My Favorite Bit this week was a guide to understanding the difference between millions, billions, and trillions. The human mind is not well suited to understanding and comparing large numbers which can make it difficult to understand and compare government expenditures, large businesses, and global corruption. One trick to help understand the relative size of these large numbers is to eliminate a few zeros. This makes it easier to see that a $50 million fine for a $20 billion crime is the equivalent of paying 50 cents as punishment for stealing $200.
Our science articles this week show how neuroscientists at Yale can predict cognitive ability through brain scans, the medical benefits of horseshoe crab blood, and the reasons why humans are primed to ‘feel’ other people staring at us.
Schools are often the frontline for many kinds of social issues like student homelessness, which affects over 4 million kids in the United States every year and reexamining the gender binary by supporting students who don’t identify as girls or boys.
A pair of articles about persons with disabilities takes a look at how the Israeli army has found a role for people with autism (who often possess extraordinary visual processing skills) and at Frank Stephens’ Congressional testimony about why people with Down syndrome have lives worth living.
A hodgepodge of articles looks at deported U.S. military veterans, the reappearance of slave auctions in Libya, how our psychological immune system protects us from the fear of impending death, the persistence of self-selected segregation and how to change its underlying causes, and a database of water quality for every U.S. zip code.
Finishing off your week in review is a somber photo collection of the bedrooms of fallen soldiers.
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Have a great rest of your week!