Major biological discovery…inside the Chernobyl reactor?? The abandoned town of Pripyat, the Chernobyl reactor in the background.
There has been an exciting new biological discovery inside the tomb of the Chernobyl reactor. The Practice of Medicine, Perfected: Portrait of a Doctor, France, 1953. Thomas Insel: Toward a new understanding of mental illness. Let's upgrade undergrads to first-class citizens. Why Your Brain Craves Music. If making music isn’t the most ancient of human activities, it’s got to be pretty close.
Melody and rhythm can trigger feelings from sadness to serenity to joy to awe; they can bring memories from childhood vividly back to life. The taste of a tiny cake may have inspired Marcel Proust to pen the seven-volume novel Remembrance of Things Past, but fire up the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” and you’ll throw the entire baby-boom generation into a Woodstock-era reverie. From an evolutionary point of view, however, music doesn’t seem to make sense. Unlike sex, say, or food, it did nothing to help our distant ancestors survive and reproduce. Yet music and its effects are in powerful evidence across virtually all cultures, so it must satisfy some sort of universal need — often in ways we can’t begin to fathom.
(MORE: Your Brain on Sesame Street: Big Bird Helps Researchers See How the Brain Learns) Bugs As Drugs. Gulf War Syndrome, Other Illnesses Among Veterans May Be Due To Toxic Environments. In 1991, as part of Operation Desert Storm, former U.S.
Army Spc. North America. Jonas Bendiksen Globalization’s promises and perils do not only manifest themselves in nations around the world, but also in communities across North America.
The Rockefeller Foundation, therefore, works both at home and abroad to assure that more people can reach the benefits of progress and growth while strengthening resilience to new and evolving social, economic, health, and environmental challenges. Local Action Yields Global Results Many of our model programs start domestically, but yield global impact: Our successes in combating malaria began as pilot projects in Arkansas and Mississippi and later expanded to research centers in 25 locations in Latin America, Europe, the Near East and Asia.
Some of Our Current Projects in the United States. 50 Best Websites 2012. The Rich Haven’t Always Hated Taxes. Mitt Romney has proclaimed, “I pay all the taxes that are legally required, not a dollar more.”
While most Americans may not agree with his tax rate (14%), few would disagree with his sentiment. Almost no one willingly pays more taxes than required. Yet there was a time when elites willingly acknowledged that they should pay far higher rates than others. In fact, when the income tax was first regularly put into place in 1913, the well-off were the only ones required to pay it.
50 Best Websites 2012. How Do Words, such as Yes and No, Change Our Brains and Lives? The neuroscience of language, consciousness, and communication raises many fundamental questions, the answers to which consistently defy definition.
For example: when we speak, where do our words come from? Our brain, or our mind? The Surprising Big Idea at TED: Turn Off Technology. It’s a TED tradition: when the stage lights go up at the beginning of a talk, the little gadgets go away—iPhones, iPads, and Blackberries all have to be powered down, even by the tech big wigs who were in attendance, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Linked In’s Reed Hoffman, and Google’s Marissa Mayer.
In-Your-Face: Can Computers Catch You Telling a Lie? A popular school of thought, dramatized in the recent TV drama Lie to Me, is that a careful study of facial expressions—especially eye movements—tells investigators if a perp is dissembling.
Reality is neither as dramatic nor as decisive. Even experienced investigators average only about a 65 percent success rate, according to researchers. Could computers do a better job? Researchers at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York (U.B.), claim their video-analysis software can analyze eye movement successfully to identify whether or not a subject is fibbing 82.5 percent of the time. The 40 interviews were conducted by Mark Frank, a U.B. professor of communication and a study co-author, and included a diversity in age, gender and ethnicity. Why China Will Have an Economic Crisis. The view in most of the world is that China is indestructible.
Shrugging off the crises multiplying elsewhere, China seems to surge from strength to strength, its spectacular growth marching on no matter what headwinds may come. It appears inevitable that China will overtake a U.S. mired in debt and division to become the world’s indispensable economy. Those businessmen and policymakers looking to the future believe China’s “state capitalism” may be a superior form of economic organization in dealing with the challenges of the modern global economy.
My answer to all of this is: think again. I don’t doubt for a second that China will be a major economic superpower with an increasingly influential role in the global economy. (MORE: Are China’s Big State Companies a Big Problem for the Global Economy?) But the more time I spend in China, the more convinced I am that its current economic system is unsustainable. The Boy Who Played With Fusion. "Propulsion," the nine-year-old says as he leads his dad through the gates of the U.S.
Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. "I just want to see the propulsion stuff. " A young woman guides their group toward a full-scale replica of the massive Saturn V rocket that brought America to the moon. President Obama plans to propose a lower corporate tax rate, but Warren Buffett says that taxes aren't a key factor driving corporate investment. Yesterday, President Obama announced a long-awaited proposal to cut corporate taxes in America, which U.S. businesses complain are much too high by international standards. The proposed reform is intended to prevent companies from shifting operations and earnings to tax havens (paging Mitt Romney!)
And instead encourage companies to bring them back into the U.S., where they could create jobs and growth. What’s being missed in all this is that the corporate tax debate and the jobs debate are two separate things. Here’s why. America has the second highest corporate tax rate in the rich world. (MORE: The Corporate Tax Rate Is Lowest in Decades; Is Business Paying Its Fair Share?) That gets at the key issue: Fundamentally, lower taxes aren’t the reason that businesses choose to invest, or not, in a certain country.
True enough. (MORE: The Street Fighter: This Man is Busting Wall St.)