WASHINGTON, D.C. — Gallup published nearly 100 unique articles in 2013 about Americans’ health and well-being. Through its daily surveys, conducted year-round, the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index uncovers new insights and provides the most up-to-date data available on Americans’ mental state, exercise and eating habits, healthcare coverage, physical health, and financial well-being. The following list represents Gallup editors’ picks for the top 10 most important findings from this year.

Lacking employment is most linked to having depression: For Americans, being unemployed, being out of the workforce, or working part time — but wanting full-time work — are the strongest predictors of having depression. Gallup found that these relationships hold true even after controlling for age, gender, income, education, race and ethnicity, marital status, having children, region, obesity, having health insurance, and being a caregiver. Bonus finding: Depression costs U.S. employers $23 billion in absenteeism each year.

Obesity is a growing problem for Americans: The adult obesity rate has been trending upward in 2013 will likely surpass rates since 2008, when Gallup and Healthways began tracking. The obesity rate has increased across almost all demographic groups.

Those who are actively disengaged at work […]

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They are a fixture in daily newspapers, varying enormously in difficulty and complexity. Crosswords range from simple puzzles that provide amusement in waiting rooms and coffee-breaks to fiendish tests of intelligence that were even used to recruit code breakers during the second world war. But where and when did the modern crossword originate?

Arranging words in grids is a pastime that dates back centuries. The earliest known example of the Sator square, a Latin palindrome consisting of the words SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS, was found scratched on a wall in the buried Roman town of Pompeii. Word puzzles of various kinds appeared in 19th-century English publications. But the genesis of the modern crossword lies in the Sunday edition of the New York World published on December 21st, 1913. Arthur Wynne, a violinist-turned-journalist, created a word puzzle, called ‘Word-Cross’, for the paper’s ‘Fun’ supplement. It is the ancestor of all modern crosswords, but differs from them in several ways. For one thing, it is laid out on a diamond-shaped (rather than square) grid. Unlike many modern crossword puzzles, it contains no black squares. Its numbering system is also unfamiliar: rather than ‘2 across’, for example, it names clues using the numbers […]

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The notion that hallucinogenic drugs played a significant part in the development of religion has been extensively discussed, particularly since the middle of the twentieth century. Various ideas of this type have been collected into what has become known as the entheogen theory. The word entheogen is a neologism coined in 1979 by a group of ethnobotanists (those that study the relationship between people and plants). The literal meaning of entheogen is ‘that which causes God to be within an individual’ and might be considered as a more accurate and academic term for popular terms such as hallucinogen or psychedelic drug. By the term entheogen we understand the use of psychoactive substances for religious or spiritual reasons rather than for purely recreational purposes.

Perhaps one of the first things to consider is whether there is any direct evidence for the entheogenic theory of religion which derives from contemporary science. One famous example that has been widely discussed is the Marsh Chapel experiment. This experiment was run by the Harvard Psilocybin Project in the early 1960s, a research project spearheaded by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. Leary had traveled to Mexico in 1960, where he had been introduced to the effects of […]

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The NSA’s TAO hacking unit is considered to be the intelligence agency’s top secret weapon. It maintains its own covert network, infiltrates computers around the world and even intercepts shipping deliveries to plant back doors in electronics ordered by those it is targeting.

In January 2010, numerous homeowners in San Antonio, Texas, stood baffled in front of their closed garage doors. They wanted to drive to work or head off to do their grocery shopping, but their garage door openers had gone dead, leaving them stranded. No matter how many times they pressed the buttons, the doors didn’t budge. The problem primarily affected residents in the western part of the city, around Military Drive and the interstate highway known as Loop 410.

In the United States, a country of cars and commuters, the mysterious garage door problem quickly became an issue for local politicians. Ultimately, the municipal government solved the riddle. Fault for the error lay with the United States’ foreign intelligence service, the National Security Agency, which has offices in San Antonio. Officials at the agency were forced to admit that one of the NSA’s radio antennas was broadcasting at the same frequency as the garage door openers. Embarrassed officials at […]

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Speaking recently with the Los Angeles Times, UCLA professor and former Washington state

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