Technology and Honesty
Technology is bringing us closer to the truth, it seems. The first study to compare honesty across a range of communications media has found that people are twice as likely to tell lies in phone conversations as they are in emails. The fact that emails are automatically recorded - and can come back to haunt you - appears to be the key to the finding.... posted on Feb 21 2004, 1,107 reads

Human Genome Mystery
The genome is the complete list of coded instructions needed to make a person. If we recited the genome at one letter per second for 24 hours a day it would take a century to recite the book of life. Between humans, our DNA only differs by 0.2%. But the most astonishing fact is this -- we haven't yet understood 97% of the human genome!... posted on Feb 19 2004, 1,093 reads

Same Primitive Elements
Modern humans vary by only 0.2 percent of their genetic material -- and none of those variations correspond with definitions of race. In the stratified world of high school, where cliques often form along racial lines, biotechnology students recently made a startling discovery: More than half of the class at San Jose's Piedmont Hills High School, students from numerous racial and ethnic background... posted on Feb 11 2004, 1,002 reads

Too Many Choices
Too many choices actually leaves us with nothing but confusion. Research shows that as the number of flavors of jam or varieties of chocolate available to shoppers is increased, the likelihood that they will leave the store without buying either jam or chocolate goes up. According to their 2000 study at Stanford and Columbia, shoppers are 10 times more likely to buy jam when six varieties are on ... posted on Jan 28 2004, 1,530 reads

Pursuit of Happiness
If this Harvard psychology professor is right, then you are wrong. That is to say, if Daniel Gilbert is right, then you are wrong to believe that a new car will make you as happy as you imagine. What Gilbert has found is that we overestimate the intensity and the duration of our emotional reactions -- our "affect" -- to future events. On average, bad events proved less intense and more transient... posted on Dec 31 2003, 1,256 reads

Female Doctors
For the first time ever, women outnumbered men among people applying to U.S. medical schools for this fall — a milestone in the slow but steady increase in the number of aspiring female doctors. Of the 35,000 total applicants, 17,672 were female.... posted on Dec 10 2003, 2,391 reads

Bridges I Crossed
To the litany of arguments against prejudice, scientists are now adding a new one: Racism can make you stupid. That is the message of an unusual and striking new series of experiments conducted at Dartmouth College; with the help of brain-imaging equipment, scientists found that the more biased people are, the more their brain power is taxed by contact with someone of another race, as they strugg... posted on Nov 25 2003, 1,356 reads

We're bowling alone, Harvard's political scientist Robert Putnam notes. More Americans are bowling than ever before, but they are not bowling in leagues. We spend about 35% less time visiting with friends than we did thirty years ago. Leisure activities that involve doing something with someone else, from playing volleyball to playing chamber music, are declining.... posted on Nov 20 2003, 1,051 reads

Everybody loves a fat pay raise. Yet over the past half-century, as developed economies have got much richer, people do not seem to have become happier. Surveys suggest that, on average, people in America, Europe and Japan are no more pleased with their lot than in the 1950s. Economist Richard Laylard thinks it's because we work too long, driven to choose more income instead of leisure. In a rec... posted on Nov 15 2003, 1,443 reads

What do the arrangement of rose petals, a painting by Dali, and the spiral shells of mollusks have in common? Mathematicians call it the "golden" ratio -- phi. Astrophyscist Mario Livio calls it "the world's most astonishing number." Phi is the golden ratio of antiquity (1.6180339887), a never-ending number so lauded for its harmonious qualities that in the 16th century it was dubbed the divin... posted on Nov 08 2003, 1,711 reads