AIDS will affect us all eventually, Mandela tells London audience

Will Diet and Exercise Save Us All?

How many times have you been to the doctor and was told that a balanced lifestyle is key for a healthy, disease-free, long life? How many times did genetics take the blame? But do we really know whether genetic risk associated with complex diseases can be offset by behavioral changes? A recent study at the New England Journal of Medicine now brings us some answers. The idea that most human dise...

Anticipating the Changes That Will Touch Us All.

Through animal eyes: What behaviour tells us

To Charles Darwin, it was obvious that animals are sentient, so why should the idea not be now universally accepted? I review the difficulties and issues with animal sentience with a view to answering some of the critics. Sentience is ‘the hard problem’ and it is important we acknowledge the difficulties and do not claim too much for the evidence we have. Two sorts of evidence are examined: evi...

What Humour Tells Us About Discourse Theories

Many verbal jokes, like garden path sentences, pose difficulties to models of discourse since the initially primed interpretation needs to be discarded and a new one created based on subsequent statements. The effect of the joke depends on the fact that the second (correct) interpretation was not visible earlier. Existing models of discourse semantics in principle generate all interpretations o...

Neighbourhood deprivation and health: does it affect us all equally?

BACKGROUND Neighbourhood socioeconomic status (SES) may affect rich and poor residents differentially. Two models are proposed. Model 1: living in a non-deprived neighbourhood is better for health because better collective material and social resources are available. Model 2: being poor (rich) relative to the neighbourhood average is associated with worse (better) health because of the discrepa...