Children in highly developed countries suffer abuse and neglect much more often than is reported by official child-protective agencies, according to the findings of the first in a comprehensive series of reports on child maltreatment, published Dec. 2 in the British medical journal The Lancet. Based on a review of research conducted on child abuse between 2000 and June of this year, researchers estimate that 4% to 16% of children are physically abused each year in high-income ...

It's no secret that stress isn't good for you. But what's less clear is how social stressors like a high-pressure job or a failing marriage affect your physical well-being. Researchers at Wake Forest University who study stress in monkeys think they may have discovered a clue: fat. More specifically, the particular form of fat called visceral fat, which tends to build up in the abdomen . Researchers believe this abdominal fat lodges deep within visceral organs, such ...

T.J. Rodgers may be many things--tough taskmaster, Green Bay Packers fan--but reticent he is not. And if anything gets the pugnacious founder and CEO of Cypress Semiconductor talking, it's the notion that corporations ought to exist for more than the pursuit of profit. In the simplest terms, that idea--called corporate social responsibility, or CSR--invites companies to consider their impact on people and the planet on a par with their traditional quest for profit. Rodgers considers that bunk. Not that he ...

In New York City, where they never roll up the sidewalks, illegal social clubs are a long tradition. There are more than 1,000 such clubs strewn across the city's five boroughs, dispensing cheap booze, loud music and a touch of the home country to immigrants. Many of them have something in common: the lack of a liquor license. All too many also offer their patrons something besides the prospect of a hot time on the town: the high risk of ...

Sex forges unlikely alliances and Hugh Hefner, who has been the world's most prominent personification of the unchained heterosexual male libido since his 1953 launch of Playboy magazine, forges unlikelier alliances than most. It's not only that the 85-year-old is looking forward to marriage later this month to Crystal Harris, a psychology major-turned-Playboy Playmate and aspiring pop singer 60 years his junior. For more than half a century, Hefner has succeeded in uniting social conservatives of the ...

Video résumés have long tickled imaginations in Hollywood without making much of a dent in the real world. Enter Aleksey Vayner. The Yale student submitted his video résumé, titled Impossible Is Nothing, to investment bank UBS last fall. It became a YouTube classic, while its karate-chopping, tennis-acing, deep-thought-having star became the joke of Wall Street. But another funny thing happened: Vayner's vanity creation awakened recruiters and job seekers to the possibilities of marrying the video CV to the Internet--and ...

We like to think of ourselves as rational creatures. We watch our backs, weigh the odds, pack an umbrella. But both neuroscience and social science suggest that we are more optimistic than realistic. On average, we expect things to turn out better than they wind up being. People hugely underestimate their chances of getting divorced, losing their job or being diagnosed with cancer; expect their children to be extraordinarily gifted; envision themselves achieving more than their peers; ...

Society At A Glance 2009 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development 132 pages The Gist: If you're looking for another reason to hate on France, you might check out the latest report from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. According to the Paris-based group, the French spend twice as much time enjoying meals each day than most Americans, and get nearly an hour's more sleep each night than most Japanese . The study, which is based on government ...

Jenny has not returned my calls in roughly a year. She has, however, sent me a poinsettia, poked me and placed a gift beneath my Christmas tree. She's done all this virtually, courtesy of Facebook, the social-networking site on which users create profiles, gather "friends" and join common-interest groups, not to mention send digital gifts. Although Jenny has three children, ages 4 to 14, and rarely finds time for visits, phone calls or even e-mail, the full-time ...

After more than 100 Palestinians breached Israel's border with Syria on Sunday, knocking down a fence and striding into a village in the Golan Heights, overmatched Israeli security forces scrambled to glean what they could from the protesters who had just, without so much as a sidearm, penetrated farther into the country than any army in a generation. Under close questioning, the infiltrators closed the intelligence gap with a shrug and one word: Facebook. The operation that ...