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By Mahmoud Darwish
$12.00
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By Daniel Domscheit-Berg
$15.64
$18
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Illustration from sanctumsolitude and Marc Mongenet
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America isn’t the only country trying to eat its way to happiness. A new study predicts that by the year 2020, 81 percent of adult British men and 68 percent of women will be obese or overweight. (continued)
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theonion.com
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A lot of people have said in recent weeks that the space agency simply lacks the chutzpah that put a man on a moon. Figure out global warming? Boring, they say. The Onion has come up with a satirical solution that just might blow your minds: Project Spaceman, the David Bowie-inspired Glam Space Program. (continued)
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Flickr / joey.parsons
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Before we scare you, keep in mind that if everyone in America who experienced high blood pressure—that’s about a third of us—got dementia, you would know about it. However, new research suggests that the relationship between hypertension and dementia is more pronounced and alarming than doctors previously understood ... (continued)
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Flickr / jwillier2 (CC-BY-ND)
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Our culture tends to reward multitasking, sleep-deprived go-getters, but a new study confirms that catching up on sleep over the weekend just doesn’t work. After weeks of less than seven to nine hours a night, “banking” a long stretch on your days off isn’t going to repair your memory, immune system or ability to drive a car. (Continued)
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An Iranian spokesman accused the “triangle of wickedness,” otherwise known as Israel, the U.S. and “their hired agents,” of carrying out the Tuesday bombing of Iranian scientist Massoud Ali Mohammadi. The State Department said that was “absurd.”
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Curl up with some eggnog and click on to find out why Americans can’t make things (hint: business school), why Michelangelo wasn’t such a loner, after all, and more.
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Put down the dreidel and step away from the latkes. It’s time to read about the mercenary surge in Afghanistan, Sarah Palin the Terminator, why your boss is incompetent and much more.
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A revelatory new book by Scott D. Sampson, one of our leading dinosaur paleontologists, suggests we have much to learn about extinction, global warming and energy flow from the biological experience of the charismatic beasts that roamed the Earth more than 60 million years ago.
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Today on the list: the power of same-sex liaisons, poetry in the Bible and more. Update
Posted on Dec 8, 2009
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Flickr / M. Janicki by way of popsci.com
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Dutch scientists are doing their bit to address the food crisis, the climate crisis and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals by growing pork meat from muscle cells harvested from a live pig. Their hope is to turn the cells from one animal into the meat from a million without killing any. (continued)
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By Eugene Robinson — Stop hyperventilating, all you climate change deniers. The purloined e-mail correspondence published by skeptics last week hasn’t stopped the ice caps from melting.
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We’re kicking off a new feature. Get the best of the Net from Larry Gross. Tonight: Internet for Nobel Prize, secrets of the Kremlin, augmented reality art, charges against nude model dropped, and more.
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CERN
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Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider buried deep beneath the Swiss-French border made history Monday, smashing two proton beams traveling at near light speed into each other. The LHC, also known as the big bang machine, is the largest machine on Earth and ... (continued)
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Flickr / el fedora
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The Vatican used to burn people for talking about aliens. Now it holds conferences on the subject. After presiding over such an affair, the director of the Vatican Observatory explained “we cannot put limits on God’s creative freedom.” (continued)
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Flickr / lucianvenutian
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Don’t be fooled by stimulus critics who cite expenditures such as the “electric fish orchestra” (actually an educational demonstration of a larger project related to robotics and prosthetics) or trips to resorts (to train special-ed teachers). “Waste,” as ProPublica reports, “is in the eye of the beholder.” (continued)
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George W. Bush’s dream of Americans on Mars got a little bit closer to reality Wednesday as NASA successfully launched its prototype Ares I-X rocket. A version of the new rocket is planned to launch Orion, NASA’s replacement craft for the aging space shuttle, as America’s preferred method of getting off-planet.
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Flickr / Hellgasms!
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This isn’t going to sound all that shocking, but remember that this country is still wrapping its head around evolution: Criminalizing abortion does not reduce the number of abortions; it reduces the number of safe abortions. Contraception, however, does reduce abortions, according to an epic study of 197 countries.
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Flickr / SteelCityHobbies
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Recent autopsies on the brains of former football players showed that concussions cause a lot more brain damage than previously suspected. To contribute to a better understanding of the problem, three current and 40 retired NFL players have agreed to donate their brains to a program at Boston University.
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Flickr / Rennet Stowe
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Let’s get something straight, America. Charles Darwin was right. Only 39 percent of you believe that, but his theory of evolution is the basis of modern biological science. Deal with it. A new film about the man can’t get distribution in the U.S. because—this is embarrassing just to type—150 years after “On the Origin of Species,” he’s too controversial in these parts.
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Flickr / Ollie Crafoord
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Researchers at the University of Maryland say not to worry about the dreaded swine flu mutating into an even more dreaded super bug. That’s the good news. The bad news: Swine flu doesn’t mutate, based on their tests, because it doesn’t have to. It’s stronger than other flu strains and spreads like wildfire. At least among ferrets.
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hotpot.se
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Here’s an oddball out of the empire: A new British study suggests that a girl’s “visual diet” affects attraction. Girls who attended same-sex schools were found to prefer more-feminine boys. (For boys in all-male schools, there was little or no indication they preferred more-masculine girls.) Maybe it’s a British thing?
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Kremlin / Presidential Press and Information Office
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According to a report in Miller-McCune, scientists have determined that muscles make men irritable and politically aggressive. That makes Vladimir Putin’s pecs troublesome, say the researchers: “If governmental decision-makers are like other humans, then their musculature may be playing a role, unconnected from rational evaluation, in their decisions to go to war.”
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Wikimedia Commons / Polargeo
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One of Antarctica’s largest glaciers is melting much faster than it was a few years ago, potentially adding anywhere from an inch to a foot to global sea levels. According to one of the scientists who broke the bad news: “This is unprecedented ... nothing in the natural world is lost at an accelerating exponential rate like this glacier.”
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AP / Mark Lennihan
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By Chris Hedges — Positive psychology, which claims to be able to engineer happiness, is a quack science that justifies the cruelty of unfettered capitalism, shifting the blame from the power elite to those they oppress.
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White House / Chuck Kennedy
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The crew of Apollo 11, the NASA mission that 40 years ago Monday first put a man on the moon, marked the occasion with President Obama at the White House. The president hailed their accomplishments as a boon to the home planet. But astronauts of the Apollo series aren’t satisfied with such earthbound praise—they want a national commitment to send Americans to Mars.
Posted on Jul 20, 2009
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Original: Flickr / be_khe
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Tell this to the next nudnik who gives you a hard time for sucking down a cup of joe: A study of mice suggests that coffee could reverse symptoms of Alzheimer’s and prevent the onset of dementia. Old mice that consumed the equivalent of five cups of coffee a day showed improved cognitive function, and some young mice, when properly juiced, managed to avoid the disease altogether.
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Flickr / TheGiantVermin
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The Food and Drug Administration’s expert panel has recommended the agency ban Vicodin and Percocet. Both drugs contain acetaminophen, which is known to cause liver damage. The panel also recommended reducing the standard doses of over-the-counter acetaminophen products, such as Tylenol.
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Tired of making machines that beat humans at chess, IBM is prepping a computer competitor for “Jeopardy,” which makes sense since Alex Trebek himself is computer-generated. Japanese researchers, meanwhile, have created walking goo.
Posted on Apr 28, 2009
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Flickr / just clicked
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Turns out polar bears aren’t the only land mammals struggling with global warming. Many of the world’s most-used rivers, from the Colorado to the Ganges, have been losing water for the last 50 years. So, in addition to coping with floods, storms, deserts and mass extinction, we could all die of thirst. Happy Earth Day.
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Flickr / rubberpaw
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This generation’s Albert Einstein has been hospitalized for a chest infection and is said to be “very ill,” though a spokesman later said he was comfortable. The world-renowned physicist suffers from Lou Gehrig’s disease, a degenerative disorder that few survive more than 10 years after diagnosis. Hawking, 67, first developed symptoms of the disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, in the early 1960s.
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global-warming.accuweather.com
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The president’s new science adviser tells ABC News, “We don’t have the luxury ... of ruling any approach off the table” in the fight against global climate change. Geoengineering, once the province of science fiction and climate eccentrics, may now be necessary. One approach involves blasting sulfur into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays.
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By Marie Cocco — A court ruling offers a chilling compendium of accounts by doctors and other FDA professionals who were routinely thwarted as they tried to make the “morning after” pill available, especially to teenagers.
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AP photo / M. Spencer Green
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By Chris Hedges — The methods used to attain what we want, we are told by reality television programs, business schools and self-help gurus, are irrelevant. Success, always defined in terms of money and power, is its own justification. Our moral collapse is as terrifying, and as dangerous, as our economic collapse.
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By Ellen Goodman — Since the 1980s, more than a half-million children have been created through in vitro fertilization. There are also about a half-million leftover embryos.
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Rob Young
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Despite the apparent reality that it’s not possible to precisely quantify everything under the sun, particularly when it comes to human behavior, the worrisome trend of “quants”—experts from physics and other scientific fields—infiltrating Wall Street firms to apply their skills to the stock market is still in effect.
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White House / Chuck Kennedy
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Barack Obama officially reversed his predecessor’s ban on federally funded stem cell research on Monday, promising to “vigorously support scientists who pursue this research.” The president also said his White House would restore “scientific integrity to government decision making.” Good luck with that.
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NASA / JPL
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NASA’s first effort to loft a satellite to help scientists determine where carbon dioxide is produced and stored around the globe ended in failure when the $270 million spacecraft crashed near Antarctica.
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SF Chroncile / Lance Iversen
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The key word being had: The new secretary of energy, Nobel Prize-winning Steven Chu, is making waves in the policy community with his daunting comments about climate change. Chu warns that the farms of California, the nation’s leading agricultural producer, could vanish by the end of this century if steps to slow global warming are not taken.
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NASA
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NASA scientists have discovered regularly replenished supplies of methane gas on the Red Planet. That raises two possibilities: The gas could be formed by geologic activity or, as anyone who has spent time around cows can tell you, it could be a sign of life.
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Lou Dobbs is diversifying his nonsense portfolio. The anti-immigrant poster boy has taken up the now-passé fight against climate science. In this clip, Dobbs refers to “many scientists” and “just the facts” as he tries to pin climate change on something he calls the “solar sunspot activity cycle.”
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By Ellen Goodman — “Virginity pledges” are one of the ways that government officials measure whether abstinence-only education is “working.” They count the pledges as proof that teens will abstain. It turns out that this is like counting New Year’s resolutions as proof that you lost 10 pounds.
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cdc.gov
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While heart disease remains the No. 1 killer of people in the U.S., researchers have found that we can help explain a large part of these cases through one’s genetic makeup. In fact, one in five white people are believed to have the “blood pressure gene,” where the genetic variance that controls salt in the kidneys changes to affect individuals’ blood pressure.
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The president-elect rolled out his major energy appointments Monday, among them Nobel prize-winning physicist Steven Chu. That choice, Obama said, “should send a signal to all that my administration will value science. We will make decisions based on the facts, and we understand that facts demand bold action.”
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Thinking of whipping up another tuna casserole? You may change your mind after reading this convincing expose by Jane M. Hightower, a San Francisco doctor.
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Flickr / Oop
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The chemical BPA is common in plastic products such as baby bottles and food containers, despite concerns among scientists and environmentalists about its safety. The FDA has defended BPA use and recently turned to an outside panel for backup. That group of scientists, however, ended up criticizing the agency’s guidelines.
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By Ellen Goodman — A cohort of entrepreneurs and scientists is the cutting edge of the Personal Genome Project. In an act of altruism and/or exhibitionism, the PGP-10 have put their medical records, traits and genetic codes on the Web where all the scientists, paparazzo and peeping Toms can see them.
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