I mentioned before, this semester I’m teaching a graduate level seminar on David Hume, and having lots of fun with it. During a recent discussion of sections 4 and 5 of the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (“Sceptical doubts concerning the operations of the understanding” and “Sceptic al solutions of these doubts”) the concept of metaphysical necessity came up.

In what they are calling the most thorough analysis to date of studies on school bullying, the psychologists who authored a review on the topic in Annual Review of Psychology say that K-12 schools' efforts to curtail bullying are often disappointing and that, unlike public perception, bullying tactics like verbal aggression and exclusion are used by boys as often as girls

The authors say that the most comprehensive programs are effective but they require substantial commitment and school resources to be successful. An assembly once per year does nothing at all. Instead, other studies have found that school programs are teaching bullies how to avoid being caught.      

Pine cone or pine nut? Friend or foe? Distinguishing between the two requires that we pay special attention to the telltale characteristics of each. Psychologists call it selective attention. We hone in on visual information that is new or important and dismissing what is not.

As it turns out, us humans aren't the only ones up to the task. Pigeons share our ability to place everyday things in categories and focus on what is relevant.

The Sun newspaper in the UK has a "check 'em Tuesday" campaign - a weekly call for women to examine their breasts. Readers are even asked to send in photos to prove compliance and can even sign up for a text message reminder.

It sounds like concern for readers and it is, except it doesn't help and may even hurt, according to Glasgow general practitioner Margaret McCartney in BMJ.

McCartney argues that teaching women to examine their breasts regularly "has been shown not to reduce deaths from breast cancer and actually increases the chances of a benign biopsy result." She says it is "unfair to tell women that regular self examination will save their lives when it may simply incur anxiety and have the potential to harm."

The extreme cold weather observed across Europe and the east coast of the US in recent winters is due to to natural, long-term variations in sea surface temperatures, according to a new study published in Environmental Research Letters.

The researchers from University of California Irvine show that the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) phenomenon — a natural pattern of variation in North Atlantic sea surface temperatures that switches between a positive and negative phase every 60-70 years — can affect an atmospheric circulation pattern, known as the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), that influences the temperature and precipitation over the Northern Hemisphere in winter.

In unvaccinated hotbeds like California and New York, rich elites rely on 'herd immunity' to protect their children - poor families will get the vaccines and protect the rich ones. That's why in those states, easily preventable diseases have come roaring back, with dangerous consequences.

Developing nations should be a reminder to anti-science progressives about the risks they are inflicting on kids who can't get vaccines, and their own children as well. Nearly 4 million children under 5 die from vaccine-preventable diseases worldwide each year.

Scientists from Queen Mary University of London have found that naturally high concentrations of the greenhouse gas methane contributes to energy production in chalk rivers, in a new study published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Chalk rivers, found from Dorset to Cambridgeshire, sustain a diverse range of protected animals and plants, and are renowned globally for fly fishing, an industry worth more than £4M on the Rivers Test and Itchen (Hampshire) alone.

"It's a surprise to find methane is such a big source of energy in these gin-clear waters, famed for their luxuriant plant growth," said co-author Professor Mark Trimmer, Head of the Aquatic Ecology Group at Queen Mary's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences.

LIVERPOOL, UK – 2 April 2014: Female fruit flies with a large number of sexual partners are playing an invaluable role in preventing the extinction of males, research at the University of Liverpool has shown.

Scientists have found that flies in the northern parts of the United States are more inclined to have multiple partners in order to reduce the occurrence of an X chromosome which causes the production of only female offspring.

Charred grains of barley, millet and wheat deposited nearly 5,000 years ago at campsites in the high plains of Kazakhstan show that nomadic sheepherders played a surprisingly important role in the early spread of domesticated crops throughout a mountainous east-west corridor along the historic Silk Road, suggests new research from Washington University in St. Louis.

"Our findings indicate that ancient nomadic pastoralists were key players in an east-west network that linked innovations and commodities between present-day China and southwest Asia," said study co-author Michael Frachetti, PhD, an associate professor of archaeology in Arts&Sciences at Washington University and principal investigator on the research project.

I was at the park the other day throwing pinecones at my kids when a horrified mother asked, “How can you hit your kids with pinecones!” I said it was pretty easy: you just don’t lead them as much. First, this is important because my brain is almost completely incapable of accessing the proper pop-culture comeback (in this case, Full Metal Jacket) until the middle of the night after it was needed.