Your grandmother’s habit of hoarding pennies in a jar notwithstanding, until now there’s been no hard evidence that economic events like the Great Depression actually change investment behavior. However, a new study demonstrates that personal experience does matter – and that the economic times we live through have a significant impact on how we invest our money.

Tagged: investing, risk, Business

As a result of the Cold War thaw and improved Russian-American relations, the world's nuclear stockpile has shrunk by two-thirds. That's good news, but 25,000 nuclear weapons still lie nestled in various locations on the planet.

Tagged: nuclear, risk, International Issues, Engineering

Elisabeth Paté-Cornell specializes in understanding risk—going behind the scenes to perceive threats and trying to prevent them from materializing. "If we're doing our job well, nobody hears about it," says Paté-Cornell. It's a kind of analysis that has applications far from engineering itself, from detecting terrorists' plans to fighting infectious diseases to predicting human error in a variety of situations.

Tagged: multidisciplinary, NASA, risk, terrorism, International Issues, Engineering

When heterosexual men are exposed to positive emotional stimuli—in this case, erotic photos of a man and woman—an area of the brain associated with anticipation of reward is stimulated, and men are more likely to take bigger financial risks than they otherwise would, according to a recent study at Stanford.

Tagged: brain imaging, emotions, psychology, risk, Business, Humanities & Sciences