Last Friday, on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions?, one of the questioners picked up a theme that had appeared many times in the media during the week.  ‘What is the point’, he asked, ‘of asking for advice from an expert independent panel of…

New York Times writes about the stressful lifestyle of for-pay bloggers. The bloggers get rewarded for being prolific and quick to comment, but since the Internet never sleeps they feel a pressure not to sleep either. The result is physical…

Germany’s highest court recently upheld the law making incest a criminal offence that can be prosecuted with up to 2 years. It thereby rejected an appeal from a man who has four children with his sister. The pair fell in love when they met …

Euthanasia for animals is commonplace, and is widely accepted as a morally acceptable response to animals whose suffering is unable to be relieved. But, with the exception of a few places such as the Netherlands, Belgium and the US state of…

Science constantly gives rise to new information, new technologies, and new ethical dilemmas. To keep abreast of such changes, we need good science reporting in the newspapers, television and online. However there is a fundamental disconnec…

The first hybrid embryo was created yesterday and the debate about it and the HFEA Bill continues. Recently, the most senior Catholic scientist Sir Leszek Borysiewicz has criticised the Church for its position. Sir Leszek is quoted in The T…

The Large Hadron Collider, LHC, is the worlds biggest particle accelerator and due to start investigating the structure of matter later this year. Now a lawsuit has been filed in the US calling on the U.S. Department of Energy, Fermilab, th…

In recent studies, neuroscientists have been able to use brain imaging to reliably predict inner states such as lying or intention. In a groundbreaking study published in a recent issue of Nature (and briefly summarised here, here and here)…

The New York Times recently published a feature article on a website called PatientsLikeMe. This is an online community like facebook or MySpace, but with a medical twist. The members have serious medical conditions, like Parkinson’s diseas…

Various news sources this week, including Fox News and The Guardian, are reporting on an editorial published in this month’s American Journal of Psychiatry. In it, the author, Jerald J. Block, argues that internet addiction is a real psycho…