Another chance to catch the most interesting, and important, articles from the previous week on MIT Technology Review.

A new guest column in Sabato’s Crystal Ball by Political Science Professor Thomas Schaller argues that future ratification of constitutional amendments will become increasingly unlikely as state legislatures and the national government become more divided.

Schaller writes as this year marks the centennial anniversary of the 17th Amendment, several former and current Republican members of Congress are moving to repeal the amendment, which mandates the popular election of U.S. Senators.

“Although the movement to repeal the 17th Amendment is likely to fizzle, the fact is plans to amend the Constitution are mostly a waste of time because, other than a widely popular and highly-unifying suggested change, it is probably almost impossible to ratify or even propose amendments in our highly-polarized nation and divided national government,” Schaller writes.

“The bottom line? America hasn’t adopted an amendment in the traditional, proposed-then-ratified-soon-thereafter fashion in more than 40 years, and it may be a long time before it happens again,” he adds.

To read the full column in Sabato’s Crystal Ball, click here.

An article published March 25 in the online magazine Slate examines the factors that cause humans to laugh. The story cites the work and research of Psychology Professor Robert Provine that helps explain why humans laugh.

“For his book, Laughter: A Scientific Investigation, Provine engaged in what he called ‘sidewalk neuroscience,’ tracking and observing real-world laughter,” the article states.

The authors write that Provine’s research helps illustrate the reasons human laugh usually aren’t in response to something that is humorous.

“Provine discovered that the laughter of our everyday lives isn’t for the most part in response to anything resembling jokes,” the authors note. “Instead, most of it occurs in conversations that, out of context, don’t seem funny at all. Provine’s discoveries suggest that laughter is inherently social, that at its core it’s a form of communication and not just a byproduct of finding something funny.”

To read the full article in Slate, click here. Provine was also interviewed about the same topic on “The Arlene Bynon Show” on Sirius XM radio. Additional coverage can be found on Salon.com by clicking here.

Doug Frey (Professor of Chemical, Biochemical & Environmental Engineering) will be this year’s Horvath Memorial Lecturer at Yale University.

The prestigious Csaba Horvath lecture series is in memory of Professor Csaba Horvath, who is responsible for developing High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC), without which modern chemistry and biotechnology would be difficult, if not impossible. The lecture is sponsored by Yale’s School of Engineering and Applied Science and The Goizueta Foundation.

Dr. Frey will speak on new methods and applications for the chromatography of biological macromolecules at Yale on April 16.