Sightings
An Anatomical Marker for Chronic Pain in the Brain
“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. more »
House Hearing on Sex-Selective Abortion: India's Missing Girls
"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." more »
Taylor Branch, Barbara Kingsolver, Katherine Paterson, Natasha Trethewey: Authors at the National Book Festival
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." more »
The Cheater's High: The Unexpected Affective Benefits of Unethical Behavior
"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." more »