Skeptophilia

When I was a kid, my parents had a set of books called The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Modern Medicine.  Now, this was circa 1972, so keep that in mind when you read the word "modern," but for the time, they were exhaustive.
Now, I was fascinated by biology even back then, at something like age twelve, so those medical encyclopedias were a source of real curiosity for me.  Not just the pages with the naughty bits -- being right on the cusp of puberty, those were really fascinating...

Given the right context, people tend to be cooperative.
That's the gist of a study out of the University of Texas - Austin this week, called, "Prosocial Modeling: A Meta-analytic Review and Synthesis," by Haesung Jung, Eunjin Seo, Eunjoo Han, Marlone Henderson, and Erika Patall.  If behavior is characterized...

I used to tease my poor, long-suffering mother because of her habit of talking with her hands.
It wasn't even necessarily when the person she was talking to was physically there in the room with her.  She talked with her hands (well, with one hand) while she was on the phone....

In 1869, explorer John Wesley Powell did the first systematic study of the geology of the Grand Canyon.  As impressive as it is, the Grand Canyon's not that complicated geologically; it's made of layers of sedimentary rock, most of them relatively undeformed...