Bias can occur in the planning, data collection, analysis, and publication phases of research. Understanding research bias allows readers to critically and independently review the scientific literature and avoid treatments which are suboptimal or potentially harmful. A thorough understanding of bias and how it affects study results is essential for the practice of evidence-based medicine.

Bias is not a dichotomous variable. Interpretation of bias cannot be limited to a simple inquisition: is bias present or not? Instead, reviewers of the literature must consider the degree to which bias was prevented by proper study design and implementation. As some degree of bias is nearly always present in a published study, readers must also consider how bias might influence a study's conclusions

Chance and confounding can be quantified and/or eliminated through proper study design and data analysis. However, only the most rigorously conducted trials can completely exclude bias as an alternate explanation for an association.

The domination of English and a lack of translation is hurting global science, new research suggests.

Researchers say the domination of English among international scientific communities and the lack of translation makes it more likely non-English research will go ignored.

According to a new study in the journal PLOS Biology, the domination of English creates barriers to knowledge transfer. The barriers are present in all scientific fields, but especially problematic in biodiversity conservation.

In today’s globally connected world, language may still be a barrier to science.

Today, almost every major scientific journal prints in English – even while featuring research from all over the world.

Meanwhile, new research suggests, tens of thousands of reports are being published without English translations.

Small-business owners' optimism improved to its highest level in eight years after the 2016 presidential election.

To communicate effectively, it is not enough to have well organized ideas expressed in complete and coherent sentences and paragraphs. One must also think about the style, tone and clarity of his/her writing, and adapt these elements to the reading audience. Again, analyzing one's audience and purpose is the key to writing effectiveness. In order to choose the most effective language, the writer must consider the objective of the document, the context in which it is being written, and who will be reading it.

Effective language is: (1) concrete and specific, not vague and abstract; (2) concise, not verbose; (3) familiar, not obscure; (4) precise and clear, not inaccurate or ambiguous; (5) constructive, not destructive; and (6) appropriately formal.

Language is very probably the one characteristic that separates us from the chimpanzees, our closest relatives. All other major differences between us likely stem from language.

[Language] allows you to implant a thought from your mind directly into someone else's mind and they can attempt to do the same to you without either of you performing surgery

language is a "social technology" that allows for cooperation between unrelated individuals and groups. According to the archaeological record, it was this cooperation and sharing of ideas that preceded human migration around the planet and the ensuing human population explosion.

use those machines to examine the genetic underpinnings of genius like his own. He wants nothing less than to crack the code for intelligence by studying the genomes of thousands of prodigies, not just from China but around the world.

fully expect they will succeed in identifying a genetic basis for IQ. They also expect that within a decade their research will be used to screen embryos during in vitro fertilization, boosting the IQ of unborn children by up to 20 points. In theory, that’s the difference between a kid who struggles through high school and one who sails into college.

studies make it clear that IQ is strongly correlated with the ability to solve all sorts of abstract problems, whether they involve language, math, or visual patterns. The frightening upshot is that IQ remains by far the most powerful predictor of the life outcomes that people care most about in the modern world. Tell me your IQ and I can make a decently accurate prediction of your occupational attainment, how many kids you’ll have, your chances of being arrested for a crime, even how long you’ll live.

The adolescent population is highly vulnerable to driving under the influence of alcohol and social maladjustments due to an immature limbic system and prefrontal cortex.

Synaptic plasticity and the release of neurotransmitters may also be influenced by environmental neurotoxins and drugs of abuse including cigarettes, caffeine, and alcohol during adolescence.

Brain maturation during adolescence (ages 10–24 years) could be governed by several factors, as illustrated in Figure 1. It may be influenced by heredity and environment, prenatal and postnatal insult, nutritional status, sleep patterns, pharmacotherapy, and surgical interventions during early childhood.

Unburdened by illusion that Donald Trump can or will “turn this thing around,” they have proceeded straightaway to the next important conversation: What comes next for America’s battered Republican Party? Noah Rothman writes: “Reunification and a recapitulation of something resembling a national governing coalition must be the foremost priority.”

reconstitute conservatism as it used to be, refined by the famous “autopsy” of 2013.

The wiser response to the impending Republican electoral defeat is to learn from Trump's insights—separate them from Trump’s volatile personality and noxious attitudes—and use them to develop better, more workable, and more broadly acceptable policies for a 21st-century center-right.

many observers worried that Americans had lost interest in politics. In his famous book Bowling Alone, published in 2000, the social scientist Robert Putnam bemoaned the collapse in American political participation during the second half of the 20th century. Putnam suggested that this trend would continue as the World War II generation gave way to disengaged Gen Xers.

“It’s like that scene in Titanic,” he remarked to me, “where they know the ship is going down, and the conductor decides there’s nothing to do but keep the orchestra playing.”

Roy, a health-care expert who has advised Rubio, Rick Perry, and Mitt Romney, once looked forward to 2016 as a year of Republican opportunity, when the party would choose a leader capable of reorienting it toward the future.

But in the real world, Donald Trump was running on a platform directly opposed to the pro-trade, pro-immigration, pro-small-government ideology of conservatives like Roy. Many of those at the Hoover gathering, Roy included, feared they would not have a party to come back to post-Trump. They are among a class of conservative operatives, thinkers, and staffers who have spent the campaign season adrift, pondering the causes of their party’s disruption and looking nervously to the future.

I, a conservative female, have spent years defending the Republican Party against claims of sexism. When I saw Republican men getting attacked I stood up for them. I came to their defense. I fought on their behalf. I fought on behalf of a movement I believed in.

Now some Trojan horse nationalist sexual predator invades the @GOP, eating it alive, and you cowards sit this one out? He treats women like dogs, and you go against everything I – and other female conservatives – said you were & back down like cowards.

This election, many Republicans won’t withhold their support from an openly cruel, sexist bigot. And there is a lesson in their failure. It suggests the best way forward. If the groups that Trump targets, especially the sizable ones, like women and Latinos, turn out in large enough numbers to vote against him, handing a crushing loss to the corrupting billionaire; if other folks who usually vote Republican join in that protest, to signal that this behavior is a dealbreaker; then the GOP will likely never nominate a man like this for high office ever again.

We live in a loud and distracting world, where silence is increasingly difficult to come by — and that may be negatively affecting our health.

World Health Organization report called noise pollution a “modern plague,”

overwhelming evidence that exposure to environmental noise has adverse effects on the health of the population.”

Almost one in seven children worldwide live in areas with high levels of outdoor air pollution, mostly in South Asia, and their growing bodies are most vulnerable to damage

air pollution was a “major contributing factor in the deaths of around 600,000 children under five every year”, causing illnesses such as pneumonia.

“Pollutants don’t only harm children’s developing lungs - they can actually cross the blood-brain barrier and permanently damage their developing brains

The use of sound is one of the most common methods of communication both in the animal kingdom and between humans.

human speech is a very complex process and therefore needs intensive postnatal learning to be used effectively. Furthermore, to be effective the learning phase should happen very early in life and it assumes a normally functioning hearing and brain systems.

Nowadays, scientists and doctors are discovering the important brain zones involved in the processing of language information. Those zones are reassembled in a number of a language networks including the Broca, the Wernicke, the middle temporal, the inferior parietal and the angular gyrus. The variety of such brain zones clearly shows that the language processing is a very complex task. On the functional level, decoding a language begins in the ear where the incoming sounds are summed in the auditory nerve as an electrical signal and delivered to the auditory cortex where neurons extract auditory objects from that signal.

occasionally lured by the promises of effortless slimming

Dr.-Oz-endorsed Garcinia Cambogia pills are languishing in his kitchen cupboard - because they don’t seem to work. Bruni applauds the recent interest in fighting aggressively marketed junk-that-makes-us-fat, and wants to remind us that we should also pay attention to aggressively marketed pills

most of the supplements marketed as fat burners have little or no science to support their claims

The imaging analysis found four stages in all: encoding (downloading), planning (strategizing), solving (performing the math), and responding (typing out an answer).

The analysis found four separate stages that, depending on the problem, varied in length by a second or more. For instance, planning took up more time than the other stages when a clever workaround was required. The same stages are likely applicable to solving many creative problems, not just in math. But knowing how they play out in the brain should help in designing curriculums, especially in mathematics, the paper suggests.

A 2014 experiment with mice first raised that worrying idea, finding that the more the animals exercised, the worse their long-term memories became.

Study after study in animals has shown that exercise, especially aerobic activities like running, can double or triple the number of new cells in the hippocampus, compared with the number in animals that do not exercise, and that these new cells translate into a significantly heightened ability to learn new skills. Animals that run, in essence, become brighter than those that do not. But most of these studies of exercise and neurogenesis have examined the effects on learning and short-term memory.

But for now, he believes that the available evidence suggests that, unless you are a mouse, working out is going to be “quite beneficial” for your brain.

Dwight D. Eisenhower’s inauguration took place in 1953. Our world had spun around the sun more than 30 times since, though Henry’s world had stayed still, frozen in orbit. This is because 1953 was the year he received an experimental operation, one that destroyed most of several deep-­seated structures in his brain, including his hippocampus, his amygdala and his entorhinal cortex. The operation, performed on both sides of his brain and intended to treat Henry’s epilepsy, rendered him profoundly amnesiac, unable to hold on to the present moment for more than 30 seconds or so.

The history of brain science is rich in these sorts of one-­sided relationships. A great deal of what we know about how our brains work has come about through intensively scrutinizing individuals whose brains don’t work.