"The word "neologism" dates to the seventeen-seventies, taken from Greek via French, meaning "new speech." But the practice of coining new words goes back to the beginning of language itself. It accelerated as culture accelerated, and by the nineteenth century conservative types were worried that industry and science were flooding the linguistic marketplace with all kinds of shoddy fad words, and that the language had to be protected from interlopers. Others embraced the dynamism. "

"WHAT is the chance that you could get someone to lie for you? What about vandalizing public property at your suggestion? Most of us assume that others would go along with such schemes only if, on some level, they felt comfortable doing so. If not, they'd simply say "no," right? Yet research suggests that saying "no" can be more difficult than we believe - and that we have more power over others' decisions than we think."

"A South Pacific island, shown on marine charts and world maps as well as on Google Earth and Google Maps, does not exist, Australian scientists say."

"A number of other researchers have since produced similar findings: temperatures that deviate from the norm affect people's beliefs in climate change. In one study, subjects placed in a heated cubicle believed more acutely in global warming than people placed in non-heated ones."

"That's what historians do: look back and see things that people at the time couldn't see. It's a job well worth doing. But it's equally important that we don't confuse the early seeds of a major political, social, and cultural change with the substance of the change itself. If we make that mistake, we miss the most important lesson... The seeds can be all around us, yet the change itself remains unexpected, invisible, even unimaginable to most people at the time."

"Hayes has devoted the past fifteen years to studying atrazine, and during that time scientists around the world have expanded on his findings, suggesting that the herbicide is associated with birth defects in humans as well as in animals. The company documents show that, while Hayes was studying atrazine, Syngenta was studying him, as he had long suspected. Syngenta's public-relations team had drafted a list of four goals. The first was "discredit Hayes.""

"Empathy research is thriving these days, as cognitive neuroscience undergoes what some call an "affective revolution." There is increasing focus on the emotions, especially those involved in moral thought and action. We've learned, for instance, that some of the same neural systems that are active when we are in pain become engaged when we observe the suffering of others."

"In retrospect, Kubrick's black comedy provided a far more accurate description of the dangers inherent in nuclear command-and-control systems than the ones that the American people got from the White House, the Pentagon, and the mainstream media."

"No map can be a perfect representation of reality; every map is an interpretation, which may be why writers are so drawn to them. Writers love maps: collecting them, creating them, and describing them. Literary cartography includes not only the literal maps that authors commission or make themselves but also the geographies they describe. The visual display of quantitative information in the digital age has made charts and maps more popular than ever, though every graphic, like every story, has a point of view."

"But brain death is not quite as certain as these bioethicists might like. A doctor can't always determine whether the brain is truly dead. The diagnosis is made the old-fashioned way: by careful observation. A doctor checks to see whether the eyes are responsive to light or touch; she pricks the nailbeds to discern whether the pain registers; she tests muscle reflexes; she determines whether the buildup of carbon dioxide triggers spontaneous breathing if the ventilator is shut off; and she may use an electroencephalograph to detect electrical activity in the brain. (However, even a dead brain may produce some voltage.) If all the findings are negative, then the declaration is made. Even then, the doctor can be wrong. "

""When Nabokov started translating it into Russian, he recalled a lot of things that he did not remember when he was writing it in English, and so in essence it became a somewhat different book," Pavlenko says."

"But according to new research, the therapeutic effects of a placebo are so powerful that an inert pill has a good chance of reducing symptoms - even if patients know they are taking a dummy pill."

"St James Ethics Centre is a unique centre for applied ethics, the only one its kind globally. Despite the fact that we have 'saint' and 'ethics' in our name, St James Ethics Centre is not a religious organisation and neither is it a sort of moral policeman. Working both in Australia and abroad for over twenty years, we're an independent not-for-profit organisation that provides an open forum for the promotion and exploration of ethical questions. We provide practical support to individuals and across organisations to help them to deal with the complex ethical questions that are part of everyday life."

"Confusion about the concept of brain death is not unusual, even among the transplant professionals, surgeons, neurologists, and bioethicists who grapple with it regularly. Brain death is confusing because it's an artificial distinction constructed, more than thirty years ago, on a conceptual foundation that is unsound. Recently, some physicians have begun to suggest that brain-dead patients aren't really dead at all-that the concept is just the medical profession's way of dodging ethical questions about a practice that saves more than fifteen thousand lives a year."

"The global problem of death in childbirth is a pressing example. Every year, three hundred thousand mothers and more than six million children die around the time of birth, largely in poorer countries. Most of these deaths are due to events that occur during or shortly after delivery. A mother may hemorrhage. She or her baby may suffer an infection. Many babies can't take their first breath without assistance, and newborns, especially those born small, have trouble regulating their body temperature after birth. Simple, lifesaving solutions have been known for decades. They just haven't spread."

"When a team of scientists in Finland asked people to map out where they felt different emotions on their bodies, it found that the results were surprisingly consistent, even across cultures."

"We should be aware that views of the war have changed dramatically over time and that those who experienced it directly often saw it in ways that we would find astounding. Memories and remembrances are more plastic than we like to think, changing over time and under the influence of current preoccupations."

"What does the way you speak say about where you're from? Answer all the questions below to see your personal dialect map."

"So I decided to read the tea leaves of my DNA. I reasoned that it was worth learning painful information if it might help me avert future illness. Like others, I turned to genetic testing, but I wondered if I could trust the nascent field to give me reliable results. In recent years, a handful of studies have found substantial variations in the risks for common diseases predicted by direct-to-consumer companies. I set out to test the tests: Could three of them agree on me? The answers were eye-opening"

"IT IS everywhere. Some 380m people speak it as their first language and perhaps two-thirds as many again as their second. A billion are learning it, about a third of the world's population are in some sense exposed to it and by 2050, it is predicted, half the world will be more or less proficient in it. It is the language of globalisation-of international business, politics and diplomacy. It is the language of computers and the Internet. It is now the global language. How come? Not because English is easy."