Have you ever stepped into a revolving door and had it unceremoniously slam into your behind? Or tried to cut a slice of cheese with a double-edged knife and ended up with a slice of thumb, instead? (I know, the cheese should've been the first clue it was a bad idea.) Or decided it would be a fun idea to see how far you can throw a three-meter-long tree branch only to have the far end spin up and clip you on your chin after its first arc? Well, maybe I was just an accident-prone kid, or a slow learner, but all these things have happened to me. Luckily, they taught me a lesson, the essence of which being described by G.I. Gurdjieff when he said: "every stick has two ends." If you don't have a good idea of the material you're handling, the 'other end' can wind up smacking you with unanticipated results. I've got the bruises and scars to remind me.

Just like the knives, sticks and revolving doors of my youth, there are many other things that have the ability to 'cut both ways': actions, ideas, even the mind itself is a double-edged sword. In this article I'll be discussing some of the ways this principle has cropped up in our collective history of ideas. Specifically, I want to write about the so-called conflict between science and religion and how it has affected the way we see and interact with the world - the attitude we take towards nature, the cosmos, and ourselves. I think it's an important idea to ponder. Like a government censor at a national newspaper, a worldview determines what we value and therefore what we see; and what we see influences how we respond to the data we take in. It's the grand focuser of attention, like Tolkien's Eye of Sauron, directing its gaze on the world around us (only not quite as nasty, in most cases). But like every self-defeating fantasy-novel baddie, science and religion have both ended up shooting themselves in the foot, losing sight of their original aim and purpose.

Depression is increasingly recognized as an illness that strikes repeatedly over the lifespan, creating cycles of relapse and recovery. This sobering knowledge has prompted researchers to search for markers of relapse risk in people who have recovered from depression. A new paper published in Elsevier's Biological Psychiatry suggests that when formerly depressed people experience mild states of sadness, the nature of their brains' response can predict whether or not they will become depressed again.

Patients who ruminate and activate the brain's frontal lobes are more likely to relapse into depression than those who respond with acceptance and activate visual areas in the back of the brain. Part of what makes depression such a devastating disorder is the high rate of relapse: each time a person becomes clinically depressed, increases their chances of becoming depressed by 16%. However, the fact that some patients are able to fully maintain their recovery points to the possibility that differences in the way they respond to everyday emotional challenges may reduce their chances of relapse.

The acute economic downturn that began in 2008 sometimes is called the "mancession" to reflect its harsher impact on men than women. As recently as last November, 10.4 percent of adult men were unemployed as compared to 8 percent of adult women.

But how do unemployed men cope with their shifting domestic roles, especially when they become financially dependent on a wife or female partner?

One University of Kansas researcher has investigated the impact of joblessness on masculinity and the "breadwinner ideology" within the context of traditional families.

"It changes how men think of themselves," said Ilana Demantas, doctoral student in sociology, who has interviewed 20 recently unemployed men. "Usually men see themselves as supporters of the family, and since a lot of them are no longer able to do that alone on their income, they have to construct their identity in a new way to allow them to still think positively of themselves."

Demantas will present her findings at the 106th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association.

American voters sympathetic to the Tea Party movement reflect four primary cultural and political beliefs more than other voters do: authoritarianism, libertarianism, fear of change, and negative attitudes toward immigrants and immigration, according to new research to be presented at the 106th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association.

"Our findings show that the Tea Party movement can best be understood as a new cultural expression of late 20th century conservatism," said Andrew J. Perrin, an associate professor of sociology in the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill's College of Arts and Sciences, and lead author of the study, "Cultures of the Tea Party."

Findings are based on two telephone polls of registered voters in North Carolina and Tennessee (conducted May 30-June 3, 2010 and Sept. 29-Oct. 3, 2010), and a set of interviews and observations at a Tea Party movement rally in Washington, N.C. Nearly half of poll respondents (46 percent) felt favorably toward the Tea Party movement.

Seeing helps map a place in the mind, but exploration and experience are vital, researchers say.

Seeing and exploring both are necessary for stability in a person's episodic memory when taking in a new experience, say University of Oregon researchers.

The human brain continuously records experiences into memory. In experiments in the UO lab of Clifford G. Kentros, researchers have been studying the components of memory by recording how neurons fire in the hippocampus of rats as they are introduced to new activities. As in humans, brain activation in rats is seen in particular locations called "place cells." It has been believed that these cells together form a mental map of the environment.

There are subtle but important differences, though, in how mapping is done, the researchers say in a paper online in advance of regular publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Rats need to directly experience a place to create a stable representation of it in their brains, researchers say. Seeing provides the big picture, but exploration burns it into memory.

Giving your heart to a supportive spouse turns out to be an excellent way to stay alive, according to new research from the University of Rochester. Happily wedded people who undergo coronary bypass surgery are more than three times as likely to be alive 15 years later as their unmarried counterparts, reports a study published online August 22 in Health Psychology, a publication of the American Psychological Association.

"There is something in a good relationship that helps people stay on track" says Kathleen King, professor emerita from the School of Nursing at the University of Rochester and lead author on the paper.

In fact, the effect of marital satisfaction is "every bit as important to survival after bypass surgery as more traditional risk factors like tobacco use, obesity, and high blood pressure," says coauthor Harry Reis, professor of psychology at the University of Rochester.

Mothers who carry their babies facing forwards are cruel and selfish, according to a leading child health expert.

She said the same accusations could be applied to those who take babies out in pushchairs which face away from the parent.

Cathrine Fowler, a professor of child and family health nursing, claimed youngsters are frightened if they are carried in a sling or pushed in a pram looking away from their parents.

'Imagine if you were strapped to someone's chest with your legs and arms flailing, heading with no control into a busy shopping centre - it would be terrifying,' said Professor Fowler.

'Outward-facing baby carriers and prams give babies a bombardment of stimulus, creating a very stressful situation.

For years, researchers have published papers that associate chronic stress with chromosomal damage.

Now researchers at Duke University Medical Center have discovered a mechanism that helps to explain the stress response in terms of DNA damage.

"We believe this paper is the first to propose a specific mechanism through which a hallmark of chronic stress, elevated adrenaline, could eventually cause DNA damage that is detectable," said senior author Robert J. Lefkowitz, M.D., James B. Duke Professor of Medicine and Biochemistry and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator at Duke University Medical Center.

The paper was published in the Aug. 21 online issue of Nature.

In the study, mice were infused with an adrenaline-like compound that works through a receptor called the beta adrenergic receptor that Lefkowitz has studied for many years. The scientists found that this model of chronic stress triggered certain biological pathways that ultimately resulted in accumulation of DNA damage.

Psychopaths have faulty connections between the part of the brain dealing with emotions and that which handles impulses and decision-making, scientists have found.

In a study of psychopaths who had committed murder, manslaughter, multiple rape, strangulation and false imprisonment, the British scientists found that roads linking the two crucial brain areas had "potholes", while those of non-psychopaths were in good shape.

The study opens up the possibility of developing treatments for dangerous psychopaths in the future, says Dr Michael Craig of the Institute of Psychiatry at London's King's College Hospital, and may have profound implications for doctors, researchers and the criminal justice system.

"These were particular serious offenders with psychopathy and without any other mental illnesses," he says.

Experts have recognised for some time that not all psychopaths are violent criminals. Many of them live inconspicuously amongst us (see item 4 here). But according to Mehmet Mahmut and his colleagues, these more benign psychopaths have been relatively uninvestigated. It's not even clear how comparable they are to their more notorious counterparts.

One hundred university students completed a self-report measure of psychopathy that probed four key areas - lack of empathy, grandiosity, impulsivity and delinquency. The top 33 per cent and bottom 33 per cent of scorers subsequently formed high and low psychopathy groups. The low and high psychopathy groups then completed the kinds of neuropsychological tests that have often been used on research with criminal psychopaths.

The high psychopathy students, as well as recording low empathy on the self-report test, also scored poorly on the Iowa Card Gambling task (relative to the low psychopathy students), reflecting the same kind of performance seen in criminal psychopaths. This gambling task is thought to measure functioning in a specific frontal region of the brain called orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), which is known to be involved in emotion and decision-making.