Inside the Busy Mind of a Baby

Sure, they may while away their days eating, sleeping and soiling diapers. But Alison Gopnik says it’s high time that babies got some respect. In her new book, The Philosophical Baby, the University of California, Berkeley, psychologist argues that modern research is revolutionizing our understanding of the first years of life, revealing early childhood to be a frenzied period of intellectual, emotional and moral development

Share

Marriage: For Worse, Then for Better

Just a few months before John Gottman, a leading American marriage researcher and psychologist, was to be married, his father died, leaving Gottman to contend with overwhelming loss during what should have been one of the happiest times of his life. No one would have blamed him for putting the wedding on hold

Share

Unemployment Falls, but Long-Term Joblessness Remains a Concern

For all the relief over the jobless figures released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics Friday morning — 247,000 jobs were lost in July, far fewer than economists had expected — a dark problem lurks in the numbers: dangerously high levels of long-term unemployment in America.

Share

Do Monkeys Pay for Sex?

It turns out that one of humanity’s oldest professions may be even older than we thought: In a recent study of macaque monkeys in Indonesia, researchers found that male primates “paid” for sexual access to females — and that the going rate for such access dwindled as the number of available females went up. According to the paper, “Payment for Sex in a Macaque Mating Market,” published in the December issue of Animal Behavior, males in a group of about 50 long-tailed macaques in Kalimantan Tengah, Indonesia, traded grooming services for sex with females; researchers, who studied the monkeys for some 20 months, found that males offered their payment up-front, as a kind of pre-sex ritual

Share

Commentary: Flu and your health on a plane

The novel swine flu is showing the world just how interconnected we are and how commercial aircraft can serve as vehicles of rapid disease spread. (CNN) — The novel swine flu is showing the world just how interconnected we are and how commercial aircraft can serve as vehicles of rapid disease spread. I am frequently asked: What is the risk of catching an illness while flying In a nutshell, the risk of getting an infection while you’re in an enclosed space such as an airplane depends upon three factors: The infectiousness of the contagious person spreading the illness; the degree of your exposure (how close you are to the contagious person and for how long); and the ventilation of the space or passenger cabin.

Share

TV for Babies: Does It Help or Hurt?

Early parenting choices are never clear-cut, and deciding whether to allow your infant to watch television or DVDs ranks as one of the more perplexing. Thanks to marketing claims for TV shows and DVDs created for babies, many parents believe that watching educational programming will stimulate infants’ brains and actually promote learning. It’s a seductive line of reasoning

Share