Little white lies have a tendency to snowball. The more we lie, the more our brains seem to become desensitised to deception. Tali Sharot at University College London and her team ran an experiment that encouraged volunteers to lie. They were shown jars of pennies, full to varying degrees, and asked to send estimates of …
Five months after Hurricane Maria barrelled through Puerto Rico, much of the island remains “largely unliveable”, says emergency medicine physician Jeremy Samuel Faust. One knock-on effect of this is that America is drastically short of a staple item of hospital equipment: intravenous fluids for use in drips. The shutdown of several Puerto Rican factories that …
Continue reading ‘One reason American healthcare is so expensive’ »
America’s wars spread continually — there are now seven of them, and they never end; and yet, if you happen to live in the United States, most of the time it would be easy enough to believe that, except for the struggle against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, there were no conflicts underway. The Afghan …
Continue reading ‘Wars we barely know about, funded lavishly’ »
We’re not just drinking more wine than our forebears: we’re drinking it from ever-bigger glasses. A team from the University of Cambridge analysed 411 wine glasses and found that the ones we use today are, on average, almost seven times larger than those used in the Georgian era, having grown from 66ml in the early …
Mobile phones have been blamed for a sharp rise in exam cheating. Almost 2,600 pupils were penalised for cheating in their GCSE or A-level exams last summer, up 25% on the previous year. Half of those students had been found with “unauthorised materials” in exam halls; in most cases, this was a phone. What on …
