The single step that would do the most to reduce inequality has nothing to do with finance at all. It’s an expansion of early childhood education.
Traumatic events are well known for producing a sense of unreality as we watch a disaster unfold. Most of us can also produce this state far more pleasurably, by getting drunk, for example. For the less fortunate, though, it is also a known, if quite controversial, psychiatric diagnosis of dissociation. This comes in two main…
Welcome to Animation Domination, Stone Age style. By about 30,000 years ago, Europeans were using cartoon-like techniques to give observers the impression that lions and other wild beasts were charging across cave walls, two French investigators find. Ancient artists created graphic stories in caves and illusions of moving animals on rotating bone disks, say archaeologist…
Astronomers have for the first time discovered two alien planets whirling around a pair of stars: a complete solar system with twin suns just like Luke Skywalker’s fictional home world Tatooine. Most stars like our sun are not singletons, but rather come in pairs that orbit each other. Scientists had found planets in these binary…
How do we judge whether a person knows what he or she is talking about? How do we gauge someone’s credibility? At least in part, we rely on a set of cues – titles, university degrees, papers published, lectures given – that have long been bound up in the concept of “expertise”. If a person…
A rabbi, a descendant of Charles Darwin, a philosopher, and a scholar walk into an auditorium. It sounds like the start of a bad joke, but the group came together for the latest Intelligence Squared U.S. debate and faced off two against two on the motion “The World Would Be Better Off Without Religion.” Author…
A new study finds that activity in distinct parts of the brain can predict whether a person will remain cool or crumble under pressure. The results, presented at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, offer some great new clues that may help scientists understand how the brain copes with stressful situations, Activity in…