Deep down, men may not bask in the glory of their successful wives or girlfriends. While this is not true of women, men’s subconscious self-esteem may be bruised when their spouse or girlfriend excels, says a study. The researchers found that it didn’t matter if the achievements or failures were social, intellectual or related to participants’ own successes or failures — men subconsciously still felt worse about themselves when their partner succeeded than when she failed.

New Jersey could become the 11th state with a minimum wage that increases automatically if voters approve a constitutional amendment this fall. More states are adopting minimum wages that are indexed to inflation or increases in the cost of living. Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, Ohio, Oregon, Vermont and Washington already have such policies, and in all of them except Vermont the moves were approved at the polls.

I’m in the kitchen preparing dinner. A pot of spaghetti is nearing its boil on the stove. I remove a colander from its place in a cabinet and set it in the sink. When the timer rings, signaling al dente, I lift the pot by its two handles and turn around to dump pasta and water into said colander. Alas, the pockmarked utensil has vanished. In his fancy step, while my back was turned, Tommy has removed the colander from the sink, placed it back in the cabinet, and exited. He has not done this to vex me; this I know. He just can’t help it.

People who are married when diagnosed with cancer live longer than those who are not, report researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women's Hospital. Married patients also tended to have cancers diagnosed at an earlier stage — when it is often more successfully treated — and to receive more appropriate treatment.   September 23, 2013 Tags: BasicResearch, CopingWithCancer Paul Nguyen, MD People who are married when diagnosed with cancer live longer than those who are not, repo…

Miss Jane Marple of the Kentish village of St. Mary Mead, a blue-eyed, frail lady who dressed in a black lace cap and mittens, has had a broad and lasting appeal, aging along the way. Miss Marple first appeared in a series of short stories published in Britain's The Sketch magazine. In the beginning, Miss Marple is a gleeful gossip and not particularly nice. Over the years as social rules changed, so did mystery female series' characters.

Val Castronovo writes: The paintings from the war years are suffused with human suffering, violence and tumult, plus indescribable feelings of sadness, longing and loss. This exhibit clearly wants to persuade visitors that love has the power to heal and the power to triumph over trauma and evil — even evil of the worst sort.

"This study establishes testosterone levels at which various physiological functions start to become impaired, which may help provide a rationale for determining which men should be treated with testosterone supplements ... This study establishes testosterone levels at which various physiological functions start to become impaired, which may help provide a rationale for determining which men should be treated with testosterone supplements."

Q: Does the law cut spending on Medicare? A: Medicare spending will continue to expand as increasing numbers of baby boomers reach 65. The law does cut the expected growth of Medicare spending by about $716 billion over the next decade. Those cuts are made by lowering reimbursements to nursing homes, hospitals, home health agencies and other providers. It also cuts payments to Medicare Advantage plans to bring those payments closer to what Medicare pays for care for beneficiaries enrolled in the traditional fee-for-service plan.

One, seeing a bald eagle is thrilling. It has a presence. It also has a right to be here, as much as we do. We really do need to be more sensitive to our world. I’m glad to see the bald eagles are back. Two, I’m sorry. Here it is, almost at the end of the growing season and I am still talking about tomatoes. I admit to being obsessed with them this year. Perhaps it was the challenge of trying to actually harvest some before the squirrels and rabbits got them all.    

Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman today announced that 19 companies had agreed to cease their practice of writing fake online reviews for businesses and to pay more than $350,000 in penalties. "Operation Clean Turf," a year-long undercover investiga…

A bill to remove barriers to the adoption of children in foster care through reauthorization and improvement of the adoption incentives program, and for other purposes; A bill to enhance pre- and post-adoptive support services; A bill to improve outcomes for youth at risk for sex trafficking, and other purposes. A bill to extend the adoption incentive payments program to incentive payments for foster child exits to reunification, adoption, and guardianship, and for other purposes.

Rose Madeline Mula writes: When people learn that I write, they immediately assume I've got it made. Look at J. K. Rowling, they think. Didn't she make a gazillion bucks (or in her case pounds) writing about that nerdy little wizard, Harry Potter? True. And my career does bear a striking resemblance to JK's, up to a point — the point where she went from being a struggling unknown, to cashing her first staggering royalty check. I'd be happy with a tiny percentage of her success. But how to achieve it?

Adrienne G. Cannon writes: My eye is a little blurry and aches but I can already detect a change in the perception of my "new" eye. It is a bit disconcerting at first but the colors adjust themselves as the day progresses. And there is a depth of field I perceive when I look at objects. The highlights seem sharper and the shadows are deeper. I know there will be more changes, more adjustments, and more delights as I discover my new 20/20 distance vision and savor the clarity permitted by my new lens.

In 2010, the Office of Inspector General for Health and Human Services said that bad hospital care contributed to the deaths of 180,000 patients in Medicare alone in a given year. Now comes a study in the current issue of the Journal of Patient Safety that says the numbers may be much higher — between 210,000 and 440,000 patients each year who go to the hospital for care suffer some type of preventable harm that contributes to their death, the study says.

Val Castronovo writes: Since its founding in 2010, Pinterest, the photo-sharing site that has become the third most popular social network after Facebook and Twitter, has been enthusiastically embraced by art museums across the country. A virtual bulletin board, Pinterest allows users — more than 70 million now — to set up “boards” to which they “pin” images of favorite things — in this case, artworks and artifacts culled from museum collections and archives.

The creators of Roominate, Alice Brooks and Bettina Chen, didn’t grow up playing with traditional girl toys. When Brooks asked for a Barbie her father gave her a mini-saw. Chen adored Legos and built hundreds of extravagant creations with her brothers. Brooks majored in mechanical engineering at MIT, while Bettina studied electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology. When they met as graduate students at Stanford, said Chen, “We thought that there’d be a lot more women in grad school, but there weren’t.”

“Pain is becoming an enormous burden on the public. The US government recently outlined steps to reduce the future burden of pain through broad-ranging efforts, including enhanced research,” said Linda Porter, Ph.D, the pain policy advisor at NINDS and a leader of NIH’s Pain Consortium. “This study is a good example of the kind of innovative research we hope will reduce chronic pain which affects a huge portion of the population.

"Even when they are not killed outright either in the womb or just after birth, this bias against girl children manifests itself in situations where family resources are limited and little food is available, in boys being fed before girls, leading to greater incidents of malnutrition among girls and a mortality rate that is 75 percent higher for girls below age five than for boys."

Authors and poets Margaret Atwood, Marie Arana, Taylor Branch, Don DeLillo, Khaled Hosseini, Barbara Kingsolver, Brad Meltzer, Joyce Carol Oates, Katherine Paterson and Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey will be among writers speaking. New Library of Congress exhibits celebrate opera, the majestic art form that has transfixed audiences for more than 400 years, and the other exhibit celebrates what Martin Luther King Jr. called "the greatest demonstration for freedom in the nation’s history."

"Many theories of moral behavior assume that unethical behavior triggers negative affect. We challenge this assumption and demonstrate that unethical behavior can trigger positive affect, which we term a 'cheater’s high.' We find that even though individuals predict they will feel guilty and have increased levels of negative affect after engaging in unethical behavior individuals who cheat on different problem-solving tasks consistently experience more positive affect than those who do not."

Some of these tests — particularly tests involving plutonium — did not vaporize the material in a nuclear blast. It remained in tunnels and containers, in forms that could be recovered and recycled into a bomb. In addition, the Soviet Union discarded equipment that included high-purity plutonium that would have provided materials and information that could lead to a relatively sophisticated nuclear device if it had been found.

Joan L. Cannon writes: “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” George Elliot, Middlemarch. Are we in a time when we forget that the silence at the end of a disaster of whatever kind hides a roar that only saints and philosophers have the stomach for?

“We can make ourselves happy through simple pleasures, but those ‘empty calories’ don’t help us broaden our awareness or build our capacity in ways that benefit us physically,” she said. “At the cellular level, our bodies appear to respond better to a different kind of well-being, one based on a sense of connectedness and purpose.”