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The phrase “Mozart Effect” conjures an image of a pregnant woman who, sporting headphones over her belly, is convinced that playing classical music to her unborn child will improve the tyke’s intelligence. But is there science to back up this idea, which has spawned a cottage industry of books, CDs and videos? A short paper published in Nature in 1993 unwittingly introduced the supposed Mozart effect to the masses. Psychologist Frances Rauscher’s study involved 36 college kids who listened to either 10 minutes of a Mozart sonata in D-major, a relaxation track or silence before performing several spatial reasoning tasks....

So you decided to buy a nontoxic cleaning product? Good for you. Just don’t get too self-congratulatory. Purchasing a green product could make you more likely to behave more selfishly down the road, a new study reveals. Researchers at the University of Toronto asked college students to shop for products online from either an eco-friendly or a conventional store. Then, in a classic experiment known as the dictator game, subjects were asked to divide a small sum of money between themselves and a stranger....

It was a faustian bargain—and it certainly made editors at National Public Radio squirm. The deal was this: NPR, along with a select group of media outlets, would get a briefing about an upcoming announcement by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration a day before anyone else. But in exchange for the scoop, NPR would have to abandon its reportorial independence. The FDA would dictate whom NPR’s reporter could and couldn’t interview....

A staggering amount of information is conveyed in one patient’s medical records: vaccinations, allergies, records of mysterious aches and pains that were never linked to a cause. Then, of course, there are the lists of prescribed medications over the years. Even in the digital era today’s doctors typically record that medical hodgepodge in their own idiosyncratic or customized ways. And that’s even before genetic analyses entered the picture. The situation has become even more opaque with the introduction of that new massive data set....

FREUDIAN VINDICATION The actual benefits of intensive psychotherapy have long been controversial. Now investigators report that such therapy can be effective against chronic mental problems such as anxiety and depression. They looked at 23 studies involving 1,053 patients who received long-term psychodynamic therapy, which seeks clues into the unconscious roots of disorders and focuses on the relationship between patient and therapist. Psychotherapy that lasted a year or longer appeared significantly more beneficial for complex mental problems than shorter-term therapies and seemed cost-effective....

By Nidal al-MughrabiGAZA (Reuters) - More than 5,000 people have been evacuated from flood-damaged homes in northern Gaza and at least one person killed in what the United Nations called “a disaster area”.The flooding, caused by four days of torrential rain, was so severe that many homes could only be accessed by rowing boat with water two meters (more than six feet) deep in some places.“Large swathes of northern Gaza are a disaster area with water as far as the eye can see,” the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) that administers refugee camps in the Palestinian territory, said in a statement on Saturday....

In the world of climate modeling, aerosols are troublemakers. The tiny airborne particles, which come from human sources like burning fossil fuels and biomass as well as natural sources like volcanic eruptions and sea spray, are known to have a cooling effect on the Earth’s climate by affecting cloud reflectivity. Exactly how much they cool, though, is a topic of considerable uncertainty. This is a problem when climate scientists try to understand the warming effects of carbon dioxide, which they know warms the planet....

Editor’s note: The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. We’ve all heard those phrases that denote a certain blindness to the passage of time. “She looks as young as the day I met her” husbands say of their wives 50 years into married life, or “haven’t they grown”, people tell me of my children. How about “it wasn’t even hot” said the frog, realising too late that he had sat unawares in the pot while the water slowly crept up to boiling point....

Annie is lying down when she answers the phone; she is trying to recover from a rare trip out of the house. Moving around for an extended period leaves the 56-year-old exhausted and with excruciating pain shooting up her back to her shoulders. “It’s really awful,” she says. “You never get comfortable.” In 2011, Annie, whose name has been changed at the request of her lawyer, slipped and fell on a wet floor in a restaurant, injuring her back and head....

The Advances section of Scientific American’s September issue reports on a vaccine against nicotine addiction, a new x-ray technique inspired by large particle accelerators, how the brains of city folk may differ from their country cousins’, and more. For those interested in learning more about the developments described in this section, a list of selected further reading follows. “The Stress of Crowds” In “City living and urban upbringing affect neural social stress processing in humans,” Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg and colleagues report on the regional brain effects of living in—and growing up in—the city....

In the span of a few thousand years human beings have achieved some remarkable feats, innovating and crafting a rich web of traditions and beliefs that we pass from one generation to the next. The young learn from the old, and not only master traditional techniques but reshape them, creating a dynamic culture in which creativity and inventiveness yield increasingly complex solutions. But beyond intelligence and opposable thumbs, how did humans develop culture in such myriad, complex ways, when other brainy, dexterous species did not?...

Any science student knows you have to focus a light microscope onto a sample to get a sharp image. Right? Wrong. Researchers have found a practical way to extract clear images from the parts of a sample illuminated by light above and below the focal plane. The new method may soon allow doctors to diagnose tumors without removing a piece of tissue from a patient. Physically removing suspicious-looking cells from the body for a biopsy is necessary because conventional microscopes can only obtain a sharp image at a single depth—namely the spot where light is focused....

Many people venture into the desert for its starkness and simplicity, but I go there for its complexity. The rocks of western Arizona, where I work, reveal one of the most tangled histories on Earth. Layers of carbonate limestones, silty mudstones, quartz sand and solidified lava show that within the past 600 million years, this area was a warm, shallow sea, then a muddy swamp, then a vast desert of shimmering hot dunes, then a glacial ice sheet, then a shallow sea once again....

Created, written & designed by John Pavlus / Screencasts produced by Andrew Cahill / Music by Jeff Alvarez Check out previous episodes of The Monitor. Subscribe to this video podcast via iTunes or RSS Background on this week’s stories: #1. Mapping the brain’’s own O’‘Hare Olaf Sporns, co-author of the study in question (press release here) is no stranger to the creation of high-resolution maps of activity in the brain, having previously generated interesting results on all the electrical chatter present in the “resting” brain....

When parents ask, “What grade did you get?” there is a common follow-up question: “So who got the highest grade?” The practice of making such social comparisons is popular in all corners of the world, research shows. Many educators select and publicly announce the “best student” in a class or school. Adults praise children for outperforming others. Sports tournaments award those who surpass others. Last year the Scripps National Spelling Bee awarded winners with $50,000 cash prize and their own trophy—just for being better than others....

News travels fast—especially online—and a group of scientists intends to put this to good use by monitoring and trying to stop infectious diseases in their tracks. Researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School have launched a data-mining project called HealthMap. This automated system scours news services and online discussion forums, pooling information about emerging health threats worldwide. By doing so, HealthMap provides a glimpse of potential disease outbreaks in local pockets, often before government and other health agencies such as the World Health Organization and the U....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Elephants were used in the ancient Indian army, irrespective of regions, dynasties, or points in time; their importance was never denied and continued well into the medieval period as well. The ready availability in the subcontinent of the Indian elephant (Elephas maximus indicus), one of the three recognized subspecies of the Asian elephant and native to mainland Asia, led to its gradual taming and use in both peace and war....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. In Scandinavia, Christianity spread due to the support and encouragement of political rulers at the top of the society above all else. Conversion, defined here as the actions taken by kings or clerics to introduce the new religion, did not look the same in all countries, which were not even fully established during the Viking Age....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Prostitution in the ancient world usually referred to a classification of women and men who offered their sexual services outside the parameters of law codes for ancient society. The word ‘prostitute’ derives from the Latin prostituere (“to expose publicly”). This was a reference to the way in which Roman prostitutes advertised so as not to be confused with decent matrons (see below)....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Roman army fought many conflicts throughout its long history, though perhaps none so indelible as the Pyrrhic War from 280 to 275 BCE. This war between Rome and a league of Greek colonies in southern Italy led by the city of Tarentum marks a significant turning point in the Mediterranean world, effectively demonstrating the superiority of Roman political and military policy....