I recently published an article on the possible upsides of mass surveillance (somewhat in the vein of David Brin’s “transparent society”). To nobody’s great astonishment, it has attracted criticism! Some of them accu…

So the US government is likely being shutdown, which will suspend the work of many government agencies, including the Center for Disease Control (CDC). But, fair citizens, I reassure you – in its wisdom, the US Congress has decided th…

All of us are stressed, every now and then. Acute stress can have a profound impact on the human body and mind: both physical and psychological stressors affect the autonomic nervous system and the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis, leadi…

Scientists in America have found a way to reduce crime amongst some high risk groups by 30-40%. It involves a simulation of crime scenes where the victim is a hologram representing the potential criminal in question, followed by discussion …

Several days ago, a middle-aged man named Nam Young-ho was shot to death while crossing the Imjin River, which divides North and South Korea.  Such stories are sadly not uncommon, but the particular facts make this case quite unusual: Nam w…

By Luke Davies Luke can now be followed on Twitter. Anders Breivik, the 34-year-old Norwegian man responsible for the death of 77 and wounding of 232 people in an attack in 2011, has been enrolled in political science modules at the Univers…

Chad Dixon, an Indiana man was recently sentenced to 8 months in jail for teaching people how to beat polygraph tests. The sticking point seems to be that polygraphs are used by the US federal authorities for screening applicants and detect…

The furore over Syria at the G20 meeting has distracted attention from the potentially highly significant agreement by the leaders of the world’s largest economies to support an ‘ambitious and comprehensive’ plan to address the massive glob…

‘Re-homing’ is a term coined to describe the adopting out of adopted children. Reuters today published a long story on the practice, describing several cases in which children adopted from overseas by American parents were then …