By Walter Brasch (Moronia) When other states, including those settled by Puritans, got rid of their “blue laws,” Pennsylvania still bans the sale of cars on Sundays. By archaic practices, it still allows municipal governments and school districts to raise taxes and create more buildings without giving the people the right of a vote, common in [...]

By Sybille Hildebrandt ( ScienceNordic) Antioxidants, dietary supplements, vitamin pills – many people take them every day in the hope that they are good for their health. But a new Danish study of all relevant trials carried out around the world shows that taking antioxidants in the form of vitamin A, E and beta-carotene is a risky [...]

By Walter Brash (Moronia) The history of energy exploration, mining, and delivery is best understood in a range from benevolent exploitation to worker and public oppression. A company comes into an area, leases land in rural and agricultural areas for mineral rights, increases employment, usually in a depressed economy, strips the land of its resources, [...]

By James Surowiecki A recent Harvard Business Review study by Zeynep Ton, an M.I.T. professor, looked at four low-price retailers: Costco, Trader Joe’s, the convenience-store chain QuikTrip, and a Spanish supermarket chain called Mercadona. These companies have much higher labor costs than their competitors. They pay their employees more; they have more full-time workers and more salespeople [...]

By Amy Teibel (AP) Despite saber-rattling from Jerusalem, Israeli officials now agree with the U.S. assessment that Tehran has not yet decided on the actual construction of a nuclear bomb, according to senior Israeli government and defense figures. Several senior Israeli officials who spoke in recent days to The Associated Press said Israel has come around [...]

By David Hill (Singularity Hub) Academic research is behind bars and an online boycott by 8,209 researchers and counting is seeking to set it free…well, more free than it has been. The boycott targets Elsevier, the publisher of popular journals like Cell and The Lancet, for its aggressive business practices, but opposition was electrified by Elsevier’s backing of a Congressional [...]

By Daisy Grewal (Scientific American) A 2009 study demonstrated that after a short interaction with an attractive woman, men experienced a decline in mental performance. A more recent study suggests that this cognitive impairment takes hold even when men simply anticipate interacting with a woman who they know very little about. In one experiment, just [...]

By Frederick E. Allen (Forbes) Four university professors found that power breeds overconfidence, and overconfidence leads to bad decisions. People who had been primed to think of themselves as more powerful had more confidence in their answers — and yet their answers were actually less accurate. The fifth and final experiment the four conducted found [...]

By Robin Wauters (TheNextWeb) This morning, word got out in Belgian media that SABAM (the Belgian collecting society for music royalties) is spending time and resources to contact local libraries across the nation, warning them that they will start charging fees because the libraries engage volunteers to read books to kids. The De Morgen reporter [...]

By Ross McGuinness (Metro UK) Instead of just worrying about what might happen to their material possessions after they die, more and more people are taking steps to protect the belongings they store online. The emergence of cloud computing — storing your information on a network of remote servers on the internet as opposed to [...]