In 1972, researchers in North Carolina started following two groups of babies from poor families. In the first group, the children were given full-time day care up to age 5 that included most of their daily meals, talking, games and other stimulating activities. The other group, aside from baby formula, got nothing. The scientists were testing whether the special treatment would lead to better cognitive abilities in the long run.

Forty-two years later, the researchers found something that they had not expected to see: The group that got care was far healthier, with sharply lower rates of high blood pressure and obesity, and higher levels of so-called good cholesterol.

The study, which was published in the journal Science on Thursday, is part of a growing body of scientific evidence that hardship in early childhood has lifelong health implications. But it goes further than outlining the problem, offering evidence that a particular policy might prevent it.

‘This tells us that adversity matters and it does affect adult health,” said James Heckman, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago who led the data analysis. ‘But it also shows us that we can do something about it, that poverty is not just a hopeless […]

No Comments

The world’s wealthiest people aren’t known for travelling by bus, but if they fancied a change of scene then the richest 85 people on the globe – who between them control as much wealth as the poorest half of the global population put together – could squeeze onto a single double-decker.

The extent to which so much global wealth has become corralled by a virtual handful of the so-called ‘global elite’ is exposed in a new report from Oxfam on Monday. It warned that those richest 85 people across the globe share a combined wealth of £1tn, as much as the poorest 3.5 billion of the world’s population.

The wealth of the 1% richest people in the world amounts to $110tn (£60.88tn), or 65 times as much as the poorest half of the world, added the development charity, which fears this concentration of economic resources is threatening political stability and driving up social tensions.

It’s a chilling reminder of the depths of wealth inequality as political leaders and top business people head to the snowy peaks of Davos for this week’s World Economic Forum. Few, if any, will be arriving on anything as common as a bus, with private jets and helicopters pressed […]

No Comments

When the new ideas of quantum mechanics spread through science like wildfire in the first half of the 20th century, one of the first things physicists did was to apply them to gravity and general relativity. The results were not pretty.

It immediately became clear that these two foundations of modern physics were entirely incompatible. When physicists attempted to meld the approaches, the resulting equations were bedeviled with infinities making it impossible to make sense of the results.

Then in the mid-1960s, there was a breakthrough. The physicists John Wheeler and Bryce DeWitt successfully combined the previously incompatible ideas in a key result that has since become known as the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. This is important because it avoids the troublesome infinites-a huge advance.

But it didn’t take physicists long to realise that while the Wheeler-DeWitt equation solved one significant problem, it introduced another. The new problem was that time played no role in this equation. In effect, it says that nothing ever happens in the universe, a prediction that is clearly at odds with the observational evidence.

This conundrum, which physicists call “the problem of time’, has proved to be a thorn in flesh of modern physicists, who have tried to ignore it but […]

No Comments

Someone sent condoms filled with cocaine to the Vatican Post Office, but that’s only the latest in a series of revelations about nasty habits and cardinal sins.

The Vatican Post Office serves two purposes: selling stamps to tourists who want to send letters and postcards from the world’s smallest city state, and accepting packages and mail destined for the 800 people who live within its fortified walls.

So when a package containing 14 condoms filled with $55,200 worth of liquid cocaine was confiscated in Germany en route to Vatican City, police felt fairly certain it was meant for someone inside the hallowed gates.

The package originated from an as-yet-unnamed city in South America last January, and addressed to the post office, but not to any individual. So German police along with the Vatican’s gendarmerie set a trap to find out just who might come and claim the mysterious shipment.

No one showed up. The recipient apparently had been tipped off. The cocaine was sent back to Germany last week, and the investigation has been taken over by Interpol, which is reportedly searching for anyone with links to South America-presumably excluding the Argentinian Pope Francis. Police believe it might have been someone working […]

No Comments

Say you’ve been diagnosed with a serious, life-altering illness or psychological condition. In lieu of medication, psychotherapy, or a combination thereof, your doctor prescribes nightly meetings with a group of similarly afflicted individuals, and a set of 12 non-medical guidelines for recovery, half of which require direct appeals to God. What would you do?

Especially to nontheists, the concept of ‘asking God to remove defects of character” can feel anachronistic. But it is the sixth step in the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous-the prototype of 12-step facilitation (TSF), the almost universally accepted standard for addiction-recovery in America today.

From its origins in the treatment of alcoholism, TSF is now applied to over 300 addictions and psychological disorders: drug-use, of course (Narcotics Anonymous), but also smoking, sex and pornography addictions, social anxiety, kleptomania, overeating, compulsive spending, problem-gambling, even “workaholism.”
Twelve-step facilitation is now applied to over 300 addictions and psychological disorders, including overeating and workaholism.

Although AA does not keep membership records-the idea being pretty antithetical to the whole ‘anonymity” thing-the organization estimates that as of January 2013, more than 1 million Americans regularly attended meetings with one of roughly 60,000 groups. Dr. Lance Dodes, a recently retired professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical […]

No Comments