Using simulation, such as wearing a blindfold while performing everyday tasks, has negative effects on people's perceptions of the visually impaired, according to a recent paper.

In one part of the study, after simulating blindness by having their eyes covered, participants believed people who are blind are less capable of work and independent living than did participants who simulated other impairments like amputation, or had no impairment.

There is a gender gap in some fields of academia. Some are skewed heavily toward women and some are skewed heavily toward men, though some have too little variation to be meaningful.

But why are there any gaps at all? Various explanations have been offered, from the bizarre - sexism among the liberals who dominate academia - to the more bizarre - the belief among those same academic leaders that women are less analytical than men. The most popular explanation is that women are the only gender that can give birth and after that they work less hours and that penalizes them in faculty and tenure hiring. Family-friendly policy is the only area of academia where people wish it was more like the corporate world.

Last week's terrorist attacks in Paris were religiously-based and they have brought to the fore an issue that France, and most of Europe, had chosen to ignore: determining how prevalent religious fundamentalism is.

A new paper says that creating Muslim zones where outsiders were not allowed is not the problem, nor is Muslim hostility toward 'out groups', like non-Muslims, and the attacks on the Charlie Hebdo office by the terrorists was not even attacking people who made fun of religion, or even western religion, it was instead an attack on the religious values of peace-loving Muslims, according to sociologist  Ruud Koopmans, director of the WZB Berlín Social Science Centre in Germany, writing in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

Most people know that our biological functions use a circadian system comprised of a central clock located deep within the center of our brains and multiple clocks located in different parts of the body.   

When people fly to the other part of the world or work a night shift, those different biological clocks have not adjusted and so we get things like 'jet lag'. A small study may open new therapeutic avenues for improving the synchronization of the body's different biological clocks.  

A new white paper finds little to no evidence for the effectiveness of opioid drugs in the treatment of long-term chronic pain, despite the explosive recent growth in the use of such drugs. 

The paper, which constitutes the final report of a seven-member panel convened by the National Institutes of Health  last September, finds that many of the studies used to justify the prescription of these drugs were either poorly conducted or of an insufficient duration. That makes prolific use of these drugs surprising, says Dr. David Steffens, chair of the psychiatry department at the University of Connecticut and one of the authors of the study. When it comes to long-term pain, he says, "there's no research-based evidence that these medicines are helpful." 

A new paper says that human civilization has crossed four of nine so-called planetary boundaries as the result of human activity that put humanity in a "safe operating space." 

The four that are already beyond that point-of-no-return are climate change, the loss of biosphere integrity, land-system change, and altered biogeochemical cycles like phosphorus and nitrogen runoff. That makes us 44 percent of the way on the path to doom.

It should be a wake-up call to policymakers that "we're running up to and beyond the biophysical boundaries that enable human civilization as we know it to exist," says co-author Steve Carpenter, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Limnology.