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Stress Influences Our Moral Behaviour

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…

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Is compassion a necessary component of healthcare?

Is compassion a necessary component of healthcare?

Last week, the Daily Mail reported on Dr Anna Smajdor’s paper in which she argues that compassion ‘is not a necessary component’ of healthcare. This claim contrasts interestingly with Jeremy Hunt’s recent proposal that all student nurses sh…

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Ethical Enhancement

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 …

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A death on the border

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…

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Should some people be barred from pursuing higher education?

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…

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Polygraphs: placebo or trial by ordeal?

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…

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Google and the G20

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…

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What’s wrong with adopting out an adopted child?

‘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 …

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Teenage annihilation on an Aegean boat

An Old Bore writes: Last week I got the boat from Athens to Hydra. It takes about 2 ½ hours, and takes you along the coast of the Argolid. The sun shone, the dolphins leapt, the retsina flowed, the bouzoukis trembled, and we watched the sun…

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Burma, Myanmar and the Myth of Objectivity

by David Edmonds – twitter @DavidEdmonds100 Since my last blog post, there has been a decision within the BBC “to start to move” to calling ‘Burma, ‘Myanmar’. Burma has always been an interest of mine because it was the big story in t…

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