Humans have evolved to run, scientists say–if running weren’t so important to us, we’d look more like apes. Maybe. But given our druthers, most of us would rather sit on our buns (themselves a running adaptation, apparently).

Almost everyone has heard of the placebo effect–but it might surprise you to know that we’re still not sure how it works. A placebo (Latin for “I will please”) is a fake medical treatment–a pill made of sugar, for example, or an injection of saline solution. With no active ingredients, it shouldn’t have any effect …

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Here’s something you’d have trouble convincing most Canadians of, I’ll wager. From Roger Ebert’s Movie Answerman column: Q. In your Ebert & Roeper review of Michael Wilson’s ‘Michael Moore Hates America,’ you blurted out an erroneous opinion, expressing your doubts about the film’s claim that the Canadian crime rate is double the U.S. rate. I …

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Hey, I could have written a href=”http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/11/15/dungeons_and_dragons_we_love_you/”this/a/1

Hey, I could have written this/1

As the proud owner of a 2002 Volvo S60 2.4T, I’m very pleased to see that Volvo builds some of the safest auto seat-headrest assemblies in the world.

Oh, great, another health risk that appears to be targeting me, personally: according to a Japanese study, excessive computer use can lead to glaucoma in short-sighted people.

The best images ever photographed of Uranus through a telescope were created by a ground-based instrument, not Hubble! Technology marches on.

The ion-enginedSMART-1 spacecraft, Europe’s first lunar mission, will go into orbit around the Moon on Monday.

…is today’s most science-fictional-sounding headline. Cosmos 1, the world’s first solar-sail spacecraft will launch early next year from a Russian submarine, using a converted ICBM as its launch vehicle…a clear case of beating swords into ploughshares.

In the spring of 2002, scientists from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, announced that monkeys had successfully played a simple computer gamer. Their point wasn’t that any old monkey can play video games. What was special about their game-playing monkeys was that the on-screen cursor in the game was controlled by signals sent directly …

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These aren’t exactly the air-cars of science fiction, but they’re the next best thing.