Wiping your conscience clean

Wiping the cellular slate clean

dose of the JNK kinase can reset chromatin states and turn leg into wing, according to Nara Lee, Renato Paro (University of Heidelberg, Germany), and colleagues. The pathway may help cells to become reprogrammable when they find themselves in areas of injury or developmental transition. JNK has for some time been known to turn on during wound healing, and Polycomb group (PcG) proteins are known...

Your conscience and your vote.

A cultural look at moral purity: wiping the face clean

Morality is associated with bodily purity in the custom of many societies. Does that imply moral purity is a universal psychological phenomenon? Empirically, it has never been examined, as all prior experimental data came from Western samples. Theoretically, we suggest the answer is not so straightforward-it depends on the kind of universality under consideration. Combining perspectives from cu...

The Clean Conscience at Work: Emotions, Intuitions and Morality

How do people decide what is right and wrong, and to what extent are their actions guided by such moral considerations? Inspired by philosophical traditions, early approaches to morality focused on rationality, and assumed that people arrive at moral standards by logical thought. More recently, however, psychologists have explored the influence of emotions and intuitions on morality, and eviden...

How often should you clean your room?

We introduce and study a combinatorial optimization problem motivated by the question in the title. In the simple case where you use all objects in your room equally often, we investigate asymptotics of the optimal time to clean up in terms of the number of objects in your room. In particular, we prove a logarithmic upper bound, solve an approximate version of this problem, and conjecture a pre...