The interesting and important implications of recent findings around the role of the SRY gene have been largely overlooked by a news media hungry for simple, familiar stories. By Rob Brooks.

There’s this gene that about half of all people carry. It’s a pretty nasty gene – it massively increases the risk of the carrier being a murderer or a murder victim, going to jail or dying in an accident. And a new paper in Bioessays – by Prince Henry’s Institute researchers Joohyung Lee and Vincent R. Harley – suggests this gene might be responsible for an aggressive response to sudden stresses.

That could explain the bit about murder, accidents and jail.

Despite all the bad press this gene gets, it isn’t all bad. Carriers have the same number of children as non-carriers. And the biggest winners in our evolutionary history – the people who have left the most descendants – have all been carriers.

Far from being rational, our decision-making is more often than not based on emotion. By Paul Harrison.

In a 2008 paper on neuroeconomics, Carnegie Mellon University economist George Loewenstein said: “Whereas psychologists tend to view humans as fallible and sometime even self-destructive, economists tend to view people as efficient maximisers of self-interest who make mistakes only when imperfectly informed about the consequences of their actions.”

This view of humans as completely rational – and the market as eminently efficient – is relatively recent. In 1922, in the Journal of Political Economy, Rexford G. Tugwell, said (to paraphrase) that a mind evolved to function best in “the exhilarations and the fatigues of the hunt, the primitive warfare and in the precarious life of nomadism”, had been strangely and quickly transported into a different milieu, without much time to modify the equipment of the old life.

US engineers unveil a new super fast data transmission device 2,000 times more energy efficient than any device in use today, writes John Holden.

This week, scientists at the Stanford School of Engineering demonstrated their ultrafast nanoscale light-emitting diode (LED). This light-based data transmitter uses thousands of times less energy than today's laser-based systems. In addition, it is able to transmit information at 10 gigabytes per second (just to give you an idea: one movie download is usually around 1 gigabyte).

New research furthers efforts to reverse the ageing process without the ethical restrictions associated with embryonic stem cell research, writes John Holden.

The altogether un-hip sounding ‘Genomic Plasticity and Ageing’ Team at the Functional Genomics Institute in Montpelier France have successfully rejuvenated cells from donors aged over 100 years.

The biggest ever study of its kind has shown there are no links between mobile phone use and the development of brain and central nervous system tumours, writes John Holden.

The number of people using mobile phones is rising every single day. Over five billion global subscriptions were made in 2010 alone. Naturally there should be some concern over any potential harmful effects technology this widely used might have on the population at large. One such concern has been links between radio waves given off from phones and the development of cancer in humans.

The most significant point made at last night’s Irish Skeptics Society talk on the OPERA experiment at CERN is that pretty much all science journalism is bad, writes John Holden.

Science journalists have to get used to criticism. The nature of the content being reported on is often deeply complex and so is open to misinterpretation by non-scientists. Scientists will never admit to being sure of anything while journalists love their affirmatives.

The media are also often criticised for highlighting a breakthrough in science as if it has come ‘out of the blue’ when in actual fact, most breakthroughs are like “Russian dolls” that are born out of years of prior research.

New research from the Centre for Pain Research at NUI Galway highlights the importance of marijuana-like chemicals in suppressing pain. By John Holden.

The effects of smoking weed vary from person to person. For some it’s the perfect relaxant at the end of a long day. For others, marijuana can in fact cause anxiety and stress.

Its effects will vary depending on an individual’s own personality and make-up. However, the active ingredient in marijuana, Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), doesn’t change.

The 2011 Nobel Prize winner for Chemistry couldn’t be more deserving. After initially being ridiculed and asked to leave his research group for his findings in 1982, Israeli Daniel Shechtman, 70, takes home the 2011 Nobel ‘kudos’ and 10 million Swedish kronor (€1,082,671) for his discovery of “quasicrystals”. By John Holden.

The world of science can be nasty. You might make a seemingly important breakthrough only to have it shot down by your peers on account of ignorance or politics. In Daniel Schectman’s case it was the former as his “crystals that break all the rules of being a crystal” shocked his research group at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel, so much that he was asked to leave the group for fear he would bring ridicule upon them all.