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The pandemic and political tensions might slow the march towards more globalized science. The pandemic and political tensions might slow the march towards more globalized science., Author(s): Brendan Maher, Richard Van Noorden Author Affiliations: Illustration by Fabio Buonocore Cartoon showing two researchers wearing masks on a video call, elbow-bumping through the screen. How the COVID pandemic [...]

After Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the United States Constitution may no longer protect abortion, but a surprising federal statute does. That statute is called the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 ("ERISA"), and it has long been one of the most powerful preemptive statutes in the entire United States Code. ERISA regulates "employee benefit plans," which are the vehicle by which approximately 155 million people receive their health insurance. Plans are thus a major private payer for health benefits--and therefore abortions. While many post-Dobbs anti-abortion laws directly bar abortion by making either the receipt or provision of abortion illegal, other anti-abortion laws target activities thought to facilitate abortion, most notably paying for abortions. Some of these laws, or proposed laws, attempt to punish paying for out-ofstate abortions, i.e., paying for abortions in a state where abortions are legal. ERISA says otherwise. If the plan covers abortion as a benefit, ERISA preempts laws purporting to bar plans in states where abortion is banned from paying for out-of-state abortions. It likewise preempts laws attempting to obligate plans to "report" on pending or completed abortions obtained by plan members. For the first time in the scholarly literature, this Article explains how and why that is the case--and thus the underappreciated importance of ERISA in the post-Dobbs world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT The United States is facing a retirement crisis, in significant part because defined benefit pension plans have been replaced by defined contribution retirement plans that, whatever their theoretical merit, [...]

Scientists are helping to stop antisocial behaviour in the world's most popular online game. The next stop could be a kinder Internet., Author(s): Brendan Maher Author Affiliations: It took less than a minute of playing League of Legends for a homophobic slur to pop up on my screen. Actually, I hadn't even [...]

NEXT STOP--A KINDER INTERNET? It took less than a minute of playing League of Legends for a homophobic slur to pop up on my screen. Actually, I hadn't even started [...]

The question of the status of cause-and-effect explanations of human behavior that posit physically existing causative factors and those that, on the other hand, posit hypothetical entities in the form of "useful fictions" has a long history. The influence of the works of Jeremy Bentham and Hans Vaihinger, as well as the later influence of Francis Galton, is described. Issues of the validity of hypothetical constructs and related problems of measurement and definition as found in psychoanalytic theory construction and in trait theory are examined. The significant and continuing interest generated by the landmark studies of K. MacCorquodale and P. E. Meehl (1948) and L. J. Cronbach and P. E. Meehl (1955) as well as the central importance of P. E. Meehl's thinking are described.

The discovery of high-temperature superconductors, the determination of DNA's double-helix structure, the first observations that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating--all of these breakthroughs won Nobel prizes and international [...]

The packages that started arriving by FedEx on 12 October last year came with strict instructions: protect the information within and destroy it after review. Inside were two manuscripts showing [...]

In the United States, retirement income and health insurance are largely provided through private promises made incident to employment. These 'benefit promises ' are governed by a statute called ERISA, which many health care and pension scholars argue is the cause of fundamental problems with our nation's health and retirement policy. Inevitably, however, they advance narrowly tailored proposals to amend the statute. This occurs because of the widely held view that reform should leave undisturbed the underlying core of the statute. This Article develops a theory of ERISA designed to illustrate the unavoidable need for structural reform., TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION I. UNCERTAINTY IN THE BENEFIT PROMISE A. Performance Uncertainty B. Expectation Uncertainty C. Collective Uncertainty II. THE ERISA BENEFIT PROMISE A. The Defined Benefit Pension Promise [...]

As the world mobilizes against the H1N1 flu pandemic, researchers are working to answer pressing questions about the virus. Brendan Maher visited pathologists at the US Centers for Disease Control [...]

Dunham Aurelius is eager to take his shirt off and show his scars. One, a centimetre wide and roughly 20 long runs up his lower back and is from the [...]

Debate wears on as to how, exactly, it happened. Some say it could have been a global cooling event brought on by falling greenhouse-gas levels. Others argue that it was [...]

If you want to predict how tall your children might one day be, a good bet would be to look in the mirror, and at your mate. Studies going back [...]

In 1987 Rip Ballou taped an ice-cream carton to his arm. The young US Army doctor was doing his bit for science; inside the carton five hungry mosquitoes set about [...]