The New Republic’s cover headline this month is a topic that pro-choice activists speak about occasionally amongst themselves, but rarely address in public: ‘The Rise of DIY Abortions.’ The reason that it’s not much discussed in public forums is that reproductive health advocates are data-driven people, and one thing that’s nearly impossible to get data on is the prevalence of women quietly buying an ulcer medication named Cytotec from sleazy online dealers and using that to terminate pregnacies at home, far out of the reach of doctors and agencies like the CDC or the Guttmacher Institute that compile statistics on abortions. The writer of the piece, Ada Calhoun, admits that there’s no way to know how common these black-market abortions are, but points out that the rise in websites peddling Cytotec specifically to terminate pregnancy (instead for its on-label use to treat ulcers) makes it hard to deny that this is a growing trend:

Online, however, these drugs are readily available, often via suspicious-sounding sites that make claims like: ‘The Affordable Abortion Pill Will Safely, Quickly Terminate Your Undeveloped Fetus In The Privacy Of Your Home, Save You Time And Hundreds Of Dollars. It Is 100% […]

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Following a year of severe drought across the United States, the precipitation from winter 2013 may not be enough to eradicate dry conditions and return the water supply to normal levels.

The snow cover compared to last year on this date for the contiguous U.S., is significantly wider: approximately 65 percent versus last year’s 25 percent.

The highest percentage of snow coverage in any month last year just barely reached 48 percent.

But despite the seemingly wide coverage right now and talk of more snow to come, the U.S., will not be quick to recover.

‘Our current snow cover is not anything unusual. It was just way less than normal last winter,’ said AccuWeather.com Expert Senior Meteorologist Jack Boston.

‘Snow cover will probably hold for much of this month but we expect it to turn drier and milder again over western U.S. to the central and northern Plains in February, which should cause the overall snow coverage to decrease.’

Above average snowfall would be necessary to bounce back this winter, with more than 42 percent of the U.S., still undergoing severe to exceptional drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.

But as the AccuWeather.com Winter Forecast predicts, not a lot of additional snow is expected from the […]

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Science has few more controversial topics than human intelligence-in particular, whether variations in it are a result of nature or nurture, and especially whether such variations differ between the sexes. The mines in this field can blow up an entire career, as Larry Summers found out in 2005 when he spoke of the hypothesis that the mathematical aptitude needed for physics and engineering, as well as for maths itself, is innately rarer in women than in men. He resigned as president of Harvard University shortly afterwards.

It is bold, therefore, of Jonathan Wai, Martha Putallaz and Matthew Makel, of Duke University in North Carolina, to enter the fray with a paper that addresses both questions. In this paper, just published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, they describe how they sifted through nearly three decades of standardised tests administered to American high-school students to see what had been happening to the country’s brightest sparks.

They draw two conclusions. One is that a phenomenon called the Flynn effect (which weighs on the ‘nurture

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The amount the U.S. military spends annually on air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan: $20.2 billion, according to a former Pentagon official.

That’s more than NASA’s budget. It’s more than BP has paid so far for damage from the Gulf oil spill. It’s what the G-8 has pledged to help foster new democracies in Egypt and Tunisia.

‘When you consider the cost to deliver the fuel to some of the most isolated places in the world - escorting, command and control, medevac support - when you throw all that infrastructure in, we’re talking over $20 billion,’ Steven Anderson tells weekends on All Things Considered guest host Rachel Martin. He’s a retired brigadier general who served as chief logistician for Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq. He’s now in the private sector, selling technologies branded as energy-efficient to the Defense Department.

Now it’s important to note that wrapped up in Anderson’s $20 billion figure are all kind of other expenditures – for instance, the cost of building and maintaining roads in Afghanistan, securing those roads, managing the security operations for those roads. That all costs a lot of money and is part of the overall war effort in Afghanistan.

The Pentagon rejects Anderson’s estimate. Still his […]

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Kids who are kind are happier and gain greater peer acceptance, study finds

Nine to twelve-year-olds who perform kind acts are not only happier, but also find greater acceptance in their peer groups, according to research published December 26, 2012 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Kristin Layous and colleagues from the University of California, Riverside.

The authors randomly assigned over 400 students aged 9-12 to two groups: one group performed ‘acts of kindness’ and the other kept track of pleasant places they visited each week. Examples of kind acts included descriptions like ‘gave someone some of my lunch’ or ‘gave my mom a hug when she was stressed by her job’, and places visited included the baseball diamond, shopping center or a grandparent’s house.

Children were asked to report on their levels of happiness after 4 weeks of activities, and the researchers found that children who performed kind acts were happier than the other group. To assess peer acceptance, students were given a list of classmates and asked to circle those they would like to work with for school activities. Here, the authors found that the group that had performed kind acts fared significantly better.

Though both groups of children had […]

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