Western science has had remarkable success in explaining the functioning of the material world, but when it comes to the inner world of the mind, it has very little to say. And when it comes to consciousness itself, science falls curiously silent. There is nothing in physics, chemistry, biology, or any other science that can account for our having an interior world. In a strange way, scientists would be much happier if minds did not exist. Yet without minds there would be no science.

This ever-present paradox may be pushing Western science into what Thomas Kuhn called a paradigm shift–a fundamental change in worldview.

This process begins when the prevalent paradigm encounters an anomaly — an observation that the current worldview can’t explain. As far as the today’s scientific paradigm is concerned, consciousness is certainly one big anomaly. It is the most obvious fact of life: the fact that we are aware and experience an internal world of images, sensations, thoughts, and feelings. Yet there is nothing more difficult to explain. It is easier to explain how the universe evolved from the Big Bang to human beings than it is to explain why any of us should ever have a single inner […]

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In states across the country, women are being arrested for the crime of ending their own pregnancies-though they have a constitutional right to do so in a doctor’s office. Michelle Goldberg on a worrisome new trend.

Underground abortions have returned to the United States, just as pro-choice activists have warned for years. And women have started going to jail for the crime of ending their own pregnancies, or trying to.

This week Jennie L. McCormack, a 32-year-old mother of three from eastern Idaho, was arrested for self-inducing an abortion. According to the Associated Press, McCormack couldn’t afford a legal procedure, and so took pills that her sister had ordered online. For some reason, she kept the fetus, which police found after they were called by a disapproving acquaintance. She now faces up to five years in prison, as well as a $5,000 fine.

Idaho recently banned abortions after 20 weeks, and McCormack’s fetus was reportedly between five and six months old. But according to Alexa Kolbi-Molinas, a staff attorney for the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project, under Idaho law, McCormack could have been arrested even if she’d been in her first trimester because self-induced abortion is illegal in all circumstances. ‘It doesn’t matter if […]

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America clocked up a record last week. The latest drop in house prices meant that the cost of real estate has fallen by 33% since the peak – even bigger than the 31% slide seen when John Steinbeck was writing The Grapes of Wrath.

Unemployment has not returned to Great Depression levels but at 9.1% of the workforce it is still at levels that will have nerves jangling in the White House. The last president to be re-elected with unemployment above 7.2% was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The US is a country with serious problems. Getting on for one in six depend on government food stamps to ensure they have enough to eat. The budget, which was in surplus little more than a decade ago, now has a deficit of Greek-style proportions. There is policy paralysis in Washington.

The assumption is that the problems can be easily solved because the US is the biggest economy on the planet, the only country with global military reach, the lucky possessor of the world’s reserve currency, and a nation with a proud record of re-inventing itself once in every generation or so.

All this is true and more. US universities are superb, attracting the best brains from around […]

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Does nuclear radiation cause more boys to be born than girls? According to a new study, it certainly looks that way.

The study, published in the journal Environmental Science and Pollution Research, looked at the global dispersal of nuclear radiation in relation to the gender of babies born in certain locations throughout the world. Scientists analyzed population data for several decades for 39 European countries and the United States.

Under normal circumstances, male births outnumber female births by a ratio of 105 to 100. Nobody knows why, but that just seems to be the case. However, when researchers looked closely, they found an increase in the number of male births relative to female births in all of the countries from the period of 1964 to 1975 – and in many eastern European countries for several years after 1986. This increase was noted in all countries investigated and can be linked to the global dispersal of radioactive atoms from open-air atmospheric atomic bomb tests that were conducted until the early ’60s.

Another spike in male births was noted in relation to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, but in this case, the effect was more localized. The closer the country was to Chernobyl, the […]

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Millions of Americans gained the right this year to appeal decisions made by health plans to an outside, independent decision-maker. But many of these consumers might not know they have the new option — and when they find out, it might be too late.

Federal officials say that, beginning this year, about 44 million people are entitled for the first time to an external appeal, under the 2010 health care law. They are enrolled in self-insured health plans offered through an employer that weren’t grandfathered, or exempted, under the law. Employers with self-insured health plans pay for claims from their own funds instead of through insurance companies, although they often have insurers administer the plans.

In an external review, consumers who have been denied coverage make their cases to an arbiter — who has no financial stake in the decision — that the medical services are necessary and should be paid for by the health plan. A study by the Government Accountability Office this year found that consumers in plans already offering these outside reviews prevailed in as many as 54 percent of the cases. Under the health law, the employer or insurer is required to hire an outside review organization that […]

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