Further to the supposed IQ gender gap I mentioned a few days ago, the BBC have an article on it; the fun part is the inclusion of various people's comments.

The New Scientist has an article on how placebos work, as revealed by an imaging study. The writer makes a common mistake when she starts off by saying "It seems that placebos have a real physical, not imagined, effect". She may of course simply mean that the placebo turns out to be a real effect and not a statistical phenomenon -- in which case, fair enough. However, I suspect she's reflecting the common confusion between "real" and "imagined". If you imagine something, it may not "really" exist, in the world outside your brain, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have a representation in your brain -- in fact, clearly it has. If there is a "real" placebo effect, as there certainly appears to be (i.e., something measurable is happening at a level greater than could be expected by chance), then clearly there must be something physical happening in the brain, otherwise we're in the realm of magic. What this study does is give us some clear to the mechanism -- what's happening in the brain.