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Recent theories in cognitive psychology allow us to understand that emotions are not especially irrational. Rather, they are important in the management of our goals and actions . "We are ambivalent about our emotions. Sometimes they seem to make us think in a distorted way. To say that someone is being emotional is to be insulting. But on the other hand, we regard emotions as important to our humanity. To be without them would be less than human. This ambivalence is depicted in science fiction. Mr Spock of Star Trek is superintelligent and without emotion. But he is a lonely figure - not the person to identify with as one boldly goes across the universe. So the question is, do emotions impede rationality? If we were fully rational, would we need them? Would an intelligent being from another planet have emotions? Would a robot? Are emotions an important part of being human? And if so, how? Perhaps science can help to answer such questions. Most important here has been the work of Charles Darwin. His book published in 1872, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and the Animals, touches on a fundamental dilemma about the nature of emotions, and the way we view them. "

"When you take a sip of Cabernet, what are you tasting? The grape? The tannins? The oak barrel? Or the price? Believe it or not, the most dominant flavor may be the dollars. Thanks to the work of some intrepid and wine-obsessed economists (yes, there is an American Association of Wine Economists), we are starting to gain a new understanding of the relationship between wine, critics and consumers."

Thanks to Felix (TAS2010) for passing this one on!

"There has been much speculation that the lawyers for Jared Loughner, who has been charged in the Tucson shootings, may mount an insanity defense. Since John Hinckley Jr. was acquitted of trying to kill President Reagan, the use of the insanity defense has become very restricted in federal cases. Arizona, along with several other states, no longer allows a finding of not guilty by reason of insanity. In the three decades since the Hinckley case, brain research and brain scans have made many advances in diagnosing and categorizing mental illness. Yet this seems to have little bearing on how society deals with insanity and culpability in the legal arena. What has been learned in the decades since the Hinckley case? Should a better medical understanding of mental illness alter our legal definitions of insanity? Or is the insanity defense rooted in principles or traditions that actually don't have much to do with medicine?"

"There are, of course, many different ways of categorizing historical revolutions. But for the purposes of understanding what is happening in Egypt -- and the challenges it may pose for the United States -- one simple, rough distinction may be especially useful. This is the distinction between revolutions that look more like 1688 and revolutions that look more like 1789. The first date refers to England's "Glorious Revolution," in which the Catholic, would-be absolute monarch James II was overthrown and replaced by the Protestant William and Mary and the English Parliament claimed powerful and enduring new forms of authority. The second is, of course, the date of the French Revolution, which began as an attempt to create a constitutional monarchy but ultimately led to the execution of King Louis XVI, the proclamation of the First French Republic, and the Reign of Terror. "

"For the first time in memory, places like Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen are starting to understand what Thomas Jefferson meant when he wrote that "when the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty." Middle East citizens have long been fearful -- but now with protesters overwhelming the streets, the regimes finally are too. Yet as people power has swept autocrats out of Tunis and Cairo, Middle Eastern regimes aren't the only ones getting nervous. Beijing is also paying rapt attention. "

"IT has been more than three years since the beginning of the Wall Street financial crisis, yet we continue to hear about new evidence of glaring errors and widespread misdoings. Even the smartest minds in finance are left scratching their heads: how did we not catch any of this sooner? When I hear this refrain, I am reminded of Boris Goldovsky. Goldovsky, who died in 2001, was a legend in opera circles, best remembered for his commentary during the Saturday matinee radio broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera. But he was also a piano teacher. And it is as a teacher that he made a lasting - albeit unintentional - contribution to our understanding of why seemingly obvious errors go undetected for so long. One day, a student of his was practicing a piece by Brahms when Goldovsky heard something wrong. He stopped her and told her to fix her mistake. The student looked confused; she said she had played the notes as they were written. Goldovsky looked at the music and, to his surprise, the girl had indeed played the printed notes correctly - but there was an apparent misprint in the music. At first, the student and the teacher thought this misprint was confined to their edition of the sheet music alone. But further checking revealed that all other editions contained the same incorrect note. Why, wondered Goldovsky, had no one - the composer, the publisher, the proofreader, scores of accomplished pianists - noticed the error? How could so many experts have missed something that was so obvious to a novice? This paradox intrigued Goldovsky. So over the years he gave the piece to a number of musicians who were skilled sight readers of music - which is to say they had the ability to play from a printed score for the first time without practicing. He told them there was a misprint somewhere in the score, and asked them to find it. He allowed them to play the piece as many times as they liked and in any way that they liked. But not one musician ever found the err

"When reports emerged 30 years ago that young gay men were suffering from rare forms of pneumonia and cancer, public health investigators scrambled to understand what appeared to be a deadly immune disorder: What were the symptoms? Who was most susceptible? What kinds of infections were markers of the disease? They were seeking the epidemiologist's most essential tool - an accurate case definition, a set of criteria that simultaneously include people with the illness and exclude those without it. With AIDS, investigators soon recognized that injection-drug users, hemophiliacs and other demographic groups were also at risk, and the case definition evolved over time to incorporate lab evidence of immune dysfunction and other refinements based on scientific advances. "If you recognize something is happening, you need a case definition so you can count it," said Andrew Moss, an emeritus professor of epidemiology at the University of California, San Francisco, and an early AIDS investigator. "You need to know whether the numbers are going up or down, or whether treatment and prevention work. And if you have a bad case definition, then it's very difficult to figure out what's going on." Once a disease can be diagnosed reliably through lab tests, creating an accurate case definition becomes easier. But when an ailment has no known cause and its symptoms are subjective - as with chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia and other diseases whose characteristics and even existence have been contested - competing case definitions are almost inevitable. Now a new study of chronic fatigue syndrome has highlighted how competing case definitions can lead to an epidemiologic "Rashomon" - what you see depends on who's doing the looking - and has stoked a fierce debate among researchers and patient advocates on both sides of the Atlantic. "

"A new exhibition about the brain tries to bring visual arts and science together. But it's a false premise. Art does not help us understand how the world works - and to merge the two disciplines trivialises them both"

"You'd think that with all their Googling to find the Spark Notes of the novels they didn't read, today's students would understand how the search engine works. Wrong: They are completely clueless! In a detailed study of 30 college students by anthropologists at Illinois Wesleyan, only seven were able to do a "reasonably well-executed search." According to Inside Higher Ed: They were basically clueless about the logic underlying how the search engine organizes and displays its results. Consequently, the students did not know how to build a search that would return good sources. (For instance, limiting a search to news articles, or querying specific databases such as Google Book Search or Google Scholar.) Duke and Asher said they were surprised by "the extent to which students appeared to lack even some of the most basic information literacy skills that we assumed they would have mastered in high school." Even students who were high achievers in high school suffered from these deficiencies, Asher told Inside Higher Ed in an interview."

"Harvard evolutionary psychologist, Marc D. Hauser, argues that to understand what animals think and what they feel, we must ask about the kinds of selection pressures which shaped their minds and see the creature for what it is, no more, no less. Using the tools of evolutionary biology, linguistics, neuroscience, and cognitive science, he asks questions such as Why can't animals be taught to speak? How do animals find their way home in the dark? Do animals lie or feel guilty? Do they enjoy sex? Why were emotions designed into animal systems? Why are certain emotions universal and others highly specialized? "

"MIT researcher Deb Roy wanted to understand how his infant son learned language -- so he wired up his house with videocameras to catch every moment (with exceptions) of his son's life, then parsed 90,000 hours of home video to watch "gaaaa" slowly turn into "water." Astonishing, data-rich research with deep implications for how we learn."

"Acousticians have been designing concert halls for more than a century, but Dr. Kyriakakis does something different. He shapes the sound of music to conform to the space in which it is played. The goal is what Dr. Kyriakakis calls the "ground truth" - to replicate the original in every respect. "We remove the room," he said, "so the ground truth can be delivered." Dr. Kyriakakis, an electrical engineer at U.S.C. and the founder and chief technical officer of Audyssey Laboratories, a Los Angeles-based audio firm, could not achieve his results without modern sound filters and digital microprocessors. But the basis of his technique is rooted in the science of psychoacoustics, the study of sound perception by the human auditory system. "It's about the human ear and the human brain, and understanding how the human ear perceives sound," Dr. Kyriakakis said. Psychoacoustics has become an invaluable tool in designing hearing aids and cochlear implants, and in the study of hearing generally. "Psychoacoustics is fundamental," said Andrew J. Oxenham, a psychologist and hearing expert at the University of Minnesota. "You need to know how the normally functioning auditory system works - how sound relates to human perception." "

"Apart from the most rabid fundamentalists among us, nearly everyone admits that the Bible might contain errors -- a faulty creation story here, a historical mistake there, a contradiction or two in some other place. But is it possible that the problem is worse than that -- that the Bible actually contains lies? Most people wouldn't put it that way, since the Bible is, after all, sacred Scripture for millions on our planet. But good Christian scholars of the Bible, including the top Protestant and Catholic scholars of America, will tell you that the Bible is full of lies, even if they refuse to use the term. And here is the truth: Many of the books of the New Testament were written by people who lied about their identity, claiming to be a famous apostle -- Peter, Paul or James -- knowing full well they were someone else. In modern parlance, that is a lie, and a book written by someone who lies about his identity is a forgery. Most modern scholars of the Bible shy away from these terms, and for understandable reasons, some having to do with their clientele. Teaching in Christian seminaries, or to largely Christian undergraduate populations, who wants to denigrate the cherished texts of Scripture by calling them forgeries built on lies? And so scholars use a different term for this phenomenon and call such books "pseudepigrapha." You will find this antiseptic term throughout the writings of modern scholars of the Bible. It's the term used in university classes on the New Testament, and in seminary courses, and in Ph.D. seminars. What the people who use the term do not tell you is that it literally means "writing that is inscribed with a lie.""

"The alteration of photos for propaganda purposes has been with us as long as photography itself; it is not an invention of the digital age. But while digitally altered photographs can easily fool the eye, they often leave telltale footprints that allow them to be unmasked as forgeries. There are many famous altered photographs, from a Matthew Brady photograph of Abraham Lincoln's head composited on to John Calhoun's body to the endlessly altered photographs from Soviet Russia. An entire book, "The Commissar Vanishes," by David King, is devoted to Soviet whims about who should be included (or deleted) in photographs. In the series shown above, Stalin is accompanied by three officials, then two, then one, as they successively fall out of favor and are cropped and airbrushed into non-existence. (In the end, in a painting based on the photograph, he stands alone.) We understand Stalin's intentions by removing comrades, but what is the purpose of these Iranian missile photographs? They are clearly altered. The question remains: Why, and to what end?"

Texas is reissuing US History textbooks this year with a lot of controversial additions and deletions.

Texas textbooks influence the entire US History curriculum around the country. What do you think the effect of Texas' changes will be to history as American students understand it?

"Babble is increasingly being understood as an essential precursor to speech, and as a key predictor of both cognitive and social emotional development. And research is teasing apart the phonetic components of babble, along with the interplay of neurologic, cognitive and social factors. "