Here's this huge energetic country of 300 million people promoting its way of life as the guiding light of the world -- while under the covers it remains one of the most backward nations on the planet in its understanding of human sexuality. America does move forward, but it's chained...

To twist an old quip: Theories come and theories go, the environment remains. The first half of the 20th century was a big bang for the idea that every child was born a blank slate to be shaped by family and social environments. During the second half of the 20th...

In your imagination, step back and see us living on the crust of a small planet revolving around an average star. All life on Earth lives on this crust. But go out a comparatively short distance from Earth into space, and you can see the crust, but nothing alive on...

When the history of chemistry is written a thousand years from now, the 20th century will no doubt be marked as the century of giant molecules (macromolecules) in industry, the century in which the properties of giant molecules were first seriously studied and applied to technology and commerce. Most certainly,...

Nowhere is the gulf between science and religion more evident and more enormous than when we confront the issues of sexuality, sexual orientation, gender identity, and homosexuality. It seems bizarre that in the 21st century so many people in America and elsewhere are still confused by ignorance and self-deception--by rampant...

On July 10, 2007, President George W. Bush, in a speech in a hotel in Cleveland, said: "I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room."

Although this is one of the silliest statements ever made about health care, it...

It's natural that during the past two hundred years we've been involved in a roaring debate about whether mental illness is caused by inherited genes or by our various social environments. It's also a puzzle to an observer that the first nine months of life, from conception to birth, have...

When it comes to babies, it's easy to frighten people. It's natural for pregnant women to feel besieged by the idea of environmental toxic impacts on the developing fetus. The reality is that we're all besieged by this idea. But is it better to be ignorant of the dangers?

Here's...

The essence of the fetal programming idea is that impacts on local fetal cellular environments can change gene expression during the developmental construction of tissues and organs, and these changes can result in long-range consequences for the function of those tissues and organs during childhood and adulthood.

What about behavior?...

On the morning of September 11, 2001, some 3000 people died in front of our eyes in a crazy scene of airliners crashing into skyscrapers and of those skyscrapers crumbling within minutes. Anyone downtown in Manhattan that day, or anyone anywhere in front of a television screen who watched the...

Approximately 4 million live children are born each year in America, and by age six more than 15 percent of those children have clinically recognized physical or psychological neurodevelopmental defects. Here is a tabulation (some children have multiple defects):

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: 3 to 10 percent
Learning disability:...

The reality is that since our Great Recession is only a year old, it may be silly to interpret every upward blip as a sign that it's almost finished. The Great Depression lasted ten years, and probably ended only as a result of the economic pump-priming that occurred as we...

America's Thanksgiving holiday goes back at least 388 years to the year following the arrival of the Pilgrims in Massachusetts in 1620. The Pilgrims were among a number of sects called Puritans, and like many Puritan sects, the Pilgrims came to America essentially because they thought 17th Century England much...

One hundred and fifty-three years ago, in a quarry in the Neander Valley in Germany, quarry-workers stumbled on a strange skeleton. Local experts called it the skeleton of some diseased person, or maybe the bones of some foreign soldier (a Cossack?) who died on the spot in the Napoleonic War...

We Americans are no strangers to hypocrisy, but we're currently in a fix that's beginning to smell bad. It's true that the open society of the Western world is in jeopardy from people who want a closed society and are willing to have their children commit suicide to get it....

What do we remember? Veteran's Day--November 11th--was once called Armistice Day, the day the mangled soldiers started coming home in 1918.

The problem with war is that the men who declare and manage a war usually don't go to war. Had the politicians of various countries been obligated to live...

Nature is that lovely lady who gave us the polio virus...and the influenza virus...and the rabies virus...and the HIV virus...and so on. She's a lovely lady with death and cruelty in her eyes, and it seems she's totally committed to making all of us miserable.

In 1892, a twenty-eight year...

Predicting American voting behavior is a game played by pollsters, politicians, and professional gamblers, and between now and the Congressional elections in 2010 you can bet your bippy that our biannual circus will be in full swing again.

But prediction is one thing and analysis is something else. Analysts are...

America is one of the few places in the world with an ongoing public debate about the interface (conflict?) between science and religion. One of the problems with this debate is that debaters too often cook up questions and issues that serve their views without contributing to any enlightenment.

For...

One of the most insidious pollutants in our environment is the heavy metal element Cadmium. An important new study is the first research report on the effects of Cadmium on human fetal sex organ tissues. The authors of the abstract below make the following introductory points in their paper:

1. Exposure...