The Telegraph provides insight into the genuine pain of a broken heart:

Psychologists at the University of California, Los Angeles say the human body has a gene which connects physical pain sensitivity with social pain sensitivity.

The findings back the common theory that rejection ‘hurts’ by showing that a gene regulating the body’s most potent painkillers – mu-opioids – is involved [...]

Reuters carries the story of the first seed of life to be discovered on a comet:

The latest findings add credence to the notion that extraterrestrial objects such as meteorites and comets may have seeded ancient Earth, and other planets, with the raw materials of life that formed elsewhere in the cosmos.

“The discovery of glycine in a comet supports the [...]

New York Times brings up the unsettling possibility that future biochemically savvy crooks will be capable of fudging DNA evidence:

The scientists fabricated blood and saliva samples containing DNA from a person other than the donor of the blood and saliva. They also showed that if they had access to a DNA profile in a database, they could construct a [...]

Science Daily is hard boiled. As hard boiled as death. And death, they say, has a smell all its own:

Speaking at the 238th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS), they said a profile of the chemicals released from decomposing bodies could also lead to a valuable new addition to the forensic toolkit: An electronic device that could [...]

The Times somewhat recently took a close look at our brains, particularly the parts that UC San Diego neurologists say are responsible for what we call “wisdom” rather than “intelligence”:

The findings, to be published in the Archives of General Psychiatry, represent a significant incursion into territory once regarded as the domain of religion and philosophy.

Dilip Jeste, professor of psychiatry [...]

These are the volumes of the hand, Babelfish tells me… although “baender” also means “bands” (like the FM radio band), or ligaments.

Image found in Wikimedia Commons, from the Meyers Blitz-Lexikon, an encylopedia published in 1932 in Leipzig.

OK, not monkeys, but apes, New Scientist says, have been caught making musical instruments:

The orang-utan’s music, if you can call it that, is actually an alarm call known as a “kiss squeak”.

“When you’re walking the forest and you meet an orang-utan that not habituated to humans, they’ll start giving kiss squeaks and breaking branches,” says Madeleine Hardus, a [...]

New Scientist goes out on a limb with a new study that hints that humans may have learned to walk up in the branches before marching on the ground:

Kivell thinks the wrist bones of chimpanzees may instead have adapted to stabilise the wrist while standing on one tree branch and holding onto another, with knees and elbows bent…. [...]

DiscoveryNews leaves me rooted to the spot with a sprouting fascination in the latest medical implant – bones made from wood:

The researchers chose wood because it closely resemble the physical structure of natural bone, “which is impossible to reproduce with conventional processing technology.”

…

To create the bone substitute, the scientists start with a block of wood — red oak, [...]