Observations
Masks and Emasculation: Why Some Men Refuse to Take Safety Precautions
They think it makes them look weak, and avoiding that is evidently more important to them than demonstrating responsible behavior
Blogs
Observations
How a Landmark Physics Paper from the 1970s Uncannily Describes the COVID-19 Pandemic
Phil Anderson’s article “More Is Different” describes how different levels of complexity require new ways of thinking. And as the virus multiplies and spreads, that’s just what the human race desperately needs...
Observations
The Fight against COVID-19 Threatens to Cause Collateral Health Damage
The pandemic is no excuse to abandon chronic disease management and prevention
Recent Posts
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Pssst: Gossip hurts--but friends can protect you from the worst of it
CHICAGO--Think a little gossip is harmless? Beware: new research says gossiping can be a form of warfare in which information is used as a weapon that could potentially damage a competitor's reputation...
HIV drugs turned street drugs in South Africa
Teens in South Africa have found a new use for efavirenz (brand name Stocrin in South Africa and Sustiva in the U.S.), an antiretroviral drug that prevents HIV from making copies of itself in the body...
Is wisdom in the brain?
Some of us look for wisdom in the Bible, Plato or at Grandma's knee. Dilip Jeste and his colleague Thomas Meeks are searching for it in the brain.
Jeste and Meeks, both geriatric psychiatrists at the University of California, San Diego, hypothesize in the Archives of General Psychiatry that wisdom, or at least the execution of its attributes, can be found in the brain's primitive limbic system as well as its more evolutionarily advanced prefrontal cortex...
How similar was Neandertal behavior to that of modern humans?
CHICAGO—Neandertals have long been portrayed as dumb brutes. But a growing body of evidence hints that these extinct humans were much savvier than previously thought.
Do dogs really look like their owners?
Ever wonder if that whiskery fellow walking his jowly Scottish terrier or that leggy, long-haired blonde jogging with her Afghan hound were just flukes?
April Fools' Day answers
As several readers correctly answered in response to yesterday's April Fools Day blog quiz, the one real story was (drum roll…) the mind-reading robot!
April fools gets geeky: Can you spot the genuine story?
Did any of this year's April Fools Day gags get your goose? Test your nerd knowledge by pinpointing the actual story below. (Props to TechCrunch for pulling together an impressive fools list.)
Cloud computing in the sky
In an effort to keep cloud computing moving at the speed of light, Amazon Web Services has introduced Floating Amazon Cloud Environment (FACE)...
Massive lions prowled North America not so long ago
Large lions roamed North America and Europe as recently as 13,000 years ago, according to a new study published in Molecular Ecology . "These ancient lions were like a super-sized version of today's lions, up to 25 percent bigger," study co-author Ross Barnett, a researcher at the Ancient Biomolecules Centre at the University of Oxford's department of zoology, said in a statement...
Volunteers set to spend 105 days in isolation module, trial for Mars mission
Four Russians, a German and a Frenchman walk into a pod. That may sound like a setup to an off-color joke, but in actuality it's the start of a prolonged isolation study set to begin tomorrow in Moscow...
Depression screens needed for teens
All teens should be screened for depression, even if they don’t necessarily show signs of the blues, an influential government panel is recommending, noting that the majority of afflicted teens aren’t diagnosed or treated even though there are effective therapies...
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