Being female is a risk factor for Alzheimer’s. Why?

-- Read more on ScientificAmerican.com

Melissa Hunfalvay feels Claudio Reyna's pain. Not the pain caused by the sprain in Reyna's knee -- an injury the captain of the defeated U.S. World Cup soccer team sustained last week while conceding a goal in an all-important match against Ghana.

Two centuries ago, Napoleon Bonaparte sent his armies into Spain to overthrow a monarch who had once been a French ally. Napoleon, who believed he was touched by the hand of destiny, predicted his troops would be welcomed as liberators by ordinary Spaniards. He was wrong. The resulting Peninsular War from 1808 to 1814 seriously undermined French prestige, handed Napoleon a stinging defeat and produced a raft of unanticipated consequences that included the outbreak of deadly civil wars....

The conviction of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby last week gave Americans a chance to pick at the scab of what has become a favored obsession -- the debate over the motives of the Bush administration in the run-up to the war in Iraq.

The NCAA men's college basketball championship game was on the line. People in office pools around the country were holding their breath. Louisville was down by four points with a few minutes left on the clock. A UCLA player stole a pass and raced down the court where, after being bumped by a...

Psychologists once conducted a simple experiment with far-reaching implications: They asked people to describe an instance in their lives when they had hurt someone and another instance when they had been hurt by someone else. The incidents that people described were similar whether they saw...

In the face of mounting public and political opposition to the war in Iraq, recent reports from the White House suggest that President Bush remains serenely confident.

Why would David Vitter, a U.S. senator with four young children, have gotten involved with a seedy escort service? Why would Michael Vick, a gifted NFL quarterback, get mixed up with the sordid world of dog fighting? Why would Bill Clinton, a Rhodes scholar, six-time governor and president of the...

Nearly four decades ago, psychologist Stanley Milgram had a volunteer stand stock still on a busy New York sidewalk and look up at the sky. About one in every 25 passersby stopped to look up, too. When five volunteers were recruited to sky-gaze, nearly one in five passersby stopped to look up.

On the eve of crucial presidential primaries in Indiana and North Carolina, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) has found himself dogged by questions about his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. As the Democratic front-runner's popularity has suffered after public statements by Wright about ra...

People hate Mondays. And they love Fridays. The Carpenters crooned about being blue in "Rainy Days and Mondays." The restaurant chain T.G.I. Friday's might restrict its clientele to workaholics if it were to rename itself T.G.I. Monday's.

The housing market is in free fall: Quick -- let's protect homeowners against foreclosure.

Subprime mortgages have been linked to a meltdown in housing and questionable Wall Street practices, and they may have been the original domino that set off America's current economic crisis.

A few years ago, psychologists Mahzarin Banaji and Thierry Devos showed the names of a number of celebrities to a group of volunteers and asked them to classify the well-known personalities as American or non-American. The list included television personality Connie Chung and tennis star Michael ...

The Center for Responsive Politics recently estimated that it cost $5.8 billion to finance the 2008 general elections. To most people that is a staggeringly large sum and evidence of the profoundly corrupting role that money plays in politics, but to some very smart political watchers, the better...

Let's say the FBI hears a senior elected official on a tapped telephone line demanding kickbacks in exchange for favors and shaking down donors for campaign contributions in exchange for plum contracts.

There is so much that is peculiar, irregular, silly, or downright twisted in mathematical verbiage that, certainly, we could all benefit from some soul-searching on the language of our culture. Some of mathematics usage is confusing (e. g. overuse of … Continue reading →

Hi all, 2020 has been a complicated year so far, and things are only going to get more complicated as the COVID-19 pandemic. I’ve been thinking a lot about teaching recently, (as I’m the instructor for a class of undergrad … Continue reading →

Following the 2015­–16 crisis that saw record numbers of refugees arrive in Europe, policymakers have shown interest in creating managed, legal alternatives to the dangerous, unauthorized journeys many asylum seekers make. While these discussions should be informed by an understanding of current pathways and protection channels, it is "nearly impossible" to know how protection seekers enter and what legal channels are available to them, as this MPI Europe report explains.

Fostering the social and economic inclusion of refugees has long been the domain of governments and NGOs. In the wake of the 2015–16 European migration and refugee crisis, however, new actors have emerged and taken on important roles in integrating newcomers. This report describes key discussions and takeaways from an MPI Europe conference on these developments.

European countries have ramped up their investments in helping refugees find work and integrate into society. Yet little hard evidence exists of what programs and policies work best. This report proposes a new framework for thinking smartly about integration programming, using cost-benefit analysis to look beyond short-term, economic outcomes to also measure indirect benefits through a social-value concept.

Migration between Mexico and the United States has changed dramatically in recent years, but policies and political rhetoric in both countries have not always kept up. This report, which draws from discussions of a high-level Mexico-U.S. study group convened by MPI and El Colegio de México, explores this new migration reality and how the two governments could work more closely together to address shared policy challenges.

One of the major challenges Canada faced during its extraordinary push to resettle 25,000 Syrian refugees during a four-month period was to find housing for these newcomers. This report explores how the government, resettlement case workers, and private citizens tackled this challenge—balancing cost and location, access to services, and more—and how lessons learned can improve refugee housing practices for other countries going forward.

As states work to build high-quality early childhood systems and implement the federal Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) and Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), having detailed knowledge of the characteristics of immigrant parents can help maximize the effectiveness of programs that seek to improve child and family outcomes, as this commentary explains.

To successfully integrate, immigrants and refugees need a variety of skills and knowledge—from English proficiency to understanding how school systems and local services work. Yet the adult education programs in place to support them have narrowed in scope. This policy brief proposes a new instructional model, English Plus Integration, to help states more comprehensively meet the diverse needs of their adult immigrant learners.

Lucy Boston had led an adventurous life for a woman of her time. She had dropped out of Oxford University to become a nurse during WWI and worked in a hospital in Normandy. She had married her cousin, had her son Peter, divorced her husband, and moved to Germany and Italy to paint. When Peter started Cambridge, Lucy also moved to Cambridge and began obsessively painting King's College Chapel. Then in 1939, she bought The Manor, Hemingford Grey.

In Memory in a House, Lucy describes the two years that it took to restore The Manor as "which were by far the happiest of my life, even in spite of the war that broke out as soon as the builders began." (p. 19) In fact, she views her realtionship with the house as a love affair. She was aware that the house, which was built as a Norman manor in 1120 by Payne Osmundsen, was very historic, and she eventually documented everything she found and all the changes she made.

The forced restoration was brought about by the fact that the house was structually unsound due to cheap and unskillful renovations over the years. Faced with unsupported structural beams, walls cracking from top to bottom, and drastically sloping floors, Lucy was had no choice but to fix these problems. She was lucky enough to get honest and competent builders and architects to help her with the delicate job of historical renovation.

It becomes clear while reading the book that restoring the house was as much a creative endeavor for Lucy as painting a picture, or writing fiction. She was extremely sensitive to atmosphere, and accepted the physical imperfections of the house as part of the character that it had developed as it aged. She was also willing to change her mind about the alterations and restoration as she went along; the dining room, which she had thought was hopeless and would be used just as a corridor, became the center of her life, connecting the interior of the house with its equally important exterior garden.

Two weeks ago, some friends and I toured Lucy Boston's house and garden. My friend Val had read Boston's books; her husband Dave hadn't heard of Boston but wanted to see the old house. We took a train from London to the nearby town of Huntington (pop 10,000), then a short taxi ride to Hemingford Grey (pop.230), a quaint small village on the River Ouse.

Here are photos of the town's main or high street:

Since we were early for our 2 PM house tour, we decided to explore the gardens. Lucy talks about designing and building the gardens in her memoir Memory in a House, which also contains some black and white photos of the gardens back when she published the book. However, I did not realize until her daughter-in-law Diana Boston gave us the tour how much of the gardens Lucy build from scratch. Apparently most of the yard was just meadow until she set to work.

What stunned me, Val, and Dave was how large the gardens were in size. We split up in the gardens, and they saw only the more cultivated side:

WASHINGTON — A new age of migration has been ushered in by large-scale spontaneous migration flows on both sides of the Atlantic, which have upended asylum adjudications systems and placed enormous stress on reception, housing and social services, particularly in Europe.

WASHINGTON – While the new Trump administration public charge rule is likely to vastly reshape future legal immigration based on its test to assess if a person might ever use public benefits in the future, the universe of non-citizens who could be denied a green card based on current benefits use is quite small.

Brussels and Gütersloh, 05.03.2020 — Anticipated reform of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS), which was high on the agenda as nearly 2 million asylum seekers arrived at Europe’s door in 2015-16, quickly fell victim to EU Member State competing views on what constitutes equal burden-sharing, domestic politics around migration and the urgency of first addressing overtaxed national asylum systems.

WASHINGTON — Six million immigrant workers are at the frontlines of keeping U.S. residents healthy, safe and fed during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a Migration Policy Institute (MPI) analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data issued today. While the foreign born represented 17 percent of the 156 million civilians working in 2018, they account for larger shares in pandemic-response frontline occupations: 29 percent of all physicians in the United States, 38 percent of home health aides and 23 percent of retail-store pharmacists, for example.

WASHINGTON – As more than 33 million U.S. workers have lost their jobs since March amid the pandemic-induced economic crisis, immigrants are among the most vulnerable: They are more likely than the U.S. born to be laid off and to live in communities with high COVID-19 infection rates, and less likely to have health insurance coverage and access to a doctor or other usual source of health care.

2 cups of fresh ricotta 4 eggs 2 tbsp. sugar Zest of 1 orange, 1lime and 1 lemon 1 cup of plain flour 60 g soft butter

Triple Citrus Syrup

1 loaf of crusty bread - Ciabatta etc 500g of firm, ripe, large tomatoes 250g chocolate tomatoes 250g small coloured tomatoes - any variety fresh basil garlic cloves extra virgin olive oil pepper good quality salt flakes tabasco - optional

A new take on that old favourite, potato salad. The sesame and miso adds interest, while the walnuts add taste and crunch. So substantial it could be a meal in itself.

Delicious fish dish for a summer night.

I love Christmas my all time favourite time of year. It's also a great time for awesome summer sweet produce. Muscovado brown sugar is a treacle like flavour and makes a welcome texture to a traditional pavlova.

I absolutely adore a rich moist fruit cake laced with brandy. We love this cake in our house and will stay fresh in a airtight tin for months.

This recipe featured on Foodie Tuesday, a weekly segment with Raf Epstein on Drive, 774 ABC Melbourne, 3.30PM, courtesy of Maggie Beer. Maggie's new book is "Autumn Harvest".

This recipe features on Foodie Tuesday, a weekly segment on 774 Drive with Raf Epstein, 3.30PM, courtesy of Alice Zaslavsky aka Alice in Frames. Alice's latest book is "Alice's Food A-Z: Edible Adventures".

This recipe features on Foodie Tuesday, a weekly segment on 774 Drive with Raf Epstein, 3.30PM, courtesy of Shane Delia. This recipe is from Shane's book, and SBS series, "Shane Delia's Spice Journey".

Base 180g butter, at room temperature 80g icing sugar 1 tsp vanilla extract 1 egg 225g plain flour Topping 315g castor sugar 4 eggs 2 egg yolks 1 tbs lemon zest 160ml lemon juice 40g plain flour

Fortunately Tuscan black kale (cavolo nero) with its sweet, earthy flavour is readily available now, however as it's gratifyingly hardy and easy to grow, if you have a small patch or pot to put some in I can't encourage you enough to do so; it will pay you back in spades. The crinkly blue/green leaves are quite tough, but with long, slow cooking they become tender and gently sweet, and that's the quality they give to this stick-to-your-ribs soup. I usually make it on the weekend when I have a bit more time to potter around in the kitchen, and love that it makes rather a lot (I've never been one to cook by halves! Although by all means make half the recipe if you'd rather not have leftovers) as having a tub tucked away in the fridge is like gold in the bank in a busy week. There's a fair bit of chopping required to start with, however once that's done the recipe is really straightforward.

This recipe features on Foodie Tuesday, a weekly segment on 774 Drive with Raf Epstein, 3.30PM, courtesy of Alice Zaslavsky,

250g Greek feta cheese 2 eggs 1 tsp. of smoked paprika 1 tsp. of freshly ground pepper 1/2 cup plain flour, enough to coat the feta 60g sesame seeds Sunflower oil for frying 4 tbsps. of local honey

Cold damp weather prompts all manner of mushrooms and fungi to emerge from the forest floor. Having neighbours willing to share their regular harvest of field mushrooms is one of the many great privileges of living in the Southern Forests. However, this hearty winter soup can be equally delicious when made with cultivated mushrooms easily purchased from supermarkets and independent grocers.

WHERE IS WINTER WITHOUT A GUTSY SAUCE TO ACCOMPANY A JUICY STEAK OR EVEN A ROAST CHICKEN? THIS IS MORE OF A RAGOUT TYPE SAUCE

The Portuguese have a double gene for flavours. They keep it simple, they rely on extremely good produce. This dish has such a unique flavour. It's ideal with all wines. A good Lisbon paste is the trick!

This recipe features on Foodie Tuesday, a weekly segment on 774 Drive with Raf Epstein, 3.30PM, courtesy of David Hall of Pure South Dining