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One More Reason to Skip Dessert
Creepiest incentive ever to exercise: Peruvian cops have arrested a gang that, they say, kills people for their fat. Read More
November 20, 2009 | In Life & Death
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Footnote about the Pinker-Gladwell kerfuffle: To discredit Gladwell, Pinker takes advantage of a truly embarrassing mistake (the science-writer's nightmare) in which Gladwell misspelled "eigenvalue'' as "igon value.'' (It seems a less successful gambit, though, after you learn that Pinker misspelled "sagittal'' in his list of Gladwell's errors -- a mistake which, though now corrected on the NY Times website, lives on in places where the freshly posted review was quoted, like Read More
November 19, 2009 | In Science & Tech
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The United States' Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act takes effect on Saturday. Subsequently, it will be illegal for employers to use genetic test results to make decisions about their employees, or even to gather genetic information on people. That includes family histories of heart trouble, stroke, and other common maladies—which means that businesses' frequently-used "health risk" assessment forms will have to lose their intrusive que… Read More
November 18, 2009 | In Science & Tech
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Expectations for the Copenhagen summit next month are dropping like a cartoon anvil. Where once there was talk of a comprehensive international accord on cutting greenhouse-gas emissions, now the great global meeting is just a "stepping stone." "We must in the coming weeks focus on what is possible and not let ourselves be distracted by what is not possible," says the Danish Prime Minister, Lars Lokke Rasmussen. Read More
November 17, 2009 | In Politics & Policy
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Steven Pinker's attack on Malcolm Gladwell in the New York Times Book Review was more lucid and entertaining than it was intellectually honest. Read More
November 17, 2009 | In Science & Tech
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If you want to see some key symptoms of unconvincing journalism about social science, look no further than this New York Times piece on the effect of unemployment on families. Read More
November 13, 2009 | In Media & Internet
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Does Tipper Gore Know About This One?
Here's a curious study, which reports that "a multivariate logistic regression analysis finds that opera fans are 2.37 times more accepting of suicide because of dishonor than nonfans." The authors think this is because suicide in the name of honor is a theme of many opera plots. They call it the "Madame Butterfly" effect. Read More
November 12, 2009 | In Media & Internet
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People see what their tools let them see. Case in point: How different the world looks when it's mapped according to unfamiliar principles. Read More
November 11, 2009 | In Science & Tech, World
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Too Clear? Too Simple? You CAN Get Help!
Writing for an academic journal? If your prose doesn't sound importantly recondite enough, you could just let this auto-pedant do it for you. Read More
November 4, 2009 | In Arts & Culture
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Models of the mind are never ``just theories'' -- ideas about human nature shape the rules and habits that guide daily life. Read More
November 4, 2009 | In Health & Medicine
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Wrestling with any decisions today? Wondering whether to move to Minnesota or dump that guy or change your Facebook profile picture? Maybe you've also wondered what's going on when you make your choices in life, big and small. Read More
November 3, 2009 | In Science & Tech
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A.N. Wilson, the arch-conservative English litteratteur, doesn't like scientists. They are ``gods of certainty'' and people who respect them, he writes today, are responsible for killing most of Britain's cows and sheep and keeping the country's addicts on their drugs and many other bad, bad things, yea, even unto Adolf: ``The only difference between Hitler and previous governments was that he believed, with babyish credulity, in… Read More
November 3, 2009 | In Science & Tech
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The Very Rich Are Different from You and Me
So wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald. To which Ernest Hemingway replied, ``yes. They have more money.'' Could they one day end up having more fingers? Toes? Brains? Read More
November 2, 2009 | In Future
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Exploring the Post-Rational 21st Century
What this Blog Is All About Read More
November 2, 2009 | In Science & Tech
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Matthew Hoh thinks there is no good reason. And his opinion is significant, because he is the U.S. Government's Senior Civilian Representive in the Afghan province of Zabul -- or was, until he resigned last month. Read More
October 28, 2009 | In Politics & Policy
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Today is the 47th anniversary of the day a courageous Soviet submarine officer, Vasili Arkhipov, probably saved the world from nuclear armageddon. Read More
October 27, 2009 | In History
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Biofuels: A Cure Worse Than The Disease?
Biofuel development is going to add a lot more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than previously estimated, according to a new assessment published today in Science Express. Read More
October 22, 2009 | In Environment
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The Hormone of Competition . . .
After a soccer match, the losers' testosterone levels will probably be lower than the winners' (though it may be that this won't be so if the winners think their victory was a fluke). And among the spectators, even fans of the losers will experience a te… Read More
October 22, 2009 | In Science & Tech
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Monkey See, Monkey Do, Monkey Get Phone Number . . .
What makes a woman appealing to a new male acquaintance? Imitation, according to this study, published in this month's issue of the journal Social Influence. Read More
October 22, 2009 | In Love, Sex, & Happiness
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A Great Documentary About the Price of Technology
Technological change captures attention in every era, exciting dreams (and nightmares) about the future, filling histories and literature with stories about its powerful effects. The newest and most impressive devices of an age, as the historian of technology Derek de Solla Price pointed out somewhere, draw thinkers like a flame: the latest technology in each era ends up as a metaphor for the mind itself. Plato compared the psyche to a chariot. Sigmund Freud and Konrad Lorenz described emotions under pressure, risking explosion, as if the mind were a big industrial turbine. Twenty years… Read More
October 20, 2009 | In Truth & Justice
David Berreby is the author of Us and Them: The Science of Identity. He has written about human behavior and other science topics for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Slate, Smithsonian, The New Republic, Nature, Discover, Vogue and many other publications. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the University of Paris, a Science Writing Fellow at the Marine Biological Laboratory, a resident at Yaddo, and in 2006 was awarded the Erving Goffman Award for Outstanding Scholarship for the first edition of Us and Them.