In California, there is mandatory smog testing.  It isn't really meaningful, the worst polluters are actually exempt and the system has even led to a special class of smog testing company - test only shops - which means they won't be able to fix the problem so it will pass the test, but drivers may still be required by law to use one by law but then take their car somewhere else to get fixed if it does not pass

Smog testing companies know these things are dumb and a bad test result can be caused by various issues and the employees at those companies are in the people business, not the arbitrary law business, so they sometimes take pity on the customer because they would like for people to return.

Most people learn when to be afraid and when things are not as bad as they might have once seemed but some new research on autism shows that children with the diagnosis don't easily let go of old, outdated fears and that this rigid fearfulness is linked to the severity of classic symptoms of autism, such as repeated movements and resistance to change.

The new research highlights the need to help children make emotional transitions – particularly when dealing with their fears.

In wrestling, we were always taught to watch the opponent's hips - because their head and their eyes were going to try and fake you out but hips don't lie.

Likewise, if you think that you can use facial expressions to determine if someone has just won the lottery or lost everything in the stock market, researchers say it just doesn't work that way.  Rather, they found that body language provides a better cue in trying to judge whether an observed subject has undergone strong positive or negative experiences. 

11 articles in the December issue of Neurosurgical Focus are dedicated to concussions in sports, focusing on methods of diagnosing concussion and evaluating its consequences, structural and functional changes that can occur in the brain following concussion, and changing attitudes and legislation concerning sports that traditionally carry risks of brain injury.

Concussion, also called mild traumatic brain injury (TBI) by virtually no one outside concussion article writing, has been hyped into a "silent epidemic" in 2012 because the event and its consequences, such as cognitive and behavioral changes, may be subtle and are not always recognized, which means they can be correlated to almost anything.

Can advertising make kids fat? 

Childhood obesity rates have tripled in the past 30 years and food marketing has been implicated as one factor contributing to this trend.  A week after the Hostess company, makers of Twinkies, went bankrupt, a member of Congress tried to raise unemployment even more and kill the entire industry by proposing elimination of marketing as a legitimate expense.

Every year, companies spend more than $10 billion in the US marketing their food and beverages to children and 98% of the food products advertised to children on television are high in fat, sugar, or sodium. In a new study, researchers used neuroimaging to look at the effects of food logos on obese and healthy weight children.