Tapped But Unsaved
Yesterday, I discovered just how different two very similar concepts could be when I was sent two separate emails attempting to sell me beer and beer-related products as a Valentine’s Day present.
Yesterday, I discovered just how different two very similar concepts could be when I was sent two separate emails attempting to sell me beer and beer-related products as a Valentine’s Day present.
Drug addicts and their non-addicted siblings share certain features in the brain, suggesting a susceptibility to addiction is inherited but is also a flaw that can be overcome, scientists said on Thursday.
“If we could get a handle on what makes unaffected relatives of addicts so resilient we might be able to prevent a lot of addiction from taking hold,” said Paul Keedwell a consultant psychiatrist at Britain’s Cardiff University.
So let’s get all up in your business . . .
Do you think you’re susceptible to addiction? Are any of your family members? What are you/could you be addicted to? If some people with the “addiction flaw” can overcome it (apparently relatively easily), should addiction be treated as a disease? Is that just a function of the language? Where did I leave my keys?
The Afternoon Inquisition (or AI) is a question posed to you, the Skepchick community. Look for it to appear Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays, and Sundays at 3pm ET.
Whenever I see the term ‘self-healing’ my bullshit meter immediately alarms, however Nissan has produced a self-healing iPhone case with some awesome materials science to back it up. The case is expected to be distributed later this year, so I haven’t gotten my wanting (and clumsy) hands on one myself. To me this is a ‘when I see it, I will believe it’ situation, but the science is intriguing.
Smashley, a contributor to our sister site Mad Art Lab, just posted an awesome interview with Quiet Company, a band that provided a lot of great music for our old podcast, Curiosity Aroused. Here’s a taste:
Taylor: I like to think that if you look at all of our albums chronologically, you can see a progression. Because in Shine Honesty, I’m still very much Christian. I write about heaven as a person who actually believes he’ll go there. But then by our second record, Everyone You Love Will Be Happy Soon — my buddy Cameron calls that the “writing on the wall” record. There are elements of someone going “What if this is all bullshit?” you know? And so by the time we made this record, it was very much a “Okay, this is all bullshit” type record. So I like to think that it’s not necessarily new, but it’s the first time we’ve come out and said anything about it. Every time before, it was kind of dripped in metaphor.
Happy February, everyone! Jen is busy hunting down groundhogs for her annual feastday tomorrow, so I’ve taken over the Quickies.
Featured image via Joshua Roberts/Reuters /Landov
Today I’m proud to announce the new African Americans for Humanism campaign, just in time for Black History Month!
Billboards and transit shelter ads featuring historic and contemporary black humanists are going up—in black neighborhoods!—in New York City, Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Dallas, Washington DC, and Durham NC. The ads highlight historic black humanists Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston, as well as eight contemporary activists and organizers representing local AAH-affiliated groups in each city.