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 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 [...]

(Medical Express) Findings from a first-of-its-kind study by Indiana University researchers confirm anecdotal evidence that exercise — absent sex or fantasies — can lead to female orgasm. Sex researcher Debby Herbenick. Credit: Indiana University While the findings are new, reports of this phenomenon, sometimes called “coregasm” because of its association with exercises for core abdominal [...]

By Yudhijit Bhattacharjee (NY Times) Speaking two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, [...]

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 Sara Robinson (AlterNet) How did we get to the 40-hour week in the first place? How did we lose it? And are there compelling bottom-line business reasons that we should bring it back? The most essential thing to know about the 40-hour work-week is that, while it was the unions that pushed it, business [...]

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 [...]

By David Edwards (RawStory) Republican Georgia state Rep. Terry England says that his experience with cows, pigs and chickens has proven to him that women should be forced to have their babies after 20 weeks of pregnancy. In a debate over Georgia House Bill 954, which would ban abortions after 20 weeks even if the baby [...]