U of A. The research is published in the latest Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.