NEWS & VIEWS

Cymbalta (5 Aug) - Eli Lilly, the drugs firm that brought Prozac to the world, yesterday prepared to launch its new antidepressant, Cymbalta, after saying the United States food and drug administration had approved it for sale in the country. The controversial drug is still being considered for European approval. [more]

Evolution (4 Aug) - Cancer and evolution both occur when genetic material changes randomly in ways that may be good or bad. A study in Nature magazine this week shows that these changes build up at a much quicker rate than anyone thought. The observation was made in tiny worms, but could revolutionize thinking about all living organisms. NPR's Joe Palca reports. [more]

Genomics (31 Jul) - "We have 25,000 genes (or recipes for protein molecules) which is the same as a mouse, just 6,000 more than a microscopic nematode worm and 15,000 fewer than a rice plant. However sophisticated our brains are, it is not reflected in our genes," writes Matt Ridley. [more]

Lying (31 Jul) - "Is he lying?" Odds are, you'll never know. Although people have been communicating with one another for tens of thousands of years, more than 3 decades of psychological research have found that most individuals are abysmally poor lie detectors. In the only worldwide study of its kind, scientists asked more than 2,000 people from nearly 60 countries, "How can you tell when people are lying?" From Botswana to Belgium, the number-one answer was the same: Liars avert their gaze. [more]

Law (4 Aug) - Emotions are not intrinsically opposed to reason, for they involve pictures of the world and evaluations. But there are some emotions whose role in the law has always been more controversial. Disgust and shame are two of those. [more]

Imagination (3 Aug) - The concept of imagination remains one of the greatest uncharted territories of psychology. Granted, we can't all paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but almost all of us have an ability to come up with ideas or images. So it's time scientists paid more attention to the power of imagination, said Open University senior psychology lecturer Dr Ilona Roth. [more]

Stress (3 Aug) - Levels of a particular hormone may influence a person's ability to cope with stress, suggests a study of soldiers put through a prisoner of war camp simulation. [more]

Economics (9 Aug) - For all its intellectual power and its empirical success as a creator of wealth, free-market economics rests on a fallacy, which economists have politely agreed among themselves to overlook. This is the belief that people apply rational calculations to economic decisions, ruling their lives by economic models. [more]

Obituary (29 Jul) - Francis Crick, the British scientist who helped discover the double helix structure of DNA has died. He was 88 years old and had been battling colon cancer. NPR's Richard Harris offers a remembrance. [more]

History of science (29 Jul) - When great science minds collide, the insults traded and the bile spilt has been both personal and scandalous. But all too often, the victor's reputation is scrubbed clean by the passage of history. William Hartston rakes up some of the muck that has always been part and parcel of the nature of scientific practice, but that few of us know about. [more]

Malthusianism (28 Jul) - The world has never been overpopulated with humans in any meaningful sense. It seems, though, that it is overpopulated with theoretical fears of overpopulation. [more]

Adulthood (2 Aug) - Today, adulthood no longer begins when adolescence ends. In the bridge to adulthood, also referred to as early adulthood, many more young people are caught between the demands of employment (e.g., the need to learn advanced job skills) and economic dependence on their family to support them during this transition. [more]

Inequality (26 Jul) - Among those committed to understanding the mind as the work of natural selection, there is a sense that the time has come: we are now beginning to see what we really are. Two major propositions have emerged, sustained by a construction boom in Darwinian theory and the confidence that supporting data will increasingly be delivered in hard genetic currency.  One is that human nature is evolved and universal; the other is that variations in personality and  mental capabilities are substantially inherited. The first speaks of the species and the second about individuals. That leaves society - and here a third big idea is taking shape. In two words, inequality kills. [more]

Epigenetics (23 Jul) - A look at the emerging science of epigenetics: inherited information that isn't in the form of genes. [more]

RESEARCH & COMMENTARY

Cognitive science (6 Aug) - For all you budding Kasparovs out there, a team of cognitive scientists has worked out how to think like a chess grand master. As those attending this week's Cognitive Science Society meeting in Chicago, Illinois, were told, the secret is to try to knock down your pet theory rather than finding ways to support it - exactly as scientists are supposed to do. [more]

Psychology (6 Aug) - Every mom and dad can tell you that keeping children busy helps stave off cries of boredom--and now there is scientific backing to prove it. Dr. Anthony Chaston and his research colleague, Dr. Alan Kingstone, have proven, once and for all, that time really does fly when you're having fun. Or, at least, it flies when your attention is engaged. [more]

Assertiveness (5 Aug) - Assertiveness really is all in the mind. Dominant rats have more new nerve cells in a key brain region than their subordinates, a study reveals. [more]

Depression (4 Aug) - A brain imaging study by the NIH's National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) has found that an emotion-regulating brain circuit is overactive in people prone to depression – even when they are not depressed. Researchers discovered the abnormality in brains of those whose depressions relapsed when a key brain chemical messenger was experimentally reduced. [more]

Biology (4 Aug) - Women who believe they are going to live for a long time are more likely to give birth to sons than less optimistic women, a new study suggests. Researchers reached the strange conclusion after completing a survey of British women who had recently become mothers. They found that for every extra year a woman thought she was going to live, the odds of her firstborn being a boy increased significantly. [more] [more]

Complex systems - consensus (4 Aug) - A month before the fall of the Berlin Wall, 70,000 people gathered in the streets of Leipzig, East Germany, on Oct. 9, 1989, to demonstrate against the communist regime and demand democratic reforms. Clearly, no central authority planned this event; so how did all of these people decide to come together on that particular day? [more]

Sex differences (4 Aug) - A University of Toronto researcher has found that differences between men and women in determining spatial orientation may be the result of inner ear size. The study, published online in the journal Perception, examined whether differences in how men and women judge how we orient ourselves in our environment could be attributed to physiological or psychological causes. It found that giving the participants verbal instructions on how to determine their spatial orientation did not eliminate the differences between the sexes. [more]

Genetics - addiction (4 Aug) - Two related genes that help control signaling between brain cells may be central components of the biological machinery that causes cocaine addiction, researchers have found. [more]

Psychoneuroimmunology (3 Aug) - New research in hamsters now suggests that without companionship, wounds on the animals don't heal as fast. Researchers looked at the effect social contact had on wound healing in stressed hamsters. Results showed that skin wounds healed nearly twice as fast in the hamsters paired with a sibling. These animals also produced less of the stress hormone cortisol than unpaired hamsters. [more]

Personality disorders (2 Aug) - An estimated 30.8 million American adults (14.8 percent) meet standard diagnostic criteria for at least one personality disorder as defined in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-Fourth Edition (DSM-IV), according to the results of the 2001-2002 National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC) reported in the current issue of the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. [more]

Animal behavior (1 Aug) - Everyone knows not to get between a mother and her offspring. What makes these females unafraid when it comes to protecting their young may be low levels of a peptide, or small piece of protein, released in the brain that normally activates fear and anxiety, according to new research published in the August issue of Behavioral Neuroscience. "We see this fierce protection of offspring is so many animals," says Stephen Gammie, a University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant professor of zoology and lead author of the recent paper. "There are stories of cats rescuing their kittens from burning buildings and birds swooping down at people when their chicks are on the ground." [more]

Human behavior (1 Aug) - Stanford University Professor Paul R. Ehrlich is urging fellow ecologists to join with social scientists to form an international panel that will discuss and recommend changes in the way human beings treat one another and the environment. Ehrlich is scheduled to call for the establishment of a Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior (MAHB) during a speech at the 89th annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America (ESA) in Portland, Ore., on Aug. 2. The goal of MAHB will be to avoid the approaching collision between humanity and its life-support systems, he noted. ''For the first time in human history, global civilization is threatened with collapse,'' said Ehrlich, the Bing Professor of Population Studies at Stanford. ''The world therefore needs an ongoing discussion of key ethical issues related to the human predicament in order to help generate the urgently required response.'' [more]

Genetics (1 Aug) - Scientists at The Hospital for Sick Children (Sick Kids), Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) and Harvard Medical School (HMS) have made the unexpected discovery that significant differences can exist in the overall content of DNA and genes contained in individual genomes. These findings, which point to possible new explanations for individual uniqueness as well as why disease develops, are published in the September 2004 issue of the scientific journal Nature Genetics (available online August 1, 2004). [more]

Neural Darwinism - Gerald Edelman was awarded the Nobel prize for physiology and medicine in 1972. One of the world's foremost experts on the brain and consciousness, he is founder and director of the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, Calif., a "scientific monastery," where he spoke with NPQ editor Nathan Gardels. Edelman's most recent book is Wider Than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness (Yale University Press, 2004). [more]

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Biography - Ian Sample reviews Extreme Measures: The dark visions and bright ideas of Francis Galton by Martin Brookes. [review]

Lying - Alex Sager reviews Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind by David Livingstone Smith. [review]

Sexual behavior - George Williamson reviews Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People by Joan Roughgarden. [review]

Consciousness - Kamuran Godelek reviews The Psychology of Art and the Evolution of the Conscious Brain by Robert L. Solso. [review]

Sociobiology - Deborah M. Gordon reviews Why Men Won't Ask for Directions: The Seductions of Sociobiology by Richard C. Francis. [review] [review]

Sex differences (26 Jul) - The experience I remember best from teaching nine courses at the university level was the occasion when a class discussed a chapter out of a textbook concerning the variations in development between men and women. I found that most of the class believed that "differences" should be placed in scare quotes as they regarded any distinctions as being the result of societal pressure as opposed to the influence of our internal makeups, " writes Bernard Chapin. [more]