Newly published research suggests that’s a complete misreading of the facts. According to this analysis, politically engaged Mexicans who move to the U.S. fall all over the ideological spectrum, very much like native-born Americans.

What’s more, according to University of Nebraska-Lincoln political scientist Sergio Wals, those on the right are more inclined to participate in the American electoral process than those on the left.

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But, what does your actual sneeze—the sound, the volume, the frequency—say about you? A Chicago neurologist is trying to figure that out:

“Sneezes are like laughter,” says Dr. Alan Hirsch, a neurologist, psychiatrist, and founder of the Smell & Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago. “Some [laughs] are loud, some are soft. And it’s similar with sneezing. It will often be the same from youth onward in terms of what it sounds like.”

Hirsch says he doesn’t know of any studies that have been conducted on various sneezing styles and what they might mean, but says he does believe the way we sneeze reflects some component of the personality.

“It’s more of a psychological thing and represents the underlying personality or character structure,” he says.

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Score another one for Wolfgang Amadeus. Researchers report the soothing sounds of a Mozart minuet boosts the ability of children and seniors to focus on a task and ignore extraneous information.

Dissonant music has the opposite effect, according to Nobuo Masataka of Japan’s Kyoto University and Leonard Perlovsky of Harvard University. Their findings help make the case that music, sometimes thought of as a pleasant byproduct of evolution, has in fact played an active role in human development.

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“Everybody in the South over 60 used the N-word at some time or the other in the past.”

“I don’t understand why some people can use [the N-word] and others can’t.”

“We have lived with each other and loved each other here for a long time. Sometimes I think there is more prejudice in the North than there is in the South.”

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“Overweight and obesity are defined as abnormal or excessive fat accumulation that presents a risk to health,” according to both the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization. “A crude population measure of obesity is the body mass index (BMI), a person’s weight (in kilograms) divided by the square of his or her height (in meters). A person with a BMI of 30 or more is generally considered obese. A person with a BMI equal to or more than 25 is considered overweight.”

So is obesity a disease?

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“Darkness increases freedom from constraints, which in turn promotes creativity,” report  Anna Steidle of the University of Stuttgart and Lioba Werth of the University of Hohenheim. A dimly lit environment, they explain in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, “elicits a feeling of freedom, self-determination, and reduced inhibition,” all of which encourage innovative thinking.

Steidle and Werth describe six experiments which provide evidence for their thesis. The key one featured 114 German undergraduates, who were seated in groups of two or three in a small room designed to simulate an office.

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In three experiments described in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, researchers found “a systematic bias among young adults to perceive themselves as somewhat more conservative than they actually are.”

“Commentators have presumed that America is a ‘center-right’ nation,” write psychologists Ethan Zell of the University of North Carolina-Greensboro and Michael Bernstein of Pennsylvania State University-Abington. “The present findings challenge this assumption.”

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On a Saturday morning in late May, I went to see if I could become one of them.

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Are you uncomfortable with ambiguity? It’s a common condition, but a highly problematic one. The compulsion to quell that unease can inspire snap judgments, rigid thinking, and bad decision-making.

Fortunately, new research suggests a simple anecdote for this affliction: Read more literary fiction.

A trio of University of Toronto scholars, led by psychologist Maja Djikic, report that people who have just read a short story have less need for what psychologists call “cognitive closure.” Compared with peers who have just read an essay, they expressed more comfort with disorder and uncertainty—attitudes that allow for both sophisticated thinking and greater creativity.

“Exposure to literature,” the researchers write in the Creativity Research Journal, “may offer a (way for people) to become more likely to open their minds.”

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Disturbing new research suggests the answer to that question may depend on your political ideology.

In three experiments, “we found that conservatives were more likely than liberals to categorize a racially ambiguous person as black than white,” a research team led by New York University psychologist Amy Krosch writes in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Intriguingly, this dynamic disappeared when the study participants—white Americans—were told they were judging Canadian faces. The tendency for those on the right to more quickly categorize someone as “black” only occurred when they were evaluating their fellow countrymen.

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Samantha Power teaches at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, and it’s worth noting her official title: “Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy.” As a teacher, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and until recently a senior adviser to Barack Obama, she has focused on how leadership can be effectively exercised in an increasingly fragmented world.

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New research from the Netherlands suggests the two phenomena may be directly related.

A study just published in the journal Psychological Science finds people eating or drinking while mentally distracted require greater concentrations of sweetness, sourness, or saltiness to feel satisfied. A slightly sweet dish may be delicious when you’re concentrating on each bite, but it tastes bland if you’re eating while your attention is divided.

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“The Internet is not addictive in the same way as pharmacological substances are,” cognitive scientist Tom Stafford at the University of Sheffield in the U.K. told Tia Ghose at LiveScience “But it’s compulsive; it’s compelling; it’s distracting.”

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That’s Louis Lingg, the German anarchist partially responsible for the 1886 Haymarket Bombing. Haymarket started as a labor demonstration. When the police came in to break up the demonstration someone threw a dynamite bomb at them. Seven police officers, and four other people, were killed in the event. Investigators later discovered dynamite bombs in Lingg’s apartment. He was arrested and tried with seven other anarchists.

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“Our findings support the possibility that compassion and altruism can be viewed as trainable skills rather than stable traits,” a research team led by Richard J. Davidsonand Helen Weng of the University of Wisconsin-Madison writes in the journal Psychological Science.

Specifically, they report that taking a course in compassion leads to increased engagement of certain neural systems, which prompts higher levels of altruistic behavior.

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The hypothesis is sound and the supporting data is impeccable, right?

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The Center for Shale Development advocates that oil and gas companies voluntarily adopt 15 performance standards. These cover wastewater disposal, fracking fluids, air pollution standards for drill engines, limits on gas flaring in the fields and more. But this week, 68 grassroots groups protested the Environmental Defense Fund’s move, arguing the big environmental advocacy organization had allowed itself to be “co-opted by industry interests,” and that it was engaged in “greenwashing.”

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