Dream Weaver
Are our dreams really vulnerable to manipulation? Click ahead for a reality check on these ideas and more in the world of dream research. (msnbc.com)

Accents Influence How Truthful People Sound
Researchers in Chicago have shown that people with a noticeable accent are considered less credible than those with no accent. The stronger the accent, the less credible the speaker. (Elizabeth Weise, USA Today)

More on China’s Religious Boom
The biggest boom of all has been in Christianity, which the government has struggled to control. One way it has tried to do that is by establishing government-sanctioned churches. (Louisa Lim, NPR)

Beauty Burden?
Few studies have examined the perils of beauty, or the upside of ordinary stock. But those that do offer some interesting reminders—above all, that beauty, like wealth, is both a blessing and a curse. (Tony Dokoupil, Newsweek)

Natural Selection in the Recent Past
In the last few years, biologists peering into the human genome sequences now available from around the world have found increasing evidence of natural selection at work in the last few thousand years, leading many to assume that human evolution is still in progress. (Nicholas Wade, The New York Times)

In Praise of the New Atheists
The Rev. Michael Dowd: The New Atheists, I suggest, are not enemies of religion; they are modern-day prophets. Prophets traditionally were those who chastised their people for having fallen out of sync with their time, with “God’s ways.” “Come into right relationship with Reality,” they warned, “or perish!” (Orlando Sentinel)

Violence as Entertainment
Violent sports, movies, and games enjoy popularity and profitability because of the excitement and “forbidden fruit” factor, say psychology experts. (Madison Park, CNN)

Billboard Battle
Deep in the heart of the Bible Belt, a dispute over God and country is being waged very publicly. (Dan Harris and Enjoli Francis, ABC News)

THEATER
Imagining Madoff
Two months after Elie Wiesel used legal threats to shut down a play that imagined his relationship with his former money manager, Bernard Madoff, that work—revised, with a new character replacing Wiesel—will have its first performances this week. (Patrick Healy, The New York Times)

It Pays to Be My Facebook Friend
Research tracking our habits on networking sites is only just emerging, and its conclusions have come as a surprise to cynics like me. It seems these tools are altering our influence over others, improving our chances of professional success, and even making us happier. Could the benefits of social networking be too good to miss out on? (Richard Fisher, New Scientist)

China’s Religious Boom
The collapse of the communist ideology created a void that has left many Chinese staring into a spiritual vacuum, looking for a value system to counterbalance the rampant materialism that seems to govern life in China. (Louisa Lim, NPR)

Overreaction
The amygdala is located in the right brain, which controls emotion. The left brain controls thinking and reasoning. The stronger the circuits that connect left and right brain, Judith Siegel, a professor at New York University’s Silver School of Social Work, says, the better people are able to cope with intense emotions. But overreactions occur in split seconds, and the part of the left brain that regulates logic and reasoning can be bypassed. (Sharon Kirkey, Postmedia News)

Studying Responses to Genetic Test Results
Will patients be willing to make lifestyle changes to forestall what their genes foretell? Do they appreciate the difference between an increased likelihood of a disease indicated by genetic makeup and a fixed medical destiny? (Ilana Yurkiewicz, The News & Observer)

Moral Thinking
Peter Railton: Are the optimistic Darwinians wrong, and impartial morality beyond the reach of those monkeys we call humans? Does thoroughly logical evolutionary thinking force us to the conclusion that our love, loyalty, commitment, empathy, and concern for justice and fairness are always at bottom a mixture of selfish opportunism and us-ish clannishness? (Opinionator, The New York Times)

In Defense of Secularism
Secularism works both ways—while it does not permit religion to interfere in affairs of state, it also forbids the state from seeking to control religion. This is surely the best way to ensure that those with faith can pursue their beliefs unencumbered. (Terry Sanderson, New Statesman)

When Facts “Backfire”
Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. (Joe Keohane, The Boston Globe)

More on the World Science Festival’s S&R Panel
Dave Munger: I don’t think it’s wrong to assemble a panel that believes it’s possible to reconcile faith and science, but I do think that when a public conference devoted to science presents an issue on which the scientific community is fairly evenly divided, it’s the conference organizers’ responsibility to ensure that the primary points of contention are addressed. (Research Blogging, Seed)

Church-Made Movies
Moviemaking churches are venturing into the cineplex to attract souls who might never set foot in a megachurch. (Cathy Lynn Grossman, USA Today)

Is Abraham Maslow’s Pyramid of Needs Out of Date?
That’s the argument of a team of evolutionary psychologists led by Douglas Kenrick of Arizona State University. They propose a revised pyramid, one informed by recent research defining our deep biological drives. (Tom Jacobs, Miller-McCune)

Gene Involved in Sperm Production Is Present In Nearly All Animals
The finding suggests the ability to produce sperm arose just once, 600 million years ago, and has been conserved through all subsequent animal evolution. (Jess McNally, Wired Science, Wired.com)

What Predicts a Marriage’s Success?
Anneli Rufus, a journalist and author, has now delved into the archive of studies dedicated to the subject to compile a list of 15 warning signs that someone is heading for a divorce. (Telegraph)

“We Should Not Expect One Key to Open Every Lock”
Keith Ward: We need to distinguish in detail all the different sorts of explaining we do in life. People who are not scientists certainly try to explain lots of things that happen, and why should we deny they are using explanations, but not as a professional scientist would? (guardian.co.uk)

Paul Allen Gives Away Half His Fortune
Paul Allen, who founded the Microsoft Corporation with Bill Gates, is among a growing number of wealthy philanthropists who are publicly stating their commitments to giving their money away in response to a call from Gates and Warren Buffett, who last month started a program called The Giving Pledge that aims to get the country’s billionaires to devote half their fortunes to charity. (Stephanie Strom, The New York Times)

MOVIES
Toy Story 3
What we want in a kid’s movie is positive psychology, and that’s what we got in the first two Toy Story flicks. Toy Story 3 was still a good, and engaging, movie, but it would have been even better without the Count of Monte Cristo angle. (David Lundberg Kenrick and Douglas Kenrick, The Caveman Goes To Hollywood, Psychology Today)

Apes and Old World Monkeys May Have Split Later Than We Thought
A slope-faced, big-toothed creature from the distant past has inspired scientists to recalibrate the ancient evolutionary split between apes and Old World monkeys. (Bruce Bower, Science News)

Behavioral Economics (and Its Limits)
George Loewenstein and Peter Ubel: Behavioral economics is an increasingly popular field that incorporates elements from psychology to explain why people make seemingly irrational decisions, at least according to traditional economic theory and its emphasis on rational choice. (The New York Times)

The Ultimate Nature of Reality
Marilynne Robinson: We have demonstrated again and again a terrible freedom to do ourselves catastrophic harm. It is critically important now that we remember our dignity and our worth. We must recover respect for what we are. Science and religion, history, literature and the arts, even our abused and beleaguered politics, all can help us do this if we will only let them. (The Huffington Post)

Ending the Fight Between God and Darwin
Brad Hirschfield: We need to shift from a conflict-driven approach to a conversational approach on this and most other socially divisive issues. In a conflict, someone must lose for things to be resolved. In a conversation, everyone needs to be engaged for it to be successful. (On Faith, Newsweek/The Washington Post)

Art and Religion Don’t Have to Be Enemies
Religions have been the primary patrons and creators of art throughout history. (Russell Smith, The Globe and Mail)

MOVIES
Inception
If Leonardo DiCaprio (and indeed the audience) spent much of the film asking, “Was it a vision or a waking dream?” he was echoing not just Keats, but pretty much the whole of world literature and a great deal of its art. (Christina Patterson, The Independent)