Two American economists won the Nobel Prize in economics for their research into how to match different actors in given markets, such as job seekers with employers and patients with donated kidneys. Alvin Roth of Harvard University and Lloyd Shapley of the University of California Los Angeles won the prize “for the theory of stable…
Daniel Kahneman sent an e-mail last week to a dozen social psychologists, spelling out what he sees as a way to restore the credibility of priming research. The research, which has found that small cues can cause strong subconscious effects, have come under fire after attempts to replicate some high-profile studies failed. It hasn’t helped…
Social media was a major force behind last year’s Arab Spring, after communities organized and overthrew tyrannical dictators, as well as last month’s riots across the Muslim world, after the trailer for The Innocence of Muslims circulated on the Internet. Like most technologies, social media can promote the good or accentuate the bad. But does…
“ ‘Nones’ On the Rise,” released by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life in affiliation with PBS’ Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, gives the sense that we can see what’s really going on across the American religious landscape and understand it. The following data points from the report, for instance, seem to make clear…
Rapid urbanization will take a heavy toll on public health if city planning and development do not incorporate measures to tackle air pollution, warns a new study. The report, compiled by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the International Global Atmospheric Chemistry (IGAC), was launched in Beijing in September as part of the IGAC Open…
A 520-million-year-old, three-inch fossil has yielded evidence that complex brains evolved much earlier than previously thought. The preserved external skeleton of Fuxianhuia protensa, an extinct type of arthropod, is the earliest known fossil to show a complex brain, according to a study published in the journal Nature. “No one expected such an advanced brain would…
It’s been 3 years since the legality of federal funding for research involving human embryonic stem cells (hESC) was first brought to the US court system, and despite some tense moments, including a temporary ban on National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding for hESC research, the courts have continued to uphold the legality of such…
Jim Yong Kim, the new president of the World Bank, said that dealing with climate change will be one of his priorities. “Since becoming president of the World Bank, I have looked deeply into the data on climate change, and I have to say I was surprised that even in last 6 months to a…
Reducing the risk of extinction for threatened species and establishing protected areas for nature will cost the world over $76 billion annually. Researchers say it is needed to meet globally agreed conservation targets by 2020. The scientists say the daunting number is just a fifth of what the world spends on soft drinks annually. And…
A New York Medical College developmental biologist whose life’s work has supported the theory of evolution has developed a concept that dramatically alters one of its basic assumptions—that survival is based on a change’s functional advantage if it is to persist. Stuart A. Newman, Ph.D., professor of cell biology and anatomy, offers an alternative model…