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