One of the enigmas of our political landscape is the impoverished Republican. This is the American with very little money, and many unmet needs, who nevertheless votes for people and policies that will deny him or her assistance. Indeed, many of the reddest states in the nation are among the largest beneficiaries of government aid.
There are problems with the "hardwired" view, and especially with the two lines of research its adherents rely on to stake their claim of fixed, innate gender differences.
Since the 1950s, clinical depression has been thought to be caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, specifically an imbalance of the neurotransmitter serotonin. But a paper published in ACS Chemical Neuroscience last month suggests that no, depression is not cause by serotonin dysfunction.
It has been over 45 years since the first Moon landing. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins made a journey for the ages as the Apollo 11 mission rocketed humans to another world. But, what have we done lately?
Scientists compared the differences in genes between friends and strangers across nearly 2,000 people and they found that friends tend to have a more similar set of genes than strangers. Perhaps it's "The Starbucks Effect" -- if two people like the smell of coffee maybe they're more likely to hang out together.
It will be fun to see what turns up in the Rosetta and Philae images and data from Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko! Astronomy is always full of surprises when you see something at high resolution for the first time.
For many years, I have been anticipating the start of a revolution in the satellite market, in which the majority of the satellites built and launched would be of the micro, nano, pico, and femto variety.
If it's harder to become a scientist just because you're a girl, imagine how much harder to start on that path as a member of a religious group that's often marginalized by leading scientists in the public sphere.
The Ebola outbreak may also indirectly kill people, by causing a sharp increase in non-Ebola deaths (e.g., deaths due to Malaria, or typhoid fever). Can this "collateral damage" be larger than the recorded death toll, as several reports in the media have suggested?
Imagine how much money could be saved, and how much traffic and pollution could be reduced, if people shared taxis with strangers.
Like most Americans, I grew up on a steady diet of fictional robots. They were occasionally friendly or cooperative, often murderous, typically clumsy and tone-deaf to human emotions and needs
Adolescence begins with puberty and ends, ambiguously, with the makings of adult independence: marriage, financial self-sufficiency, employment.
I think we're headed toward a dystopia that will look for all the world like utopia. We may already have entered this new paradigm and be well on the way toward its irreversibility, which has profound consequences for individual and social action, and for making the best of this moment of transition that may well last centuries.
Why should science not also have its ten commandments? Here is the current set of commandments through the eyes of science, in the form of objective, natural theories that should be believed.
How do you explain suicidal crickets and zombie caterpillars? One word: parasites. Science writer Ed Yong shows us how these tiny creatures force insects and animals to do their bidding, and asks: Are parasites manipulating humans, too?
The mental health industry works very hard to convince government to throw money at "mental health" problems that are very broadly and loosely defined, instead of having a clear focus on delivering basic services to the seriously ill.
Scientists turned a mouse's bad memories into happy ones with a pulse of light, and cured other mice of peanut allergies by dosing them with Clostridium bacteria.
Noting that her fruit flies were more likely to get sick and die if they were infected at nighttime led her to important discoveries about the effects of circadian rhythm on immune response.
Earlier this year the UK government finally gave up on trying to control the American grey squirrel in the UK. Which prompts the question: Why has the grey squirrel been such a success in Britain?