Humans are primarily social creatures - Thoreau may have pretended he wanted to sit among nature by himself and write a book but he was in a house built by someone else, paid for by someone else, with clothes made by someone else, and writing a book that would be published by someone else.

People band together in groups to be stronger - about causes or for actual defense. How to prompt people to become social rather than anti-social is one of the central goals of game theory. 

Tropical Cyclone Nilofar is closing in on the border between Pakistan and northwestern India and NASA's Terra satellite caught it while it passed overhead from space.

Wind shear continued to affect the storm and from their image it looks more like a comet than a tropical cyclone.

Organic marketing may like to portray itself as small mom-and-pop farmers standing up to Big Agriculture and corporate food, but they have a business juggernaut that would be the envy of anyone in any business. 

And it's going to get better.

Proponents of the Affordable Care Act are getting exactly the cultural result they wanted. They are able to declare victory because of a decrease in health care costs but don't mention it is because there has been a decrease in people using their insurance because of high out-of-pocket costs.

In this election season, it is imperative to remember those who voted for this disaster without having read the bill, those who demonized people who raised valid questions about access to care, costs and rationing, and those who cried racism when valid points were raised about how the quality of care would necessarily drop because there was never enough money to subsidize a substantial number of the 30 million newly insured people.

A new psychology paper says people feel sad up to 240 times longer than they do ashamed, surprised, irritated or even bored.

The reason may be because sadness often goes hand in hand with events of greater impact such as death or accidents and so we need more time to mull over and cope with what happened to fully comprehend it, say Philippe Verduyn and Saskia Lavrijsen of the University of Leuven in Belgium, who asked 233 high school students to recollect recent emotional episodes and report their duration. The participants also had to answer questions about the strategies they use to appraise and deal with these emotions.

J. Marion Sims by Jim.Henderson, CC BY-SA

By David T. Z. Mindich, St. Michael's College

On an October day in 1894, a group of New York City’s leading doctors gathered to unveil a statue in honor of one of the greatest surgeons of his day and the founder of New York’s Women’s Hospital, J. Marion Sims, an Alabama doctor and a man they called “the father of modern gynecology.”

For MSNBC, climate change is an opportunity to stoke anger over conservative “denialists.” MSNBC 5/12/14

By Matthew Nisbet, Northeastern University

Recent Pew Research Center studies offer valuable insight on the ideological makeup of those Americans most likely to voice their opinion in politics generally and the climate debate specifically, including the news sources they rely on to articulate their arguments.

In 2012, the Obama administration made the National School Lunch Program, which has provided free or reduced-cost meals in more than 100,000 public and non-profit private schools and other child-care institutions nationwide since 1946, into a political football and used beliefs that lacked any scientific basis to mandate what should be served.

Schools and communities went into open revolt. For the children we care most about, those school lunches might be the best meal they got, and those were being replaced by an agenda-based menu that no one wanted to eat.

By Val Giddings, Genetic Literacy Project

With little fanfare, last summer the U.S. Fish  &  Wildlife Service announced it would formally ban the use of seeds treated with neonicotinoid pesticides, (a newer, safer generation of seed treatments to protect against pests) and the use of crops improved through biotechnology throughout the fish and wildlife refuge system.