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a group of genetically identical mice lived in the same complex enclosure for 3 months, individuals that explored the environment more broadly grew more new neurons than less adventurous mice, according to a study

s a clear and quantitative demonstration that individual differences in behavior can be reflected in individual differences in brain plasticity

often tried to tackle the question of how individual differences in behavior and personality develop in terms of the interactions between genes and environment. “But there is next to nothing [known] about the neurobiological mechanisms underlying individuality

Although previous work had indirectly suggested that changing mitochondrial function affected lifespan, “this is the first clear demonstration [that it] extends mouse lifespan,” Miller added.

well known that mitochondria are linked to health. Some evidence suggests that inhibiting mitochondrial function can be harmful—as in the case of diabetes or obesity—but earlier data from nematodes and fruit flies also suggest a link to lifespan increase. The latest findings are a step toward untangling one of the current debates in the field—whether inhibiting mitochondrial function is detrimental or beneficial,

The average lifespan of BXD mice range from 1 year to almost 2.5 years. The researchers were able to link 3 genes to longevity variability, including mitochondrial ribosomal protein S5 (Mrps5), which encodes a protein integral to mitochondrial protein synthesis. They found that BXD strains with 50 percent less Mrps5 expression lived about 250 days longer than BXD mice with more robust Mrps5 expression.

It is most unfortunate that Ms. Dolezal did not begin her television interviews on Tuesday by acknowledging that she should not have claimed to be black. She might have been forgiven if she had stated clearly that, while she may identify herself as black, by American society’s standards, her racial designation is white.

Ms. Dolezal’s view of herself — however confused, or incongruent with society’s — reveals an essential truth about race: It is a fiction, a social construct based in culture and not biology. It must be “made” from what people believe and do. Race is performative. It is the memories that bind us, the stories passed down to us, the experiences that we share, the social forces that surround us.

Identities are never entirely our own, but does that mean that we should lose all control in determining who we are? Advertisement Continue reading the main story

the deep, dark secret of the expat experience is that coming home – repatriation – can be even harder than leaving. “When you go abroad, you expect everything to be new and different,” says Tina Quick, author of “The Global Nomad’s Guide to University Transition.”  And when you return home, you expect life to be basically the same. “But you have changed, and things back home have changed since you’ve been gone,” she says.

Many expats coming home go through a period of grief, says Ms. Quick, until they “give in to the homesickness” for their host country.

a Facebook group, also called “I Am a Triangle,” so that people going through similar experiences could connect. A “triangle,” she says in her original post, is a person who might be from a “circle country” but move to a “square society,” that is totally different. Eventually that person evolves into a triangle, with elements of both cultures. Moving home doesn’t change that, she says.

Happiness is more like knowledge than like belief. There are lots of things we believe but don’t know. Knowledge is not just up to you, it requires the cooperation of the world beyond you — you might be mistaken. Still, even if you’re mistaken, you believe what you believe. Pleasure is like belief that way. But happiness isn’t just up to you. It also requires the cooperation of the world beyond you. Happiness, like knowledge, and unlike belief and pleasure, is not a state of mind.

If happiness is not a state of mind, if happiness is a kind of tango between your feelings on one hand and events and things in the world around you on the other, then there’s the possibility of error about whether you’re happy. If you believe you’re experiencing pleasure or, perhaps especially, pain, then, presumably, you are. But the view of happiness here allows that “you may think you’re happy, but you’re not.”

One especially apt way of thinking about happiness — a way that’s found already in the thought of Aristotle — is in terms of “flourishing.” Take someone really flourishing in their new career, or really flourishing now that they’re off in college. The sense of the expression is not just that they feel good, but that they’re, for example, accomplishing some things and taking appropriate pleasure in those accomplishments. If they were simply sitting at home playing video games all day, even if this seemed to give them a great deal of pleasure, and even if they were not frustrated, we wouldn’t say they were flourishing. Such a life could not in the long term constitute a happy life. To live a happy life is to flourish.

Philosophy, among other things, is that living activity of critical reflection in a specific context, by which human beings strive to analyze the world in which they find themselves, and to question what passes for common sense or public opinion — what Socrates called doxa — in the particular society in which they live.

Philosophy, as the great American philosopher Stanley Cavell puts it, is the education of grownups.

As it functions in society, philosophy can also provide a method for debunking the many myths and ideologies that we live by and propose alternative conceptual or normative frameworks for thinking about concepts — justice, truth, freedom, the mind, science, religion — all of which have been debated over the past months in The Stone. Hegel says that philosophy can allow us to comprehend our time in thought. But it can also — perhaps more importantly — allow us to resist our time, to ask untimely questions, difficult, intractable and unfashionable questions. Nietzsche writes in a very late text, where he is still trying to wrestle himself free from the spell of his fascination with the composer Richard Wagner: What does a philosopher demand of himself first and last? To overcome his time in himself, to become “timeless.” With what must he therefore engage in the hardest combat? With whatever marks him as a child of his time. Well, then I am, no less than Wagner, a child of this time; that is, a decadent. But I comprehended this, I resisted it. The philosopher in me resisted.

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at the force behind all that exists actually intervened in the consciousness of humankind in the form of a man so saturated in godliness that merely being near him healed people of the weight of the world's sins.

THROUGHOUT the debt-ceiling debacle, poll after poll has shown that Americans want politicians in Washington to compromise.

why is compromise so hard to achieve?

“Americans are self-segregating,” said Bill Bishop, author of “The Big Sort,” a 2008 book that examined, in the words of its subtitle, “why the clustering of like-minded America is tearing us apart.”

In a mere couple of centuries, Greek speakers went from anomie and illiteracy, lacking even an alphabet, to Aeschylus and Aristotle. They invented not only the discipline of philosophy, but also science, mathematics, the study of history (as opposed to mere chronicles) and that special form of government they called democracy — literally rule of the people (though it goes without saying that “the people” didn’t include women and slaves). They also produced timeless art, architecture, poetry and drama.

The more outstanding you were, the more mental replication of you there would be, and the more replication, the more you mattered.

Kleos lay very near the core of the Greek value system. Their value system was at least partly motivated, as perhaps all value systems are partly motivated, by the human need to feel as if our lives matter

The definition of philosophy is pretty much set – love of wisdom, the rational investigation of questions about existence and knowledge and ethics, the application of reason towards a more enlightened way of life. How can we understand performance in equally clear terms? Also, what are the responsibilities of the performer?

How can my performances enrich my life and the lives of my audiences? What is my own personal philosophy of performance?

Performance can fundamentally be said to be a transformation of ideas and dreams and all those other little understood human impulses into outward action. In this very basic sense performance happens with every word and gesture. It also presupposes a process of evaluation by a spectator.

WHAT is the point of economics? It often seems that the objective is to make the world richer.

Yet this is the season when, for devout Christians at least, the ineffable supplants the material (and the other way around for most folk). That makes it a good time to ponder whether maximising income should really be the be-all and end-all of economic policy.

people in the ten richest countries in the world have a life expectancy 25 years higher than people in the ten poorest. People with more cash can afford better education, more varied leisure activities and healthier food, all of which improve the quality of life.

the parents at the heart of America’s anti-vaccine movement are being blamed for incubating an otherwise preventable public-health crisis.

officials scrambled to try to contain a wider spread of the highly contagious disease — which America declared vanquished 15 years ago, before a statistically significant number of parents started refusing to vaccinate their children.

The anti-vaccine movement can largely be traced to a 1998 report in a medical journal that suggested a link between vaccines and autism but was later proved fraudulent and retracted. Today, the waves of parents who shun vaccines include some who still believe in the link and some, like the Amish, who have religious objections to vaccines. Then there is a particular subculture of largely wealthy and well-educated families, many living in palmy enclaves around Los Angeles and San Francisco, who are trying to carve out “all-natural” lives for their children.

this idea critically relates to the nature of being human in modern times. If you live in a modern, Westernized part of the world (as is almost necessarily true if you’re reading this on the web – or reading this at all right now …), then you are, in many ways (metaphorically), living in a cage in a zoo.

From the evolutionary perspective, understanding the topic of evolutionary mismatch is essential in allowing us to understand so much of what it means to be human.

10. You are surrounded in your day-to-day life by a higher proportion of strangers than would have ever been true of our pre-agrarian hominid ancestors.

Describing the atomic bomb (which had only two months before been used to flatten Hiroshima and Nagasaki) as an “inherently tyrannical weapon,” he predicts that it will concentrate power in the hands of the “two or three monstrous super-states” that have the advanced industrial and research bases necessary to produce it. Suppose, he asks, “that the surviving great nations make a tacit agreement never to use the atomic bomb against one another? Suppose they only use it, or the threat of it, against people who are unable to retaliate?”

The likely result, he concludes, will be “an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity.” Inventing the term, he predicts “a permanent state of ‘cold war,"’ a “peace that is no peace,” in which “the outlook for subject peoples and oppressed classes is still more hopeless.”

the destruction of privacy widens the existing power imbalance between the ruling factions and everyone else, leaving “the outlook for subject peoples and oppressed classes,” as Orwell wrote, “still more hopeless.

By watching how the human body and mind adapts in Antarctica, we can plan and predict what would happen in space,"

has felt the effects of living there on both his mind and his body.

"You're cut off from the rest of the world and in winter, completely cut off as no flights go in or out," he adds.

If ignorance is bliss, does a high IQ equal misery? Popular opinion would have it so. We tend to think of geniuses as being plagued by existential angst, frustration, and loneliness. Think of Virginia Woolf, Alan Turing, or Lisa Simpson – lone stars, isolated even as they burn their brightest. As Ernest Hemingway wrote: “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”

Combing California’s schools for the creme de la creme, he selected 1,500 pupils with an IQ of 140 or more – 80 of whom had IQs above 170. Together, they became known as the “Termites”, and the highs and lows of their lives are still being studied to this day.

Termites’ average salary was twice that of the average white-collar job. But not all the group met Terman’s expectations – there were many who pursued more “humble” professions such as police officers, seafarers, and typists. For this reason, Terman concluded that “intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated”. Nor did their smarts endow personal happiness. Over the course of their lives, levels of divorce, alcoholism and suicide were about the same as the national average.

But sadly, the anxieties of our own era could once again give rise to scapegoats and imagined enemies, while contemporary environmental stresses could encourage new variations on Hitler’s ideas, especially in countries anxious about feeding their growing populations or maintaining a rising standard of living.

The quest for German domination was premised on the denial of science. Hitler’s alternative to science was the idea of Lebensraum.

Climate change has also brought uncertainties about food supply back to the center of great power politics.

That led him to ask the right questions. First: how does free enterprise capitalism work in practice? Second: what is the relationship between economic power and government policy? Third: what is the interrelationship between such economic power and the life of the mind - otherwise known as education and the more general public awareness and perception of reality? Fourth: what questions do and do not get asked within a capitalist society? Fifth: what will be the nature of the next new system?

To honor his commitment to the dialectical process, I will offer relatively short commentaries on those questions so that we will have time to engage each other in dialogue. One. Marx built upon the foundation laid by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo; but he transcended their explanation of the capitalist process

Two. Marx once called the government of capitalist political economies little more than the executive committee of the high bourgeoisie.

“The results suggest that taking time to learn the skills to self-generate positive emotions can help us become healthier, more social, more resilient versions of ourselves,”

as little as two weeks’ training in compassion and kindness meditation generated changes in brain circuitry linked to an increase in positive social behaviors like generosity.

Dr. Fredrickson’s team found that six weeks of training in a form of meditation focused on compassion and kindness resulted in an increase in positive emotions and social connectedness and improved function of one of the main nerves that helps to control heart rate. The result is a more variable heart rate that, she said in an interview, is associated with objective health benefits like better control of blood glucose, less inflammation and faster recovery from a heart attack.

SINCE the 1990s, we’ve seen two broad social changes that few observers would have expected to happen together.

First, youth culture has become less violent, less promiscuous and more responsible. American childhood is safer than ever before. Teenagers drink and smoke less than previous generations. The millennial generation has fewer sexual partners than its parents, and the teen birthrate has traced a two-decade decline. Violent crime — a young person’s temptation — fell for 25 years before the recent post-Ferguson homicide spike. Young people are half as likely to have been in a fight than a generation ago. Teen suicides, binge drinking, hard drug use — all are down.

But over the same period, adulthood has become less responsible, less obviously adult. For the first time in over a century, more 20-somethings live with their parents than in any other arrangement. The marriage rate is way down, and despite a high out-of-wedlock birthrate American fertility just hit an all-time low. More and more prime-age workers are dropping out of the work force — men especially, and younger men more so than older men, though female work force participation has dipped as well.