Does Belief in a "Higher Power" Make People Happier?



Researchers accidentally discovered that people with religious beliefs tend to be more content in life while studying an unrelated topic. While not the original objective, the recent European study found that religious people are better able to cope with shocks such as losing a loved one or getting laid off of a job.



Professor Andrew Clark, from the Paris School of Economics, and co-author Dr Orsolya Lelkes, from the… Continue

Is the Human Brain a "Belief Engine"?





Religion_2 Lewis Wolpert believes that mankind's "incorrigible and wholly irrational" religiosity is as human, and as explicable, as the flint axe and the computer. It is a tool for the soul.



Religion and belief in a supernatural being is a natural consequence of how we are wired as human beings: our brains evolved to become "belief engines." And for that reason, we should not accept that our beliefs, particularly our religious… Continue

First Discovery Of Life's Building Block Within Comet



Posted on: Monday, 17 August 2009, 12:35 CDT



NASA scientists have discovered glycine, a fundamental building block of life, in samples of comet Wild 2 returned by NASA's Stardust spacecraft.



"Glycine is an amino acid used by living organisms to make proteins, and this is the first time an amino acid has been found in a comet," said Dr. Jamie Elsila of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "Our… Continue

Atheist doctors are likely to practice medicine among the underprivileged than religious physicians, even though most religions call on the faithful to serve the poor, according to the results of large cross-sectional survey of US medical practitioners published in Annals of Family Medicine.



Researchers from the University of Chicago and Yale New Haven Hospital report that 31 percent of physicians who were more religious—as measured by "intrinsic religiosity" as well as frequency of… Continue

"The DNA Code" -Is Life Written Into the Laws of Physics?







A recent mathematical analysis says that life as we know it is written into the laws of reality. DNA is built from a set of twenty amino acids - the first ten of those can create simple prebiotic life, and now it seems that those ten are thermodynamically destined to occur wherever they can.



For those unfamiliar with thermodynamics, it's the Big Brother of all energy equations and science itself. You can… Continue