Science 2.0

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.

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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.

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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

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.<

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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Liberals in the United States and Germany felt more empathy than conservatives toward protesters injured during an overcrowded demonstration in the United States and Germany, according to survey results of 1,046 participants who read a fake newspaper article the non-real incident. The protesters were either described as liberals, conservatives, or non-partisan local residents. 

Liberals were more likely to want to help the protesters by donating money for the medical treatment and both conservatives and liberals felt more empathy for their political allies.

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Trump has had a lot of criticism after the summit, with many saying he conceded too much to Kim. I don’t think he did at all myself. All he gave him was a meeting with him, and a couple of days of his time. And he built trust. He thinks that’s important. Previous presidents didn’t think it was important, they proceeded on a basis of distrust. He is trying something new.

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In the war for attention, a lot of parents are made to feel like they are not very good if they don't get their child into the right pre-school, buy the right food which lacks the additives it's fashionable to exclude, or spent Quality Time shuffling them from sporting events to music classes to book readings.

You can relax. You may not be perfect, but you are still probably a better dad than your dad was, finds an analysis of survey results published in the Journal of Marriage and Family.

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The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), which operates under the auspices of the U.N. World Health Organisation, is soliciting comments prior to holding an Advisory Group meeting in November to propose revisions to its Preamble.

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If you added Vitamin C to Pepsi, you know what you would have? Orange juice. 

There is nothing wrong with orange juice (public relations manufactured health halo aside), just like there is nothing wrong with Pepsi, they should both be treats. Unfortunately, for the U.S., the richest country in the world, no food need ever be a treat, they can all be purchased every day. And that is bad for kids. 

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If a study has 229 trials and there are only 12 false positives, that is a good result. 

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For thousands of years, trepanation--the act of scraping, cutting, or drilling an opening into the cranium--was practiced around the world, primarily to treat head trauma but also for headaches, seizures and mental illnesses. Sometimes it was even done to expel demons.

It sounds garish now, but ancient Peruvians were surprisingly adept at it, so adept that Incan "neurosurgeons" had twice the survival rate for the procedure than better equipped surgeons during the American Civil War centuries later.

Obviously there could be differences in when it was done, so it may be due to confounders that in Incan times the mortality rate was between 17 and 25 percent while during the Civil War it was between 46 and 56 percent. 

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Simulation, noun:
1. Imitation or enactment
2. The act or process of pretending; feigning.
3. An assumption or imitation of a particular appearance or form; counterfeit; sham.

Well, high-energy physics is all about simulations. 

We have a theoretical model that predicts the outcome of the very energetic particle collisions we create in the core of our giant detectors, but we only have approximate descriptions of the inputs to the theoretical model, so we need simulations. 

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Suicides have gone up in the United States since 1999, according to the CDC, but then state it is more than a mental health issue.

There is no rhyme or reason to the increases, half of states, from cultures as different as Vermont and North Dakota, saw large changes of over 30 percent.  Suicide is the 10th-leading cause of death in the U.S., and rates have been climbing steadily for years. With 44,965 suicide deaths in 2016, half of them using a firearm, the CDC would like to know why.

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