Media has always been partisan but when it was only partisan one way, that was the norm. It was considered objective and impartial. In the US, there were social conservative Democrats who believed in national defense and liberal Republicans who supported labor. Who can really remember whether Thomas Dewey or Harry Truman was a Democrat or a Republican? They weren't very different, really. The media were conservative.

A new study looked into the modulatory effects that musical training could have on the use of the different sides of the brain when performing music and language tasks. 

It found that brief musical training can increase the blood flow in the left hemisphere of our brain, which suggests that the areas responsible for music and language share common brain pathways.

Two separate studies which looked at brain activity patterns in musicians and non-musicians.

The first study looked for patterns of brain activity of 14 musicians and 9 non-musicians while they participated in music and word generation tasks. The results showed that patterns in the musician's brains were similar in both tasks but this was not the case for the non-musicians.  

A new study finds that anxiety about a competitive situation makes even the most physically active of us more likely to slip-up.

If you examine all of the high-profile crimes that have happened any time recently, they share one thing; psychiatric medication. It was once common to ask someone who was acting bizarrely if they were 'off their meds' but it became more common to worry they are on them.

A new paper in The Lancet took a retrospective look at population data and think the fears about medication may be misplaced. The psychiatrists, led by Dr. Seena Fazel of Oxford University, used Swedish national health registries to study the psychiatric diagnoses, and any subsequent criminal convictions, in over 80,000 patients (40,937 men and 41,710 women) who were prescribed anti-psychotic or mood stabilizing medication from 2006 to 2009.

What can a handshake tell about you? Culturally, different things. In some places, it indicates confidence, in others, aggression or weakness.

Demographers at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis say it can show the rates of aging among different population groups.

The Bubonic Plague wiped put a giant swath of the affected populations, it was truly an Old Testament wrath-of-God phenomenon - but it also led to a wave of agricultural innovation and the creation of a middle class (How The Bubonic Plague Made Europe Great).

It also did what folklore says about things that don't kill you - it made us a little stronger.