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Here are some of this week's Human Nature short takes on the news. To get them in real time, subscribe to the HN Twitter feed. 1. Mayor on Chicago's surveillance network: ''cameras are the next best thing'' to cops. http://bit.ly/syCfU Prediction: Domestic drones are next. 2. Latest totalitarian hubris: central weather planning ...

Here are some of this week's Human Nature short takes on the news. To get them in real time, subscribe to the HN Twitter feed. 1. Is youth a kind of wealth? Should you pay more for health insurance so old folks can pay less, in the name of equality? http://bit.ly/EE2pl 2. Runaway Toyotas http://bit.ly/143rMA don't help us get comfortable with ...

There's something poignant about the last-minute outrage of the pro-choice groups. The complaints they're leveling—that people had more choices in the private market, that the House bill radically upsets this market, and that it violates Obama's promise not to deprive anyone of their existing coverage—are hardly novel. Republicans have issued such ...

Fort Hood, Texas, hosts tens of thousands of men who are trained to fight for their country. But none of them stopped Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan as he blew away 13 of their colleagues Thursday afternoon. It was a civilian police officer, Sgt. Kimberly Munley, who confronted and shot him in an exchange of gunfire. For her trouble, Munley took bullets ...

Can crimes and crashes be blamed on bad genes? On Friday, Nature reported details of an Italian case in which a court, for the first time in Europe, reduced a criminal sentence based on a genetic theory of behavior. According to the report: Pietro Pietrini, a molecular neuroscientist at Italy's University of Pisa, and Giuseppe Sartori, a ...

Here are some of this week's Human Nature short takes on the news. To get them in real time, subscribe to the HN Twitter feed. 1. ''Abortion addict'' http://bit.ly/VRJHr says she ''abused her rights.'' Bingo: Abuse doesn't invalidate rights, and rights don't validate abuse. 2. IEDs spreading across south Asia & Africa: http://bit.ly/vSb9l ...

Maybe one lesson of Northwest Flight 188 is that driving should be more like flying. There are tricky parts that require close attention and adjustment—takeoff and landing for planes, local navigation for cars—and then there are parts that can be automated: cruising altitude for planes, freeway driving for cars. A freeway autopilot would have to ...

Last month, I went ballistic over New York City's plan to ban smoking in parks and public beaches. My argument was that you don't have to ban smoking on every square inch of park land to protect nonsmokers from the person next to them. You can chalk off spaces where smoking is prohibited. Just figure out how much clean breathing room people need, ...

Which is more important: food, sleep, or sex? My instinct is to go with sleep, on the grounds that if you try to avoid all three, sleep is the one that will overtake you first. It's the one you need most. If that's true—and if we know that it's unreasonable and dangerous to insist that people abstain from sex—then isn't it stupid to expect pilots ...

Everywhere you look, fat people are being charged extra. More for plane seats. More for health insurance. More, in the form of reduced incentive payouts, under proposals for Medicare and Medicaid. Now, more for ambulance service. We've talked about ambulances before. Along with toilets and coffins, they're part of a global size upgrade for ...