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Human behavior in a post-rational world
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. As described here, Nicolas Gueguen, a psychologist, sent three women out to speed-date 66 men. In some of the encounters, the women ...
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 ...
Last year Bill Maher released a movie ridiculing religious beliefs, including those of creationists. But he's now ranting against vaccination (Orac's blog is all over it), saying the same thing that creationists say: The science is not settled, there are many competing theories, so we should have ...
Want to help protect your region's sources of fresh water? Or find out the results of the latest water-quality tests for the stuff you're drinking? If you live in the United States, now you can, easily. Just go here. Hat tip to Eric Baard for this site.
Where in the United States are teen-age girls most likely to become pregnant? According to this study, published last month in the journal Reproductive Health, the answer is: Where Evangelical Christians are most numerous. The debate over whether abstinence education ``works'' has been running for ...
Great news, fans of continued existence! The world will not end in 2012, despite what you may have heard from a passing lunatic and/or viral marketer for this film. How do I know? Same way the doomsayers do -- a Mayan says so. Many an ethnic group can find itself canonized as a source of ...
The human mind is full of contradictory impulses. For instance, I doubt that many of us want the President to do his own laundry. He's not like us; he has a special talent that we want him to exercise, so give him a pass on the socks. At the same time, we're innately egalitarian, at least ...
Francis Collins and J. Craig Venter are the scientists whose names will always be associated with mapping of the human genome -- after racing to complete the job, the two announced in 2000 that it was done, three years early. So it's impressive that this year they both announced another shared ...
Batten down the hatches, people who work in tech support from Bangalore to Bangor. Google's tribute for today celebrates the invention of the bar code. Replacing those playground-friendly letters with the word ``Google'' in black, geeky barcodese will surely make a lot of people reset their ...
What causes people to act as they do -- the way they're made, or the way they make, as they go through life? Often in the mind sciences, stable traits (what you are) or changing situations (what you are doing) are set against each other as explanations for our habits and follies. Practically ...
It's safer to travel by airplane than by car, but people feel more secure on the road. The likely reason is that we feel less threatened when we have some control: Unlike passive passengers in jets, drivers can enjoy the illusion that their risk depends completely on their own actions. Some ...
A lot of hay has been made in recent years out Paul Ekman's idea that some basic facial expressions are universal -- that all people express and recognize emotions like anger, fear and disgust in the same way, no matter where they grew up. In one famous study, for instance, people who lived in an ...
Eastern Congo has been overrun with armed groups since the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Their ongoing war has killed more than 5 million people and caused millions more to suffer, as non-combatants have been displaced, impoverished, press-ganged, infected with diseases, mutilated and/or raped. These ...
Being a social animal saves you a lot of trouble. You don't need to grow huge claws or massive armored plates to protect yourself; your weapons and your shield are in your relationships to other members of your pack. In many bird species, a flock will ``mob'' a predator. And in Alaska I've seen ...
A number of evolutionary psychologists have claimed men and women have innate, inescapable differences in their approach to sex. It's supposed to be a logical consequence of the two genders' different reproductive strategies. The theory is, as the old rhyme goes, Higgamous, Hoggamous, woman's ...