The new era of psychiatry – less talk and more pills.
These days, psychiatrists are talking less and prescribing more. Many of the nation’s 48,000 psychiatrists no longer provide talk therapy, the form of psychiatry popularized by Freud that has been a mainstay of psychiatry for decades. Instead, they just prescribe medication after a very brief consultation with the patient. Psychiatric hospitals that once offered patients months of talk therapy now discharge them within days with only pills.
To learn more about the fundamental shifts in psychiatric care, read the full article in the New York Times, “Talk Doesn’t Pay, So Psychiatry Turns Instead to Drug Therapy,”
The Brain-Drain to Wall Street
Recent trends indicate that the financial sector is sucking talent and entrepreneurial energy from more socially beneficial sectors of the economy. Harvard graduates, for example, enter financial occupations at a far higher rate now than they did in the 1970s. The trend has accelerated markedly in the past decade, as the computerization of finance has made the profession both more lucrative and more intellectually challenging. The proportion of graduates from MIT, for example, who went to Wall Street rose from 18% in 2003 to 25% in 2006.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2061220,00.html#ixzz1IW6Rz4wC
and here:
and here: http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2008/01/17/the-wall-street-brain-drain/
Thanks to Mr. C for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.
Racist Monkeys
Psychologists have long known that many of our prejudices operate automatically, without us even being aware of them. Most people, even those who care deeply about equality, show some level of prejudice towards other groups when subjected to formal psychological testing. Yale graduate student Neha Mahajan, along with a team of psychologists, traveled to Cayo Santiago, an uninhabited island southeast of Puerto Rico also known as “Monkey Island,” to study if our basic tendency to see the world in terms of “us” and “them” has ancient origins. Their research suggests that monkeys not only distinguish between insiders and outsiders, but also associate insiders with good things and outsiders with bad things. Overall, these results support an evolutionary basis for prejudice.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=evolution-of-prejudice&WT.mc_id=SA_20110420
Big Brother Apple
Since June 2010, Apple devices appear to have been tracking their owners’ locations and storing data about their whereabouts without their knowledge. The hidden tracking file has been posted on a site called iPhone Tracker. Any iPhone user can use this program to see a map of their location over time since June 2010.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/mobile/04/20/iphone.tracking/index.html?hpt=T2
An Environmentally Friendly Funeral
A Swedish company has come up with a different approach to dealing with bodies after people die – freeze drying – that turns out to be one of the greenest ways to go.
The body is cooled to around -18°C and then submerged in liquid nitrogen. As the body becomes colder, it gets brittle enough that when shocked with soundwaves it will crumble into powder. The powder is then put in a vacuum chamber, which instantlyboils away all the water, reducing the mass by about 70%.
Video of the Zombie Ants
Here is a really cool video of the Cordyceps killer fungi that turns ants into zombies, which should have been posted back on March 7.
The Trash Vortex in the Pacific
The ocean currents in the North Pacific form a swirling vortex of water that collects all the trash thrown into the Ocean off the US West Coast. This has resulted in a huge floating pile of garbage in the middle of the ocean, as big as Texas.
Read more here: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/campaigns/oceans/pollution/trash-vortex/
Here is an animation showing the calm area in which the swirling trash has collected: http://oceans.greenpeace.org/en/the-expedition/news/trashing-our-oceans/ocean_pollution_animation
The Real Housewives of Wall Street
Why is the Federal Reserve forking over $220 million in bailout money to the wives of two Morgan Stanley bigwigs?
Read about it here in this article from Rolling Stone:
Thanks to Kedmobee for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting Community.
Is another mass extinction coming?
Earth’s creatures are on the brink of a sixth mass extinction, comparable to the one that wiped out the dinosaurs, concludes a new study that calculates that 3/4 of today’s animal species could vanish within 300 years.
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/03/are-we-in-the-middle-of-a-sixth-.html?ref=hp
Species naturally come and go over long periods of time. But what sets a mass extinction apart is that three-quarters of all species vanish quickly.
Earth has already endured five mass extinctions, including the asteroid that wiped out dinosaurs and other creatures 65 million years ago.
Conservationists have warned for years that we are in the midst of a sixth, human-caused extinction, with species from frogs to birds to tigers threatened by climate change, disease, loss of habitat, and competition for resources with nonnative species.
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