Guest Post: Experimenting on My Kids: What’s really being tested?

For the last five years, I’ve been letting psychology graduate students experiment on my children. That, of course, sounds much worse than the reality that I take them to participate in experiments at the University of Colorado lab that probes early language development in toddlers. Still, I have a lingering unease when it comes to [...]

The Last Word

May 6 – 10 This week, LWON spawn Virginia Hughes returns to the mothership to ask: Isn’t it a waste to spend precious years of our waking lives in service to death? People with discipline are more satisfied with less, says Jessa. People with self-control deficiencies want more. Christie considers the difference between a study [...]

Unconnected Dots: Sport and Will Power

Clenching your muscles increases self-control. So does having a loud super-ego, or at least some form of inner monologue. Isolation disrupts our will power, as does having too much dopamine in our systems, like ADHD sufferers chronically do. Sugar boosts self-control. So does a short burst of exercise. For smokers, the same restorative effect happens [...]

The Last Word on The Science Writers’ Handbook

LWON is a group blog run semi-anarchically by 12 science writers. If you think that sounds like a recipe for chaos, just contemplate SciLance, an even more anarchic group of 35 science writers. Usually, SciLance is just a discussion group, so the chaos is relatively subdued. But last week, the writers of SciLance published their [...]

The Last Word

29 April – 3 May This week, Richard’s new book came out! Oh, nothing, just the one he co-authored with Temple Grandin about the autistic brain. I don’t know how to put this, but he’s kind of a big deal. Jessa and Ann ask him many questions. And yet, in middle of a busy book-signing schedule, Richard [...]

One Justin Bieber

How much time would you need to count to a million at the “One Mississippi” rate of one number per second? At some point in my writing life I figured I should contemplate that question if I were ever to appreciate the kinds of numbers that astronomy uses. Knowing that our galaxy contains more than [...]

The Last Word

22 – 26 April This week, guest poster Tienlon Ho broke LWON with her post about what happens when the cloud breaks up with you. LWON power couple Ann & Abstruse Goose took on the topic of penis envy. Eric continues our series on debunking Hollywood with a look at the annoying legitimisation of fringe [...]

Debunking Hollywood: Science On the Fringe

I am just sitting down to dinner at makeshift cafeteria a few miles away from a Maya dig site, called Xultun, in the jungles of Northern Guatemala. It’s my third day there, and I am still not used to the howler monkeys and giant insects. But most of the students around me have been here [...]