Some things shouldn't be put to a vote.

Keeping a Promise When a Life Is Near Its End

“If something should happen to me, and I couldn’t help myself, would you be willing to help me?”



It is the question so many of us dread hearing. My mother asked it of me around her 75th birthday. Of course I didn’t need to ask what she meant by “something” or “help.” She was a card-carrying member of the Hemlock Society. On her bookshelves were titles like “Final Exit” and “The Peaceful Pill Handbook.”



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Keeping a Promise When a Life Is Near Its End

“If something should happen to me, and I couldn’t help myself, would you be willing to help me?”

It is the question so many of us dread hearing. My mother asked it of me around her 75th birthday. Of course I didn’t need to ask what she meant by “something” or “help.” She was a card-carrying member of the Hemlock Society. On her bookshelves were titles like “Final Exit” and “The Peaceful Pill Handbook.”

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Effects of Light Pollution

Light pollution—whose effects scientists are only now beginning to study. Light pollution is largely the result of bad lighting design, which allows artificial light to shine outward and upward into the sky, where it's not wanted, instead of focusing it downward, where it is. Ill-designed lighting washes out the darkness of night and radically alters the light levels—and light rhythms—to which many forms of life, including ourselves, have adapted. Wherever human light spills into the natural world, some aspect of life—migration, reproduction, feeding—is affected.

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In a Novel Theory of Mental Disorders, Parents’ Genes Are in Competition

A new genetic theory suggests that mental illness may be a product of struggles between the genes you get from your father and the genes you get from your mother.

In short: autism and schizophrenia represent opposite ends of a spectrum that includes most, if not all, psychiatric and developmental brain disorders. The theory has no use for psychiatry’s many separate categories for disorders, and it would give genetic findings an entirely new dimension.

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Earhart Crosses the Atlantic

Eighty years ago this week on June 18, 1928, Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic as a passenger aboard a Fokker tri-motor aircraft that was piloted by Wilmer Stultz and Louis Gordon.

This image shows Earhart standing in front of the Lockheed Electra in which she disappeared in July 1937. Born in Atchison, Kansas, in 1897, Earhart did not begin flying until after her move to California in 1920. After taking lessons from aviation pioneer Neta Snook in a Curtiss Jenny, Earhart set out to break flying records, breaking the women altitude records in 1922.

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Sooner vs. later: Is there an ideal age for first marriage?

And as young people wait longer to marry, there is growing debate over whether waiting is a good idea, and if so, how long is best. Those who advocate marriage in the early to mid-20s say that's the age when the pool of possible mates is larger, it's when couples can "grow up" together and it's prime for childbearing. But others favor the late 20s or early 30s, saying maturity makes for happier unions and greater economic security — both of which make divorce less likely.

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