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Ban Cosmetic Surgery in Children?

The Queensland Government, in Australia, has announced it will ban cosmetic surgery in people under 18 years of age. Other states, such as New South Wales, have stated they will also consider restricting access by teenagers to cosmetic enha…

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Trading on Testosterone: Doping and the Financial Markets

Two cambridge researchers have found that  found that the amount of money a male financial trader makes in a day is correlated with his testosterone level. The pair – John Coates and Joe Herbert – also found that a trader&#…

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Academic Integrity and Vioxx

Drug company Merck and its product Vioxx are in the news again. An article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) has examined the documents from the legal proceedings against Merck in connection with the withdrawal of Vi…

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Who’s this ‘we’, Dr Soon? Unconscious Action and Moral Responsibility

A paper in Nature Neuroscience by Soon, Brass, Heinze and Haynes has demonstrated that it is possible (in the case of a simple decision about pressing buttons) to predict what the decision will be and when it will happen several seconds bef…

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These are not the probabilities you are looking for

There has been an increasing buzz in the papers regarding the impending launch of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Some of this concerns the possibility that it will lead to a disaster which destroys the world. This certainly sounds unlikel…

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Three arguments against turning the Large Hadron Collider on

In response to Anders Sandberg’s post on the Large Hadron Collider. The physicists responses to worries about the risks posed by the LHC make it unclear whether they understand the moral issue. They may have the power, but they do not…

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The Pregnant Man, And Other Conceptual Curiosities

Recent weeks have given us several occasions to reflect on the nature of parenthood. First we had the unavoidably salacious reports about the first pregnant man, Thomas Beatie—who turned out to be a woman who has had a sex change operation …

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Policy, Uncertainty and Global Warming

The Australian today contains a link on its front page to an article entitled ‘Academic cool on warming’(http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23509775-2702,00.html) together with a link to a recent speech by the retired Vice-C…

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Expert advice

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…

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The stresses of 24 hour creative work: How much would Aristotle blog?

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…

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