Recently, Pacific Standard published a review (“Red Science, Blue Science,”January/February 2013) by Wray Herbert, a pop psychology writer,of political writer Chris Mooney’s book The Republican Brain and my new book, Science Left Behind, which I co-authored with Hank Campbell.

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Ask a woman why she endures the awkwardness and discomfort, and she’ll probably respond, “They make me look, and feel, more attractive.” Newly published research suggests this perception is accurate, but perhaps not for the reason you’d expect.

It’s not the artificially increased height that turns heads. Rather, it’s how such footwear changes the mechanics of a woman’s gait.

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The UCSF extension students mutter “yeah”—most of them, at least. Lustig has a way of seeking validation and pissing off people at the same time. His combined love of showmanship and need for approval led to acting in 12 musical-theater performances during his three years as an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His greatest role yet may be as the loudest, most contrarian voice in the public-health debate over why we get fat and what we should do about it.

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Polar bears do not have enemies. A male can weigh 1,500 pounds, with paws a foot wide and savage teeth. They are the unchallenged master predators in the harshest environment on Earth. A full-grown bear slaughtered in her den is far outside the ordinary.

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To begin the talk, I asked the audience members to recollect their first encounter with the concept of fairness. I had formed a fledgling hypothesis, and wanted to put it to the test.

As people raised their hands, I called on them to share their memories. A pattern quickly emerged:

• “I had to take the rap for something my sister actually did!”
• “My parents gave my brother a puppy, and I’m the one who loved dogs. He didn’t even like them.”
• “I came from a family with nine siblings, and we had to fight each other for food.”
• “I was an only child, and I really wanted a brother – all my friends had brothers.”
• “I was foreign, and different, and all the other kids singled me out to pick on.”

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If so, you’d better start prioritizing—or, at the very least, join a band. Because from Elvis Presley to Amy Winehouse, solo pop superstars are disproportionately likely to die young (although not necessarily at age 27).

That’s one finding of a study just published in the British journal BMJ Open,which takes a close look at mortality among rock and pop icons of the past half-century. And just like the rest of us, it finds, famous musicians are more likely to die from substance abuse if they had troubled childhoods.

A team of researchers led by Mark Bellis, director of the Centre for Public Health at Liverpool John Moores University, looked at the mortality rates and childhood experiences of 1,489 rock and pop stars who gained fame between 1956 and 2006. Comparisons were made across the decades, and between European and American musicians.

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The scholarly journal American Behavioral Scientist devoted two issues in 2009 to the 10^th anniversary of the Columbine High School mass killings and what, if anything, we have learned from them. Gary Kleck, professor of criminology and criminal justice at Florida State University, contributed an essay in which he called mass school shootings “the worst possible case for gun control.”

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To combat growing unease among parents and observers, USA Football, the official football development partner of the NFL, created Heads Up Football, a program designed to help reduce head injuries in high-school football. The program has a nice website, videos, and a national advertising campaign. But the main component is making sure children are taught proper tackling technique.

The “better and safer tackle,” according to a USA Football video tutorial, is when an athlete begins from the proper stance, explodes from the hips, and leads with the chest—all with the intent of keeping the head up and out of the tackle.

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Caricatures? Absolutely. But such stereotypes are widely held among Americans, newly published research confirms, with liberals particularly clueless about the concerns of conservatives.

Regarding issues of morality, “people overestimate how dramatically liberals and conservatives differ,” psychologists Jesse Graham, Brian Nosek and Jonathan Haidt write in the online journal PLoS One. Specifically, their research suggests those on the left unfairly assume their counterparts on the right are cold-hearted on issues involving harm and fairness.

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There’s a reason for that.

Savvy retailers use all kinds of sensory information to convey their brand, welcome you in, and put you in a frame of mind that they hope will lead to more sales. Their displays are arranged just so. Their wall colors are carefully chosen. The music burbling through their speakers hits all the right notes.

That fresh-baked-cookie smell is part of the package. The use of scents to lure customers in is the latest frontier in sensory marketing, with an entire industry supplying retailers with just the right aroma for their business.

The problem is, the science isn’t always there.

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That’s the key finding of a newly published study that suggests sexual mores remain stubbornly stable. It concludes that, more than a half-century after the introduction of the birth control pill, the sexual double standard is alive and well and still influencing women’s everyday behavior.

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It was considerate of the American Academy of Pediatrics, then, to wait until after the Thanksgiving weekend to release a policy brief recommending that physicians pre-prescribe emergency contraception—known as Plan B or Next Choice—to teenage patients, in order to ensure their ability to obtain it when needed. Onerous federal laws discourage teens from using so-called “morning-after pills,” despite the enormous human and financial costs of an unplanned pregnancy, and according to the AAP, physicians might remedy the problem by writing high schoolers a script for Plan B long before the morning after.

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What’s going on with local governments? Their troubles stem from multiple sources, but the critical factor is, yes, after all this time, still the housing bust. City finances are almost exclusively tied to property tax revenue—indeed, most locales have no other funding source. Despite all the focus on mismanagement and bloated pensions, few cities would be in these severe dire straits had housing prices not fallen by roughly 41 percent or even greater, in some places.

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Public policy leaders have somewhat higher hopes, of course. They’d like to use Facebook to encourage organ donation, charity in the wake of disaster, even voter participation.

Sheana Bull would like to use it to promote safer sex.

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Singing, dancing, and drumming.

That’s the conclusion of a study by University of Oxford psychologist Robin Dunbar. He and his colleagues report people who have just been playing music have a higher tolerance for pain—an indication their bodies are producing endorphins, which are sometimes referred to as natural opiates.

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The passing was of the metrosexual.

The word is that British journalist Mark Simpson coined “metrosexual” in 1994, that being the word because Mark “The ‘Daddy’ of the Metrosexual, the Retrosexual & Spawner of Sporno” Simpson tells us so. For a definition, I offer excerpts from the Urban Dictionary, with charming stylistic peculiarities intact:

A new name for something quite old. Men with taste & style who know about fashion, art, and culture have always existed. In past centuries, these kinds of men were in the uppercrust of society (more leisure time). … An American Metrosexual is like your average European male. In France or Italy, men can be manly and work on cars and know about art and fashion at the same time. They are cool with that and don’t need some special name for the less “masculine” side.

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The late-afternoon session pushed well past the end of the day; questions just kept coming. It was a scene, Zeisel marveled—all this interest in neuroscience—that would not have taken place just a few years earlier.

Zeisel is a sociologist and architect who has researched the design of facilities for Alzheimer’s patients. Architects, he explains, “understand about aesthetics; they know about psychology. The next depth to which they can go is understanding the brain and how it works and why do people feel more comfortable in one space than another?”

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And by “Men,” I mean clear-eyed humans (of either sex) unburdened by emotion, who make life-or-death decisions based on logic, experience, and duty alone. (Never mind that such people don’t really exist; that’s why it’s fiction.)

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