Culture

People are frequently overconfident – so confident that they tend to believe they are more physically talented, socially adept, and skilled at their jobs than they actually are. For example, 94% of college professors think they do above average work - a statistical impossibility. It's the price of creating generations of people whose self-esteem has been nurtured more than their abilities and this overconfidence can also have detrimental effects on their performance and decision-making.

The American Educational Research Association (AERA) has filed an amicus curiae brief in the U.S. Supreme Court case of Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, where a young student was discriminated against because she was not a minority.

When companies combine different pricing structures – such as asking for effort or information in combination with or instead of money – consumers perceive a greater risk in the decision to buy.

That's according to University of Cincinnati research to be presented at the Aug. 15-17 Behavioral Pricing Conference in Detroit, Mich., by doctoral marketing student John Dinsmore. His paper is titled "Mental Accounting, General Evaluability Theory and the Framing Losses Posed by Partitioned Monetary and Nonmonetary Prices."

Tel Aviv University researchers recently uncovered a seal, measuring 15 millimetres (about a half-inch) in diameter, which depicts a human figure next to a lion at the archaeological site of Beth Shemesh, located between the Biblical cities of Zorah and Eshtaol, where Samson was born, flourished, and finally buried, according to the book of Judges.

Most of America's urban cores were designed for walking yet still offer little in the way of supermarkets, restaurants and other amenities for residents to walk to, according to a study led by a Michigan State University scholar. While activists insist more people in cities is better for the environment, poor residents living in declining urban neighborhoods disagree more people will help - they instead have to go long distances to find the healthy choices offered in the suburbs or in the country.

Wintertime droughts have become increasingly common in the Mediterranean region, and human-caused climate change is partly responsible, according to a new analysis by NOAA scientists and colleagues at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES). In the last 20 years, 10 of the driest 12 winters have taken place in the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea.

There's a myth among left-wing women on the coasts that right-wing women in the middle are somehow more oppressed or timid. Not at all, said a talk last year at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association.

Instead, Texas women who hold concealed handgun licenses (CHLs) are motivated to do so by feelings of empowerment - and they don't feel like they need a man or police to defend them.

The influence of "Big Alcohol" in the health arena deserves as much scrutiny as Big Pharma and Big Tobacco, especially in light of evidence of bias in funded research, unsupported claims of benefit, and inappropriate promotion and marketing by the alcohol industry, according to a new editorial PLoS Medicine.

The writers argue that the statistics about problem drinking are troubling and what also demands more attention and research is the influence of the alcohol industry on health research, government policy, and public perceptions of the harms and benefits of alcohol.

Almost 600 million years ago, before the rapid evolution of life forms known as the Cambrian explosion, a community of seaweeds and worm-like animals lived in a quiet deep-water niche near what is now Lantian, a small village in south China.

Then they simply died, leaving some 3,000 nearly pristine fossils preserved between beds of black shale deposited in oxygen-free and unbreathable waters.

Researchers at the Sahlgrenska Academy – University of Gothenburg, Sweden - and Karolinska Institutet have carried out the first ever national study of the prevalence of overweight and obesity in schoolchildren. It reveals that one in five children in Sweden is overweight, and that there is a link between low levels of education and overweight children.

The study was part of a European project, the WHO European Childhood Obesity Surveillance Initiative, that involved 14 European countries.

A large-scale review of national patient records reveals that although survival rates are the same, the cost of treating trauma patients in the western United States is 33 percent higher than the bill for treating similarly injured patients in the Northeast. Overall, treatment costs were lower in the Northeast than anywhere in the United States.

COLUMBIA, Mo. – Millions of American cancer survivors experience chronic discomfort as a result of lymphedema, a common side effect of surgery and radiation therapy in which affected areas swell due to protein-rich fluid buildup. After reviewing published literature on lymphedema treatments, a University of Missouri researcher says emphasizing patients' quality of life rather than focusing solely on reducing swelling is critical to effectively managing the condition.

DURHAM, N.C.-- Duke researchers may have found a promising stem cell therapy for preventing osteoarthritis after a joint injury.

Injuring a joint greatly raises the odds of getting a form of osteoarthritis called post-traumatic arthritis, or PTA. There are no therapies yet that modify or slow the progression of arthritis after injury.

A Johns Hopkins review of more than 38,000 patient records finds that older adults who sustain substantial head trauma over a weekend are significantly more likely to die from their injuries than those similarly hurt and hospitalized Monday through Friday, even if their injuries are less severe and they have fewer other illnesses than their weekday counterparts.

Civil protests, from peaceful sit-ins at the Pentagon to violent riots in Cairo, nonetheless share some common characteristics. To study how protests evolve in public spaces, Dr. Tali Hatuka, an architect and head of Tel Aviv University's Laboratory of Contemporary Urban Design, has dissected some of the world's most publicized protests — those in Washington, Istanbul, Tel Aviv, Beijing, and Leipzig.