• Researchers at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore say they’ve created genetically modified mosquitos whose immune systems have been engineered to kill malaria-causing parasites before they get passed on to humans. Considering the disease kills 800,000 people a year, this could be huge. The hope is that the new mosquito strand can be released into the wild and pass their altered genes on to the rest of the population. Read more about how they made the mutant mosquitos here.

• We’ll chalk this up to a Christmas miracle. Twin sisters in Voorhees gave birth to their first children, both boys, just 13 minutes apart on Tuesday. Action News has the story.

• Another scary outcome of high lead exposure: hearing loss.  A new study of adolescents found that those with higher-than-considered-safe levels of lead in their blood were more likely to fail a hearing exam than kids with low levels of the metal. Read more here.

“Tell me about your mother.” It’s the almost-too-cliche-at-this-point mantra of every therapist, psychiatrist and psychologist in the book. But new research suggests they have good reason to probe.

Wired reports on a study in which researchers took 28 women—half of whom suffered from depression—and showed them photos of strangers, their friends, and their mothers. They wanted to see if viewing the images made any difference in brain activity. When the depressed and non-depressed subjects viewed the ones of strangers and friends, their activity (recorded using fMRI scans) measured about the same. But when the depressed women were shown pictures of their mothers, researchers documented significantly greater activity in the region of the brain responsible for social emotions—much greater activity than was found in their non-depressed peers. In fact, the results were so accurate that the researchers were able to determine with 90 percent accuracy which of the subjects were depressed just by looking at the scans. Crazy, right?

The research probably won’t translate into a diagnostic tool for depression anytime soon, since fMRI are costly to run. But the research could open doors to better understanding depression and, perhaps, its causes.

Not that I’m blaming Mom for everything, of course.

• Oh man, does this woman have something to hold over her husband’s head for years to come. Twenty-five years ago, she saw something on her tonsil and decided to use a pen and mirror to try and get a better look. She ended up swallowing the pen by accident (um, ouch?), but neither her husband nor her doctor believed her story when the pen didn’t register on X-rays. Now, a quarter century later, the woman was proved right when a CT scan showed that the pen was sitting fully in tact in her stomach. Doctors decided to operate to remove it, lest the implement puncture a hole in her stomach after all these years. And guess what? They found that the pen still works. I’ll be darned. NPR has the CT scan and proof positive of the pen’s working condition.

• I’m sure you’ve heard of the whole “27 Club” thing, right? The urban legend that the age of 27 is somehow unlucky for musicians, since several—Amy Winehouse, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and others—never made it to 28? Well, a team in Australia decided to test the theory to see if famous rock stars really are more likely to die at 27 years old. Turns out no, they’re not, but the research did find that on the whole, musicians in their 20s and 30s are two to three times more likely to die prematurely compared to the rest of the population. Probably has something to do with all the drugs. But that’s just a guess.

• Starchy foods like bread and crackers can turn your infants into tiny sodium addicts, according to a new study. No, really.