From a young age, children have a nuanced understanding of how free markets work. A new study in Child Development indicates that children as young as five incorporate market concerns—the idea that what you get is in line with what you give or offer—into their decision making, and increasingly do so with age.

Some people think children are innately selfish, they want to get goodies for themselves, while others insist they are more communist, each will do more to help those who can't or won't do enough. By studying how children engage in different types of exchanges, researchers hope to discern the origins of these behaviors, as well as their developmental course.

Cardiac arrest, essentially a heart attack, appears on a lot of coroner reports but it frequently misclassified and exaggerated. A new analysis finds that 40 percent of deaths attributed to cardiac arrest are not sudden or unexpected, and nearly half of the remainder are not arrhythmic--the only situation in which CPR and defibrillators are effective. Which means they should not be considered cardiac arrest. An alarming 13.5 percent were instead overdoses.

Pond scums were an animal’s best friend. 540 million years ago, oxygen was scarce in the atmosphere and ocean, and animals needed to find oxygen to make a livi

Meditation advocates from three schools say a lower ability to cope with the pain of being rejected by others leads to violence, but that people greater levels of mindfulness, a psychological fad where practitioners maintain attention on and awareness of the present moment -- are better able to cope with such pain. 

While preparing for another evening of observation of Jupiter's atmosphere with my faithful 16" dobsonian scope, I found out that the satellite Io will disappear behind the Jovian shadow tonight. This is a quite common phenomenon and not a very spectacular one, but still quite interesting to look forward to during a visual observation - the moon takes some time to fully disappear, so it is fun to follow the event.
This however got me thinking. A fully eclipsed jovian moon should still be able to reflect back some light picked up from the still lit other satellites - so it should not, after all, appear completely dark. Can a calculation be made of the effect ? Of course - and it's not that difficult.

A survey sent to 1,500 pediatricians, most practicing physicians for more than 15 years and nearly all in primary care, found that 74 percent of the responding pediatricians did not approve of spanking and 78 percent thought spanking never or seldom improved children’s behavior.

A federal judge's recent discussion about why glyphosate should not have a warning label in California, despite the efforts of trial lawyers and the environmental groups they pay, not only shows the label would have no scientific validity, it calls into doubt Proposition 65 itself.<

A team of psychologists hope to win a battle in the "reading wars," emphasizing the importance of teaching phonics in establishing fundamental reading skills in early childhood. 

By synthesizing findings from more than 300 research studies, book chapters, and academic journal articles published across a variety of scientific fields, they hope to create an evidence-based account of how children learn to read. 

A few years ago a cultural anthropologist levied a bombastic charge against her own field; using uncontrolled anonymous surveys with undefined terms she claimed almost every woman doing field work had been subjected to sexual harassment or even rape. It got a lot of attention but it lacked serious methodology, even for surveys.

An experimental study which sought to determine perceptions of sexual text (sext) messaging situations concluded that men and women were judged differently by the sext messages they sent, even when they were the same.

When messages were unsolicited, men were judged as creepy while women were judged as more appropriate.

The strange conclusion by the authors from their finding was not the obvious one, that men were being discriminated against, "slut shaming" for guys, but that consent is important in sexting. 


Sexting. Vaguely date rapey when a guy does it. But when a woman does it, hegemonic masculinity stereotypes gave more women a free pass.