Science News: The magic of Indian food and when sex leads to babies

This week, science made us hungry for lamb saag, we learned another way that having a bad childhood can hurt people for life, our attention has been bought, and why richer women have more sex but fewer babies (it’s the economy, stupid.)

A scientific explanation of what makes Indian food so delicious | The Washington Post

This story goes into a ton of culinary detail, but the short version is that the flavor combinations don’t overlap nearly as much as Western cuisine.

Can family secrets make you sick? | NPR

A survey of more than 17,000 adults found that of those who had suffered some form of abuse as a child, they also had “very dramatic increases in pretty much every one of the major public health problems that we’d included in the study.”

The cost of paying attention | The New York Times

“Attention is a resource; a person has only so much of it. And yet we’ve auctioned off more and more of our public space to private commercial interests, with their constant demands on us to look at the products on display or simply absorb some bit of corporate messaging.”

Unplanned births: Another outcome of economic inequality? | The Atlantic

Affluent women have more sex and are more likely to have access to more-reliable forms of birth control. They’re also more than three times as likely to have an abortion in the case of an accidental pregnancy — and it’s not because they don’t want children any more or less than less affluent women.