Culture

Being busy with acts of kindness can help people who suffer from social anxiety to mingle more easily. This is the opinion of Canadian researchers Jennifer Trew of Simon Fraser University and Lynn Alden of the University of British Columbia, in a study published in Springer's journal Motivation and Emotion.

A study of nearly 1,000 teens found that sexually active obese adolescents were significantly less likely to use contraception than normal weight peers, putting them at higher risk of unintended pregnancy.

Obese adolescents who did use contraception were also less likely to use it consistently, according to the University of Michigan Health System study that appears in the Journal of Pediatrics.

The Supreme Court seems poised to take on the abortion issue again, and with reason.

An international research team led by the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa has discovered a milk-and ochre-based paint dating to 49,000 years ago that inhabitants may have used to adorn themselves with or to decorate stone or wooden slabs.

When asked to picture someone with a PhD in physics, most people probably envision an academic in a lab -- and not, say, a CEO or a financial analyst. In reality, though, physicists aren't limiting themselves to the ivory tower. Out of necessity or choice, many leave academia for jobs in the private sector, pursuing careers that are traditionally not tracked in workforce surveys of the physics field.

There is a paradox when it comes to guns in America. In states like California, gun ownership has doubled while murder rates have dropped substantially. Most guns are used for suicide rather than crime and fewer people commit suicide with guns in the US than do by hanging in Japan. Almost one in three US adults owns at least one gun, and they are predominantly white married men over the age of 55, which dispels the myth that more guns lead to more crime or more murders.

In tough economic times, parents financially favor daughters over sons, according to researchers at the Carlson School of Management and Rutgers Business School. Their study, forthcoming in the Journal of Consumer Research, found participants preferred to enroll a daughter rather than a son in beneficial programs, preferred to give a U.S. Treasury bond to a daughter rather than a son, and bequeathed a greater share of their assets to female offspring in their will when they perceived economic conditions to be poor.

Humanities scholars say that black and Hispanic families need much higher incomes than white families to live in comparably affluent neighborhoods. Since any number of federal laws prevent discrimination - just the opposite, the 2008 housing crisis was caused by it being easier to approve people who did not qualify for mortgages than deny anyone - how is that possible? In a recent paper, authors contend it must be racism and that black and hispanic families need much higher incomes to move up. Yet Asians, a smaller minority than both, do not.

Are they instead self-segregating?

Scientific controversies, from problems replicating results - such as with the now debunked association between autism and MMR vaccines - to researcher misconduct and sensationalism, have led to speculation of "trouble at the lab," as the Economist put it.

Once again, the Human Rights Council has been hijacked to promote the agendas of states who are trying to undermine the very same human rights the UN is supposed to protect.

A recently circulated draft resolution on “protection of the family” looks likely to be passed by the council, even though the text clearly plays into the hands of countries trying to make it legitimate to oppress individuals based on their gender or sexual orientation.

A federal preschool program did more than improve educational opportunities for poor children in Mississippi during the 1960s. The program also gave a political and economic boost to the state's civil rights activists, according to a Penn State historian.

Toxic environmental contaminants are increasingly known to cause a number of severe health problems, in particular on fetuses, including heart failure, low cognitive ability, delayed development, and neurobehavioral disorders.

New research has found that fears of playground accidents such as falls has led to considerable changes in school playgrounds, reflecting a climate of over-policing and surplus rules and regulations. This month it was reported that a father is suing his son’s school for a playground accident in which his son ran into a wall.

An international group of academic leaders, journal editors and funding-agency representatives and disciplinary leaders has announced guidelines to further strengthen transparency and reproducibility practices in science research reporting.

Over 50 leading doctors and academics including Fiona Godlee, editor in chief of The BMJ, have signed an open letter published in The Guardian today calling on the Wellcome Trust to divest from fossil fuel companies.

The letter is part of The Guardian's "Keep it in the Ground" Campaign that is urging the world's two biggest charitable funds -- the Wellcome Trust and the Gates Foundation -- to move their money out of fossil fuels.