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"To find this out, researchers of the Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden studied the heart rates of high school choir members as they joined their voices. Their findings, published this week in Frontiers in Neuroscience, confirm that choir music has calming effects on the heart - especially when sung in unison."

A nun at a Catholic hospital in Phoenix has been excommunicated for allowing an abortion to be performed on a woman who doctors say would otherwise have died. Sister Margaret McBride may also be expelled from her order. Now, there's a debate about the church's quick, severe penalty while it waited years to punish pedophile priests.">

Even the smallest dose of power can change a person. You've probably seen it. Someone gets a promotion or a bit of fame and then, suddenly, they're a little less friendly to the people beneath them. Why? But if you ask Sukhvinder Obhi, a neuroscientist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada, he might give you another explanation: Power fundamentally changes how the brain operates. Everybody watched a simple video. In it, an anonymous hand squeezes a rubber ball a handful of times. Obhi's team tracked the participants' brains, looking at a special region called the mirror system. The mirror system contains neurons that become active both when you squeeze a rubber ball and when you watch someone else.... Whether you do it or someone else does, your mirror system activates. In this small way, the mirror system places you inside a stranger's head. It turns out, feeling powerless boosted the mirror system - people empathized highly. But, Obhi says, "when people were feeling powerful, the signal wasn't very high at all."