The encouragement (or requirement) of diversity sometimes gets labeled reverse racism, under the assumption that encourgaing diversity is only about somehow making up for past injustices by discriminating against today's white men who may never have themselves committed such injustices.

I'm not trying to step into the touchy issue of Supreme Court politics (nor am I arguing that quotas are always a good thing), but I've run across this interesting observation in several contexts recently:

"Participants push themselves to formulate better arguments when they know they will have to justify them."

One of the biggest recent breakthroughs in stem cell research is the ability to reprogram non-stem cells into stem cells using genetic engineering. The hitch with this technique is that genetic engineering like this can have side effects: stem cells produced in this way can turn into tumors in mice (and presumably humans, but we haven't tried that yet).

And thus researchers have been looking for ways to reprogram stem cells without genetic engineering. One promising way to do this is to use chemicals that can mimic the effects of the genes typically used for reprogramming. (The jargon for these genes is 'reprogramming factors' - who says technical jargon has to be opaque?)

Liberals and conservatives don’t just think differently, they also feel differently. This may even be a result, in part, of divergent neural responses.

I don't know much about the science behind this, but the NY Time's Nicholas Kristof points readers to an online survey set up by some psychologists to study morals and political beliefs: