For good reasons, the results reported by Diemand-Yauman et al. (2011), accompanied by the clever title, BFortune favors the bold (and the italicized): effects of disfluency on educational outcomes,^ have had a big impact, not only among researchers, but also in the public media. First, from a common-sense standpoint, why should making to-be-learned materials harder to read by virtue of a more-...

M any scientists are aware of the subtle influences on their own scientific conduct, but many others are not. Sydney Brenner, the joint winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine, delightfully described a slide in which data points were scattered very close to a straight line— but a large mysterious black object lay in one corner. By degrees, the onlooker realizes that the object...

Radiotherapy applies ionizing irradiation to selected areas of the body with the scope of destroying cancer cells, either as part of curative therapies to remove a primary malignant tumor and to prevent tumor recurrence after surgery, or as part of palliative measures to avoid local advancement of bone and brain metastases. Intriguingly, radiotherapy does not only have local effects but may lea...