Science: Psychology

Author Shankar Vedantam explains why the saga of a shipwrecked pet tugs our hearts more than a distressed nation of millions.

Crazy-ass long mad thing I suddenly found myself writing after I saw a posting by Jayson Gaddis of "Revolutionary Man" (What Is Your Constructive Feedback For MEN?). This is waaaaay too long for what Jayson Gaddis is looking for. I mostly just found myself writing more about myself than men and so, this is just my note. And please know that this is MY letter. I am not speaking for other women. I am also not directing this at any one man. And sometimes I am guilty of what I complain about. I know it and am honest about it. Why did I really have all this gushing out of me? I have no idea. Maybe just because I am a woman. And sometimes, I just shamelessly gush.

A British charity is stepping up efforts to rehabilitate LSD, one of the world's best-known "recreational" drugs, for medicinal use.

Director Oliver Stone's upcoming Showtime documentary miniseries "Secret History of America" promises to put mass murderers such as Stalin and Hitler "in context."

Do not worry. It will take a long time for handwriting to die, for us to have the interview with the "last handwriter" as we do today with the last living speakers of some languages. By 1600 B.C., all Sumerian speakers had died, but the writing system that replaced Sumerian, Akkadian, kept aspects of Sumerian alive. It would take another 1,000 years -- until 600 B.C. -- for Sumerian writing to disappear completely. Even the revolutionary Greeks took a long time to change habits. After they created the Greek alphabet, they spent 400 years doing nothing with it, preferring their extant oral culture. Handwriting is not going anywhere soon. But it is going.

If there’s been a consistent narrative to this year and every other in this decade, it’s that most of us, Bernanke included, have been so easily bamboozled. The men who played us for suckers, whether at Citigroup or Fannie Mae, at the White House or Ted Haggard’s megachurch, are the real movers and shakers of this century’s history so far. That’s why the obvious person of the year is Tiger Woods. His sham beatific image, questioned by almost no one until it collapsed, is nothing if not the farcical reductio ad absurdum of the decade’s flimflams, from the cancerous (the subprime mortgage) to the inane (balloon boy).

An intriguing new study discovered observers were able to predict some aspects of an individual’s personality from looking at photographs.

What I discovered on this visit was that Google do appear to understand a lot about human nature, and they apply these findings to how they run their company. Some of their more quirky ideas, while being sometimes laughed about in the media, are actually based in science. Here's what I came to discover on my tour of the Googleplex.