The Conversation

Maximizers vs. minimizers: The personality trait that may guide your medical decisions – and costs

Written by Laura Scherer, Assistant Professor, Psychology, University of Missouri-Columbia

A suitable disposition helps the medicine go down. Cropped from charlesonflickr/flickr, CC BY

Do certain people want more medical care than others do? And, does that matter?

To consider this idea, start by answering the following question: Which of the paragraphs below describes you best?

“I prefer active medical interventions and being...

Using randomness to protect election integrity

Written by Eugene Vorobeychik, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Computer Engineering, Vanderbilt University

Inspecting election results is best done with a dash of randomness.Boonyen/shutterstock.com

Democratic societies depend on trust in elections and their results. Throughout the 2016 presidential election, and since President Trump’s inauguration, allegations of Russian involvement in the U.S. presidential campaign have raised concerns about how...

Melding mind and machine: How close are we?

Written by James Wu, Ph.D. Student in Bioengineering, Researcher at the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering, University of Washington

A noninvasive brain-computer interface based on EEG recordings from the scalp.Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering (CSNE), Photo by Mark Stone, CC BY-ND

Just as ancient Greeks fantasized about soaring flight, today’s imaginations dream of melding minds and machines as a remedy to the pesky problem of human mortality. Can the mind...

What Trump’s foreign aid cuts would mean for global democracy

Written by Sarah Bush, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Temple University, Temple University

The government-funded International Republican Institute, a nonprofit, supports democratic efforts like this voter education campaign in Burma.International Republican Institute, CC BY-SA

President Donald Trump’s proposed budget would slash State Department spending by 28 percent, drastically reducing U.S. foreign aid flows.

Will he prevail?...

Are the rich more selfish than the rest of us?

Written by Jan Stoop, Associate Professor of Applied Economics, Erasmus University Rotterdam

Businessmen pass by Occupy Wall Street protesters at New York's Zuccotti Park in 2011.AP Photo/Kathy Willens

Social scientists have long known that the rich are not exactly model citizens.

They evade taxes more often, flaunt traffic laws that protect pedestrians and donate less frequently to charity. In the aftermath of the Great Recession, there...

Why can't America just take out Assad?

Written by David Alpher, Adjunct Professor at the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University

The Trump administration has done an abrupt about-face on Syria, contradicting its own nascent foreign policy. Within 24 hours, it went from calling out the Assad regime for using chemical weapons to launching missiles at military targets. As limited as the strikes were, there are also statements that plans are in the works to target Syrian...

Strikes against Syria: Did Trump need permission from Congress?

Written by Jordan Tama, Assistant Professor of International Relations, American University School of International Service

President Donald Trump after speaking at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida.AP Photo/Alex Brandon

Launching 59 cruise missiles at a Syrian military airfield in response to a Syrian chemical weapons attack that killed dozens of civilians raises important questions. Does the president have, or should he have, the authority to use military force...

US airstrike on Syria: What next?

Written by David Mednicoff, Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Director, Middle Eastern Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Make no mistake. The April 6 U.S. airstrike on Syria following Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapon attack is a remarkable shift in President Donald Trump’s – and Washington’s – past policy.

As president-elect, Trump’s Middle Eastern concerns centered on defeating the Islamic State and depicted Syria’s...

Trump’s attack on Syria: Four takeaways

Written by Simon Reich, Professor in The Division of Global Affairs and The Department of Political Science, Rutgers University Newark

On April 6, two U.S. Navy destroyers in the Mediterranean Sea fired 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at Shayrat airfield in western Homs province in Syria. The strike purportedly came in retaliation for the Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons in an attack in Khan Sheikhoun earlier in the week.

According to the Pentagon, the strike...

The Case for Christ: What's the evidence for the resurrection?

Written by Brent Landau, Lecturer in Religious Studies, University of Texas at Austin

Basilica of San Vitale, a church in Ravenna, Italy,kristobalite, CC BY-NC-ND

In 1998, Lee Strobel, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune and a graduate of Yale Law School, published “The Case for Christ: A Journalist’s Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus.” Strobel had formerly been an atheist and was compelled by his...