On January 22, 2007, the American Library Association awarded The Newbery Medal (the most prestigious book award for children’s literature) to Susan Patron for her book “The Higher Power of Lucky.” The book is about a ten year old girl named Lucky living in a tiny town in the California desert who fears being abandoned...Read More
The Human Papillomavirus (HPV) is the name of a group of viruses that includes more than 100 different strains or types. It is sexually transmitted and can lead in some cases to cervical cancer. Cervical cancer can lead to loss of fertility, ongoing health problems, and even death (4000 women a year die from cervical...Read More
Because of soaring costs in home health care for the elderly, some relatives of individuals in late adulthood are tapping a “hidden” market: the so-called “gray market” in elderly home health care. This consists of a network of generally untrained, unscreened, unsupervised, women who are willing to work for less than the fees charged by...Read More
Eighty years ago, Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Rank theorized that when we are born, we experience a “birth trauma” that affects us for the rest of our lives. More recently, psychiatrist Stanislav Grof has created a model for understanding in greater depth the kinds of effects that birth can have upon our later lives. He writes that...Read More
Thomas Edison was one of the greatest inventors who ever lived. He patented the incandescent light bulb, the carbon microphone, the phonograph, the motion picture projector, and a thousand other inventions. But few people know that Edison also was working on a machine that would be able to communicate with the dead. In an article...Read More
“Babies haven’t any hair. Old men’s heads are just as bare Between the cradle and the grave Lies a haircut and a shave.” ——- Samuel Hoffenstein “The first half of life consists of the capacity to enjoy without the chance; the last half consists of the chance without the capacity.” ——- Mark Twain “It is...Read More
When Albert Einstein was four, his father gave him a simple magnetic compass for his birthday. Later on, in adulthood, Einstein wrote that this simple toy served to unlock his feelings of curiosity and wonder about the world He said that from that time on he was filled with a desire to ferret out the...Read More
A report in the journal Neuropsychology suggests that hypertension (high blood pressure) contributes to age-related declines in the brain and cognition. They looked at two groups of adults: one group remained healthy for 5 years; the other group either had hypertension at the start of the study, or developed it sometime during the 5 year...Read More
In ancient times (and still today in many parts of the world) people consulted fortune tellers or astrologers to predict their future. In the modern scientific era, however, people have stopped consulting the stars in the heavens, and instead are beginning to consult the genes in their bodies as a way of predicting their future...Read More
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