Once upon a time, we used to sit down to dinner and all that mattered was what the food tasted like. If it pleased the palate, we ate it. Oh, how times have changed! Now the dinner table has become a virtual laboratory where foods are evaluated in terms of being either “good” or “bad.” It makes sense. After all, food is the only raw material that ever enters our body, so we are what we eat.

Neuroscientist Mayada Elsabbagh has spent her career unravelling the mysteries of the infant brain. She studies neural pathways. She uses high-tech sensors and infrared eye-trackers to examine the differences in babies’ brain signals when they gaze at a face or a rubber ball. The assistant professor at McGill University in Montreal has a PhD and a long list of credentials and cutting-edge studies to her name. Yet Elsabbagh cannot get her head around the disconnect she faces every day as an autism researcher.

Jamaica's Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce won gold in the 100-metre sprint at the London 2012 Olympics, clocking a time of 10.75 seconds. Vancouver's Christa Bortignon's time for the same distance is 15.99 seconds. Fraser-Pryce is 25. Bortignon is 50 years her senior. This speedy West Coast septuagenarian also competes in the 200-metre sprint, hurdles, high jump, long jump and triple jump, and in the past year alone has earned eight world masters gold medals and set seven world records, boosting her number of world records into the double digits.

Cholesterol sufferers could soon take a simple pill which keeps levels under control and protects them against heart disease or a stroke. The daily wonder pill has been hailed as a new fat buster by scientists. Experts found that people who took just two capsules packed with healthy bacteria every day not only had lower "bad" cholesterol but also of total cholesterol.

(History professor Gil Troy): Mitt Romney and Barack Obama appear to agree about at least one thing on this tense Election Day: They are standing on mutually exclusive party platforms, offering Americans what Obama called “the clearest choice of any time in a generation.” The candidates – and their partisans – insist voters are deciding today between a country that will be prospering or bankrupt, with a foreign policy that is firm or flaccid, and with abortion either remaining legal or abruptly outlawed.

(Henry Mintzberg) Governments and corporations can't be relied upon to provide solutions to our biggest problems – instead we must look to ourselves. That we face serious problems – poverty amid plenty, the degradation of our physical, social, and economic environments, terrorism by fanatic cells and rogue states, and so on – is clear. But how our established institutions – governments and businesses – deal with them, even when responsive and responsible, is not. We need another way.

Karl Moore of Desautels Faculty of Management talks with Peter McGraw, a professor of marketing at the University of Colorado, about the place of humour at work.

Read more at Globe and Mail