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The good news is that much of what we miss about our routines and customs, and what makes them beneficial to us as a species, has more to do with their comforting regularity than the actual behaviors

The key to coping during this, or any, time of upheaval is to quickly establish new routines so that, even if the world is uncertain, there are still things you can count on.

Human beings are prediction machines.

Social scientists have long known that we perceive risks that are acute, such as an impending tsunami, differently than chronic, ever-present threats like car accidents

Part of what’s happening is that covid-19 — which we initially saw as a terrifying acute threat — is morphing into more of a chronic one in our minds. That shift likely dulls our perception of the danger,

Now, when they think about covid-19, “most people have a reduced emotional reaction. They see it as less salient.”

The U.S. made clear this week that containing China’s growing clout in wireless technology is now a national-security priority. Telecommunications-industry leaders say such fears are justified—but question whether the government’s extraordinary intervention in a corporate takeover battle that doesn’t even involve a Chinese company will make a difference.

Those worries are rooted in how modern communication works. Cellular-tower radios, internet routers and related electronics use increasingly complex hardware and software, with millions of lines of code

Hackers can potentially control the equipment through intentional or inadvertent security flaws, such as the recently disclosed “Meltdown” and “Spectre” flaws that could have affected most of the world’s computer chips.

fear drives much of human behavior. And it’s not just fear of physical harm that makes us want to hide under the covers. The twin fears of intimacy and rejection, for example, shape many of our social interactions.

Scientists say fear and its companion — the fight, flight or freeze response — can save us when faced with imminent physical harm.

It’s why you jump when you sense rustling in the bushes before realizing it’s just your neighbor’s cat. That reflex can save your life in certain circumstances such as leaping out of the way of an oncoming car. Trouble starts when you can’t tamp down your amygdala’s response, which makes you obsess and perhaps do counterproductive things when faced with concerning but not life-threatening events like the Equifax hack or a vulnerable social situation like asking someone out on a date.

After a string of deaths, some heart-stopping plunges in the stock market and an emergency rate cut by the Federal Reserve, there is reason to be concerned about the ultimate economic impact of the coronavirus in the United States.

Advanced economies like the United States are hardly immune to these effects. To the contrary, a broad outbreak of the disease in them could be even worse for their economies than in China. That is because face-to-face service industries — the kind of businesses that go into a tailspin when fearful people withdraw from one another — tend to dominate economies in high-income countries more than they do in China.

If people stay home from school, stop traveling and don’t go to sporting events, the gym or the dentist, the economic consequence would be worse

"Today, I have strongly recommended to every governor to deploy the National Guard in sufficient numbers that we dominate the streets," he said.

"One law and order, and that is what it is, one law. We have one, beautiful law," he said.

D.C. had no problems last night," Trump tweeted Tuesday morning. "Many arrests. Great job done by all. Overwhelming force. Domination. Likewise, Minneapolis was great (thank you President Trump!)."

Texts arrived with the tones of a French horn and were similarly dispatched. Soon, I was reaching for the device every time it made a sound, like Pavlov’s dog salivating when it heard a bell. This started to interfere with work and conversations. The machine had seemed like a miraculous servant, but gradually I became its slave.

Habits, good and bad, have long fascinated philosophers and policymakers. Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, surveyed existing notions of virtue and offered this summary: “Some thinkers hold that it is by nature that people become good, others that it is by habit, and others that it is by instruction.” He concluded that habits were responsible. Cicero called habit “second nature,” a phrase that we still use.

Our minds, Wood explains, have “multiple separate but interconnected mechanisms that guide behavior.” But we are aware only of our decision-making ability—a phenomenon known as the “introspection illusion”—and that may be why we overestimate its power.

In a study published in the journal Annals of Clinical Microbiology, researchers at Ondokuz Mayis University in Samsun, Turkey screened the mobile phones of 200 health care workers in hospitals for germs that are known to be dangerous to human health.

The solution to this problem may be decidedly low tech -- disinfectant spray and a paper towel.

Specifically, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University studied the brain waves of drivers using cell phones -- and they found that even just listening to a conversation reduced the amount of brain activity devoted to driving by 37 percent

Frequent memory lapses are likely to be noticeable because they tend to interfere with daily living.

What’s being forgotten?

may cause individuals to get lost in a familiar place or put something in an inappropriate place because they can’t remember where it goes (think car keys in the refrigerator).

Images taken over the first three weeks of March show less nitrogen dioxide over parts of the United States than the same time last year. Nitrogen dioxide in the air comes primarily from the burning of fuel and forms from the emissions of cars, trucks, buses, power plants and off-road equipment, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency.

Satellite images released by NASA and the European Space Agency also show a dramatic reduction in nitrogen dioxide emissions in China as the nation implemented drastic coronavirus restrictions.

Nine days before George Floyd died an agonizing death under the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer while others watched, law enforcement officials broke up what has been described as a massive block party in my Florida hometown of DeLand and the surrounding unincorporated Volusia County.

this local example has lessons for all of us looking for ways to facilitate effective community policing of African American communities during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The mostly African American neighborhood known as Spring Hill is one of five historically underserved communities in the DeLand area where freed slaves settled to live separately after the Civil War. My elementary school — once heralded as a sign of this area's progress toward racial reconciliation when in the 1970s white students from the suburbs were bused there to implement the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education desegregation order — is still a neighborhood school for mostly black and brown students.

If you close your fingers in a car door or slam your funny bone into a wall, you might find your first reaction is to suck on your fingers or rub your elbow. Not only is this an instinctive self-soothing behavior, it's a pretty effective technique for temporarily calming pain signals to the brain.

The attending physician at the intensive care unit had called that morning and asked whether they should include a Do Not Resuscitate order in my dad's chart. They had asked before. I had been indecisive. A successful resuscitation would extend his life. But it might also lead to brain damage.

"If it continues in this direction," he told me, "we're talking about a single-digit chance of survival."

I suspected that my father had a will and a health care directive inside the house. I put on my mask but couldn't find a clean pair of latex gloves in my duffel bag. It was cold in the backyard. I had a pair of leather gloves. I put those on and entered my childhood home for the first time in weeks. My mother barely registered my presence. She was crying on the couch.

Adults in the United States who binge drink are consuming even more alcohol per binging episode, according to a new study published Thursday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Researchers analyzed data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System over a six-year period and discovered that the annual number of binge drinks among adults who reported excessive drinking jumped on average from 472 in 2011 to 529 in 2017. That's a 12% increase.It's not just college kids. A new study says older adults binge drink, tooThe CDC defines binge drinking as five drinks or more for men or four or more for women on a single occasion. Binge drinking has serious health risks, according to the CDC, including car accidents, domestic violence, STDs, unintentional pregnancy, stroke, heart and liver disease.

In 2017, the number of binge drinks pear year among adult binge drinkers ranged from 320 per year in Massachusetts to 1,219 in Wyoming. The number of drinks among those who reported binge drinking increased in nine states -- Idaho, Indiana, Maine, Montana, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Ohio and Virginia -- while the number of drinks decreased significantly in Massachusetts and West Virginia.

You’ve always considered yourself a sound decision-maker. From that heavily researched car that you drove to work this morning to the carefully prepared meal you’ll cook up for dinner this evening, you put a lot of thought into every choice that you make—maybe too much thought. 

Had the doctoring been done by someone from the insurer, as Ariely implied? There didn’t seem to be a way to dispute that contention, and the company itself wasn’t saying much. Then, last week, NPR’s Planet Money delivered a scoop: The company, called The Hartford, informed the show that it had finally tracked down the raw numbers that were provided to Ariely—and that the data had been “manipulated inappropriately” in the published study.

The analysis of insurance data from The Hartford appeared as “Experiment 3” in the paper. On the preceding page, an analysis of a different dataset—the one linked to Gino—was written up as “Experiment 1.” The scientists who say they discovered issues with both experiments—Leif Nelson, Uri Simonsohn, and Joe Simmons—dubbed the apparent double fraud a “clusterfake.” When I spoke with the scientific-misconduct investigator and Atlantic contributor James Heathers, he had his own way of describing it: “This is some kind of mad, fraudulent unicorn.”

When they set about reviewing Ariely’s work on the 2012 paper, a few quirks in the car-insurance data tipped them off that something might be amiss. Some entries were in one font, some in another. Some were rounded to the nearest 500 or 1,000; some were not. But the detail that really caught their attention was the distribution of recorded values. With such a dataset, you’d expect to see the numbers fall in a bell curve—most entries bunched up near the mean, and the rest dispersed along the tapering extremes. But the data that Ariely said he’d gotten from the insurance company did not form a bell curve; the distribution was completely flat. Clients were just as likely to have claimed that they’d driven 1,000 miles as 10,000 or 50,000 miles. It’s “hard to know what the distribution of miles driven should look like in those data,” the scientists wrote. “It is not hard, however, to know what it should not look like.”