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Is America fascist?

A while ago, almost exactly two years back, I asked Is the Bush Administration fascist? I think we can now safely say it is, at least in the style of Mussolini and Franco. Now Echidne of the Snakes has a series of articles up on whether the Republicans have so poisoned American politics that America itself is now fascist. Our hope, at least outside the US for those who like America, is that an Obama administration will roll back the worst excesses of the Rovian Extremists. But Echidne asks how the American republic can be protected from cronyism, profiteering and the corruption of the past…

Hey readers! What basic concepts do you want to know in my field?

If you've been perusing ScienceBlogs.com over the last week or two, you'll note that some bloggers are trying to make their sites even more accessible to the casual reader by introducing a description of basic concepts within their respective fields. I used to teach a 60-90 min lecture to the public in one of the "Mini-Med School" public education programs that have sprung up at medical schools around the world, condensing key concepts in pharmacology and drug action into bite-sized morsels. Topics included: What is a drug? Where do drugs come from? Why does a drug work for some people and…

Casual Fridays: How do you use your calendar?

Just a few months ago, I finally convinced Greta to convert her old paper appointment calendar to an electronic version. Now instead of writing her appointments down in a little book, she enters it in her computer or her PDA. It's now possible for me to see her schedule on my computer, and vice versa. But even though we're both computerized, we use our calendars differently. I need an alarm to remind me of any event, but Greta simply checks her calendar every day to remind herself of her plans for the day. This leads to endless possibilities for confusion. She might enter an item on the…

Vote for your favorite CogDaily posts of 2007

Earlier this week we asked readers which CogDaily posts we should submit to the Open Laboratory anthology. We didn't get many suggestions, and commenter Keely had a guess as to why: Perhaps what would be more helpful is to post links to the articles YOU were thinking about, and we could sort of vote on which of those we liked best. Your question as it stands now is a little broad. This is perhaps why you've had relatively few responses. Okay, we'll do it. Here are our top posts from the past year (we couldn't use Keely's nomination since that was originally posted in 2006). You can vote for…

Casual Fridays: Sports versus the arts!

Are sports fans ignorant about the arts? Do opera buffs have trouble distinguishing a fastball from a slider? Greta has never been much of a sports fan, but she loves taking in the arts, cultural events, and Broadway shows. I know lots of sports fans who've never heard an opera. Are sports and fine art mutually exclusive? If this is a rule, there's at least one exception: I love sports, but I also enjoy visiting museums and listening to the symphony. But maybe I'm not as uncommon as it seems. Maybe lots of people enjoy both fine arts and sports. Now's our chance to find out. This week's…

Greta: Now fully professorial!

Greta has been promoted to the rank of full professor! Congratulations, Greta, you've completed your ascent of the mountain of academe: When I mentioned this news to a friend at our Sunday pick-up soccer game, he asked me "so... what does that mean?" Good question. First of all, it means she gets a raise. That's always a good thing, right? But it doesn't mean she gets tenure: at most schools, tenure accompanies the promotion from assistant to associate professor. Greta got tenure seven years ago. At Davidson, it means that she is eligible to participate in certain committees, with greater…

The psychology of criminals

Psychology Today has a trio of articles relating to crime and justice. The first article is possibly the most interesting. It offers some compelling data on the frequency of false confessions: Although it is difficult, if not impossible, to estimate the number of false confessions nationwide, a review of one decade's worth of murder cases in a single Illinois county found 247 instances in which the defendants' self-incriminating statements were thrown out by the court or found by a jury to be insufficiently convincing for conviction. The article suggests that low-IQ or drug-addicted suspects…

Low IQ leads to a short life?

The BPS Research Digest is reporting on a new article by Satoshi Kanozawa, who claims that the poor economic conditions and short life expectancy in many developing countries can be explained by low IQ. The economic historian Richard Wilkinson has argued that economic inequality leads to shorter life expectancy because being at the bottom of the social pile puts people under prolonged stress. But Kanazawa rejects this hypothesis. He argues his data show that once population IQ is taken into account, a country's average life expectancy is no longer related to economic development and…

Animals, numbers, and suicide: Quick links from around the web

An excellent article in American Scientist compares "animal math" with math ability in infants. Some similarities and limitations emerge. While rhesus monkeys appear to successfully understand concepts such as 1+1=2 or 1+2=3, 2+2=4 appears beyond their ken. Five-month-old babies show about the same level of expertise. The always-excellent BPS Research Digest has an article on the differences between people who think about suicide and those who attempt suicide. While suicidal thoughts are common, a much smaller group actually attempts suicide. There are gender differences -- men who feel…

Sex, women, and brain scans

I've just got time for two quick links on women's brains and sex. First, Vaugan at MindHacks points to a new study showing that women's brains respond more quickly to erotic images than non-erotic images. Now all we need is a study on how quickly women can respond when their lovers glance at other attractive women. Second, Jake at Pure Pedantry cites a preprint article about PET scans of women's brains during sexual climax. At climax, activity fell in nearly the entire brain. For men, brain activity at climax was undetectable. In the comments, Shelley warns that this is a pre-printed article…

Is FEMA Snoozing Again?

The big story about Tropical Storm Chris, at least from a U.S.-centric perspective, is that it could wind up hitting Florida or intensifying in the Gulf of Mexico, and then going God knows where. AccuWeather put that plainly with its latest report: Those residing in South Florida and the Keys need to monitor the storm's approach carefully. There is a good chance that Chris will be churning through the Straits of Florida over the weekend and could bring strong winds and some heavy rainfall. Chris should then move into the Gulf of Mexico by early next week. It is possible Chris' eventual…

Barak Obama on Hurricanes (and Tornadoes!) and GW

The junior senator from Illinois recently gave a long speech on global warming, which included the following: And while the situation on the land may look ugly, what's going on in the oceans is even worse. Hurricanes and typhoons thrive in warm water, and as the temperature has risen, so has the intensity of these storms. In the last thirty-five years, the percentage of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes has doubled, and the wind speed and duration of these storms has jumped 50%. A hurricane showed up in the South Atlantic recently when scientists said it could never happen. Last year, Japan set a…

The "Central Debate" Over Global Warming Today

Juliet Eilperin, too, had a front page story in the Post yesterday about global warming. Alas, it wasn't as juicy as the Times piece about James Hansen (though it included a bit about him). It was mainly about the future risk of dangerous or abrupt climate change, but I found myself puzzled by the story framing introduced in the very first paragraph: Now that most scientists agree human activity is causing Earth to warm, the central debate has shifted to whether climate change is progressing so rapidly that, within decades, humans may be helpless to slow or reverse the trend. Isn't Eilperin…

Launching Biological Samples with Sound

At first glance, this video might look like it's playing in reverse. But don't worry, these stroboscopic images were patched together in the right order. Courtesy of Labcyte, Inc. The video shows a technique called acoustic drop ejection (ADE) - an idea based on sending ultrasonic waves near the surface of a liquid to eject very small droplets. First demonstrated in the early 1920s, ADE is now being used by researchers to help them study extremely small biological molecules - like proteins and viruses - with x-rays at machines like Brookhaven's future National Synchrotron Light Source…

RHICrolled: Get Low

This is the first in an occassional series about Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or, as it's affectionately called, RHIC. Lil John has a theme song for RHIC's latest experimental run. Sorry, sorry! I couldn't resist. RHIC's actual ditty of the moment goes more like this. (Clean version, of course, RHIC doesn't want any soap in its linac). RHIC, which has a maximum potential energy of 200 billion electron volts (GeV), collided gold ions at energies as low as 7.7 GeV this spring -- the lowest ever achieved in the machine. But why go so low? Even at low energies, the gold-gold…

On Bush's 'Blue' Legacy

Yesterday, President George W. Bush set aside 195,000 square miles of Pacific ocean habitat under executive authority granted by the Antiquities Act. He created three new national monuments which ban seafloor mining, most commercial fishing, and limit recreational and indigenous harvest. The new areas include the waters surrounding Howland, Baker, Jarvis and Wake islands; Rose, Palmyra and Johnston atolls; Kingman Reef; the three northernmost Mariana Islands; and the deep seafloor of the Mariana Trench. And with a stroke of his pen, W. protected more ocean than any other political leader in…

Tarzan, Jane, And The Space Between

According to John Tierney: It looks as if personality differences between men and women are smaller in traditional cultures like India's or Zimbabwe's than in the Netherlands or the United States. A husband and a stay-at-home wife in a patriarchal Botswanan clan seem to be more alike than a working couple in Denmark or France. The more Venus and Mars have equal rights and similar jobs, the more their personalities seem to diverge. These findings are so counterintuitive that some researchers have argued they must be because of cross-cultural problems with the personality tests. But after…

Sex In Congress

Here on Scienceblogs, many of us ponder the gender disparity in the sciences, but the gap goes well beyond the ivory towers into another area we discuss at The Intersection worth exploring: Congress: women hold 87, or 16.3%, of the 535 seats in the 110th US Congress -- 16, or 16.0%, of the 100 seats in the Senate and 71, or 16.3%, of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives. In addition, three women serve as Delegates to the House from Guam, the Virgin Islands and Washington, DC. So if half the population has about 16% representation across the board on Capitol Hill, what's going on?…

My Review of Expelled

It has just gone up over at Science Progress. Since there are certain things you cannot really say on ScienceBlogs any longer, I will only quote here the parts of the review that are ideologically palatable: Okay, let's get this out of the way first: Ben Stein's new movie, Expelled, is a deeply dishonest piece of propaganda. Pretty much everything in it is a sham, from the quality of its intellectual and scientific arguments to the nonsense premise that Stein is going on a learning odyssey to find out what's really happening in the world of "Big Science" (hint: repression of dissent). In…

The Outlook for Global Warming, Post-Super Tuesday

Clinton, Obama, and McCain have a lot in common on climate, but also perhaps a lot less than you might think. So, see here for what I think a race between two of them might mean for global warming policy. An excerpt: Clinton's and Obama's cap and trade plans would auction off 100 percent of the initial pollution permits, using the proceeds for needed causes like investing in clean energy technologies that will reduce carbon emissions. In contrast, the Liberman-Warner bill - closer to McCain's favored approach - would auction off only a small percentage of allowances initially. Major emitters…

U.S. Media Notices Cyclone Sidr. Finally.

It's about time. It's past time. Bay of Bengal cyclones have previously killed tens or even hundreds of thousands from storm surges and flooding. While those of us watching Sidr develop have been sounding alarm, the U.S. media has all but ignored an impending tragedy. Today the storm made landfall and they've finally noticed. While Chris and I don't understand why it took so long to make top headlines, we're thankful that collective American attention is now focused intently on this catastrophic storm hitting the most vulnerable place on earth. Now that here in the U.S. we're being…

University of Wyoming Cuts Paleontology

It's a difficult time for paleontologists. Young scientists struggle to find a place in an ever-dwindling pool of jobs and academic positions, and established scientists can sometimes have the rug pulled right out from under them. This latter misfortune befell the paleontologists at the University of Wyoming. Due to a $18.3 million cut to the Wyoming's budget the museum at the University of Wyoming will be closed and the two paleontologists who work there will be laid off (in addition to 43 other jobs cut at the school). This is truly a shame. The museum is not only essential for research,…

Special Edition of Evolution: Education and Outreach!

In case you haven't heard, the latest edition of the journal Evolution: Education and Outreach is almost entirely about transitional fossils. There's something for everyone, from synapsids to onychophorans, so make sure you check it out! My only complaint, though, is that there is not a paper about early hominins or human evolution. Human evolution is often ignored or given short shrift when we talk about transitional fossils, yet the past several decades have seen an explosion in new types of extinct humans. I have no idea why such a paper does not appear in the collection (perhaps one was…

Next Monday: An All-"Ida" Blog Carnival

It has been nearly a week since Darwinius, a 47-million-year-old primate heralded as the "missing link", burst on the public scene. (See some of my previous posts about the fossil here, here, and here.) Nicknamed "Ida", the fossil has already spurred comments from nearly all corners of the science blogohedron, but with documentaries about her airing tonight (USA) and tomorrow (UK) there is still plenty to talk about. That's why I am organizing a one-time-only blog carnival all about Ida. Whether you want to tackle the media hype, the more technical aspects of her discovery, or something else…

Speaking Science 2.0 Going Strong...And Other Stuff

Along with Nisbet, I continue to give various versions of the Speaking Science 2.0 talk frequently--even though we are not always so good about updating the Speaking Science 2.0 webpage. Um, intern, anybody? Oh wait, that was my little sister, and now she's back at college... ...anyways, we're doing two more presentations together this week. The first will be in New York, sponsored by the Center for Inquiry--that's Wednesday night. Details here. If you missed us at the New York Academy of Sciences in June, this is the next Big Apple trip. The next talk, Thursday, will be at Bucknell…

The Schizo 2007 Atlantic Hurricane Season

[The rapidly intensifying Hurricane Lorenzo makes landfall.] I've done my latest Daily Green "Storm Pundit" post, about how this hurricane season is in some ways a lion, in others a lamb. Excerpt: In short, not even a third of the named storms have attained hurricane strength this year, whereas over the previous four years, something much closer to a half have become at least this strong. (Note, however, that this year's Tropical Storm Karen may be upgraded to hurricane status in post-season reanalysis.) One reason for the relative quietude is that despite La Nina conditions in the Pacific…

Crazy Atlantic, Crazy Dean

Here are some pretty staggering factoids I recently compiled. For the Atlantic: * 8 Cat 5 hurricanes in last 10 years (Mitch, Isabel, Ivan, Emily, Katrina, Rita, Wilma, Dean) * 7 Cat 5 hurricanes in last 5 years (Isabel, Ivan, Emily, Katrina, Rita, Wilma, Dean) * By pressure, 6 of 10 most intense recorded Atlantic hurricanes in last 10 years (Mitch, Ivan, Katrina, Rita, Wilma, Dean) * By pressure, 5 of the 10 most intense recorded Atlantic hurricanes in last 4 years (Ivan, Katrina, Rita, Wilma, Dean) For Dean: * Total insured damage going to be in the billions--latest estimate I've seen…

Triple Threat: Physician-Nobel Laureate Scientist-SENATOR?!

Exciting news out of my very own little North Carolina town.. Last week, Dr. Peter Agre announced he'll evaluate a run for the Senate in 2008 as a Democrat from Minnesota. (The seat is currently held by Republican Senator Norm Coleman). Well everyone loves a Renaissance man and Dr. Agre has that 'IT' factor! He won me over by being outspoken on the need to improve science and math education and advance and strengthen science. After more than 25 years at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, he became Vice Chancellor for Science and Technology and James B. Duke Professor of…

Can someone tackle the Dinocerata next, please?

An illustration of a Brontotherium mount on display at the AMNH. Notice the healed rib. From Osborn, H.F.; Wortman, J.L.; Peterson, O.A. (1895) "Perissodactyls of the Lower Miocene White River beds." Bulletin of the AMNH; Vol. 7 (12), pp. 343-375. Brontotheres have long been among the most recognizable of ancient mammals, even appearing in recent films like the Ice Age series, yet scientifically they haven't received very much recent attention. While they were of great interest to pioneering paleontologists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the last "great" work on them was…

Medicare Part D Administrative Expenses

Yeah.  Private companies are always more efficient that government programs.  According to a href="http://www.commondreams.org/news2007/1015-06.htm">recent study by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee: The private Part D insurers report administrative expenses, sales costs, and profits of almost $5 billion in 2007 -- including $1 billion in profits alone. The administrative costs of the privatized Part D program are almost six times higher than the administrative costs of the traditional Medicare program. Another tidbit: The drug price rebates negotiated by the…

Jim Holt on Iraqi Oil

He alleges that the war in Iraq was botched for a reason: it will be easier for us to steal their oil if they do not have a functioning government.  Some excerpts: Indeed, the US may be ‘stuck’ precisely where Bush et al want it to be, which is why there is no ‘exit strategy’. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion. The draft law that the US has written for the Iraqi congress would cede…

Deceptive Genitals

Sorry, no bizarre sex organ photos this time.  But the story is interesting from an evolutionary standpoint. href="http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/09/070925-bat-bugs.html">Bat Bugs Evolved Fake Genitals to Avoid Sex Injuries     Anne Minard for National Geographic News September 25, 2007 For African bat bugs, the battle of the sexes is quite literally a violent struggle—and now it appears that the bugs are using gender-bending tactics to defend themselves. Bat bugs are small, reddish-brown parasites related to bed bugs that suck the blood of bats and sometimes bite…

Mitt Romney's National Finance Committee co-Chairman

Mitt Romney's national finance committee (ex-) co-chairman, title="Forbes article" href="http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/08/09/ap4006058.html" rel="tag">Alan Fabian, is in trouble.  He's been indicted for mail fraud, money laundering, bankruptcy fraud, perjury and obstruction of justice.   Of course, he is innocent until proven guilty.  The story here, as href="http://mediamatters.org/items/200709010002?f=h_latest">Media Matters points out, is that the problems with a donor to the Hillary Clinton campaign have been aired repeatedly on all the major networks.  The problems…

Biology is Cool: Infrared Signaling by Squirrels

I just love things like this.  An open-access article in title="Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences">PNAS reports on a previously-unknown method of signaling employed by squirrels.   The squirrels have a way of enhancing a tail-flagging movement with an IR signal.  The IR enhancement is optional.  It turns out they use it when confronted by rattlesnakes that are sensitive to infrared.   When confronted by snakes that are not IR-sensitive, they do not use the IR trick. The rattlesnakes that see the IR signal are more likely to adopt a defensive, as opposed to a predatory,…

A rocket-powered prosthetic arm

This mechanical prosthetic arm, developed by Michael Goldfarb and his colleagues of the Center for Intelligent Mechatronics at Vanderbilt University, is powered by a pencil-sized rocket that burns pressurized liquid hydrogen peroxide. The reaction, which is catalyzed by iridium-coated alumina granules, generates steam that forces the pistons in the arm to move up and down. Conventional prosthetic limbs are powered by batteries. Rockets were employed here as an alternative, because of the weight of batteries needed to power a prosthesis for any reasonable amount of time. The prototype…

A reader asks...

Can single neurons be replaced by artificial ones, perhaps nano-bots of some kind? No. Artificial neurons have not been developed. Could a cluster of neurons be replaced by an artificial cluster? No, but devices such as cochlear implants and the electrode arrays used for deep brain stimulation can perform the functions of groups of neurons. ...or perhaps hooked up to a computer which replicates their function? Some research groups have developed neuron-semiconductor interfaces which can communicate with neurons bidirectionally (i.e. artificial synapses). So, information from spontaneously-…

Sad News

I heard this morning that my grandfather died in his sleep last night. He had certainly lived a long life and had had the opportunity to travel across the country with my grandmother in their RV, for the past 15 years or so. Their pet projects involved Habitat for Humanity-type volunteering on various buildings, and they traveled from place to place looking to help where they were needed. Also about 15 years ago, my grandfather began experiencing heart problems and had a pacemaker installed. While he never tried to let it slow him down, eventually the years caught up with him and the last few…

Hooray for Atkins? Nope.

In a recent head-to-head test of four fad diets, apparently the Atkins diet resulted in the participants losing the most weight. The Atkins diet relies on the elimination of carbs in your diet, and encourages intake of protein and fats instead. However, there's more to the story: Women on the low-carb Atkins diet lost more weight than those on three other popular plans, but the dieters on all four programs dropped only modest amounts of weight and regained some of it within a year, a new study shows. Women ages 20 to 50 lost an average of 10.4 pounds on Atkins during a year-long period,…

Scientists are a heterogeneous mixture (perhaps even an emulsion?)

Janet has a very interesting post over at Adventures in Ethics, springboarding off Chris Mooney & Sheril Kirshenbaum's new book Unscientific America. She discusses a key concept that seems obvious, but constantly ends up being ignored by both pro-science and anti-science factions: scientists are not a monolithic interest group. (For one thing, we disagree about how and when to approach the public, and how conciliatory to be). Janet says, I think it's fair to say that scientists and other members of Team Science are not in total agreement about which segments of the public can be…

Layering light

Circling Around, 2008 Jean Gumpper Jean Gumpper's woodcut prints are mesmerizing. At first glance, the crisp edges and intricate detail are reminiscent of watercolor. But the works are actually pieced out of flat spots of block color, which gives them a stylized, minimalist, modern flavor - like gallery-quality IKEA. The final effect is one I've sometimes seen in quilts: the flatness of the colors and starkness of the edges combine to generate a sparkle and clarity in the complete piece, an illusion of motion through a brightly lit space. From the artist's statement: In my work as an…

Fixed?

Fixed (fawn) Lisa Black Lisa Black's hybrid clockwork animals are heartbreaking - especially the fawn and duckling. The title of her series, "Fixed," strikes just the right note of ambiguity. Is the fawn's state a travesty, or better than the alternative? Who did the fixing, and why? Via Brass Goggles PS - speaking of Goggles, have you seen Google's new Mail Goggles? It's an add-on for Gmail which is supposed to prevent you from sending drunk email messages late at night, by requiring you to do math before allowing you to send. The only problem is, the math looks too easy - I'm terrible at…

A stillness of stones

When was the last time you coveted something, but let prudence prevent self-indulgence - to your later regret? This summer I was gallery-hopping on Martha's Vineyard when I saw these wonderful stone neckpieces by artist Andrea Williams. I really, really wanted the round Kyuma Pendant, a smooth black tumbled stone cut in half and then made whole once more with a magnetic clasp. The stone can be closed in either an aligned (round) or misaligned (asymmetric) manner; in the aligned state the magnet looks like a decorative silver band, but in the misaligned state, the method of construction…

It could be worse, part II

We could be gamers. Oh, wait … some of us are! If you want to see the very worst of raging, testosterone-poisoned sexism, look to nerd-dominated gaming culture; I wouldn't be surprised to learn that a significant part of the current conflict in the skeptical movement comes from our large overlap with that segment of the tech-savvy, rather clueless collection of man-children who see all women as aliens who are fat, ugly, or slutty. I'm not heavily into gaming, but I do play a little World of Warcraft, poorly (it's easy, though, so my old-man reflexes can mostly cope). Mostly, I find the…

the Georgia Guidestones: if the world ends, they'll tell survivors how to do really obvious stuff

A recent CNN article points out that the Georgia Guidestones, a carved granite monument erected in 1980 by a mysterious donor obsessed with the possibility of civilization's destruction, wouldn't be all that useful to humankind's survivors: The center column has a slot through which the transit of the sun throughout the seasons can be observed, while a hole higher up focuses on Polaris, the north star. Another hole in the capstone focuses a beam of sunlight onto the central pillar at noon. Those features would allow the survivors of Christian's feared apocalypse to reproduce three of the…

In Support of Diversity in Science

It wasn't exactly a New Year's resolution, but Scibling Abel Pharmboy announced a new mission for Terra Sigillata this year: Terra Sigillata will broaden its focus area to become an open platform for scientific and career development issues specific to underrepresented or underserved minority groups as described in the US by the National Institutes of Health: African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Native Americans/Alaska Natives who maintain tribal affiliation or community attachment, Hawaiian Natives and natives of the U.S. Pacific Islands, persons with disabilities, and underserved groups…

Smarthistory: art history as conversation

Smarthistory is a wonderfully simple concept: landmark artworks presented with conversational narration (sometimes audio, sometimes video) by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker. Sometimes they focus on a single work, as a professor would in a lecture; in other tracks, they stand in a murmur-filled gallery and comment on the hubbub around them. I have friends who sound just like Zucker and Harris when you get them talking about art - relishing the give and take of ideas; happily tossing out half-formed hypotheses about intent and context; gently mocking art cliches, curation cliches, and the (…

Varmint delays plane

A squirrel running around the innards of the plane grounded a Dallas-Tokyo flight: An American Airlines flight made an unscheduled landing after pilots heard something skittering about in the wire-laden space over the cockpit. The airline blamed the emergency landing of the Tokyo-Dallas flight with 202 passengers on a stowaway squirrel. "You do not want a varmint up in the wiring areas and what-have-you on an airplane. You don't want anything up there," said John Hotard, spokesman for the Fort Worth, Texas-based airline. He said pilots feared the animal would chew through wiring or cause…

NY State Senator wants to ban iPods in cross walks

This will never end. Ever. There will always be some yo-yo who feels it necessary to protect me from reality: First it was cell phones in cars, then trans fats. Now, a new plan is on the table to ban gadget use while crossing city streets. We all seem to have one -- an iPod, a BlackBerry, a cell phone -- taking up more and more of our time, but can they make us too distracted to walk safely? Some people think so. If you use them in the crosswalk, your favorite electronic devices could be in the crosshairs. Legislation will be introduced in Albany on Wednesday to lay a $100 fine on…

Chimp cleans toilet poorly, falls asleep by fridge

Why do I love stories about monkeys so much: An escaped chimpanzee at the Little Rock Zoo raided a kitchen cupboard and did a little cleaning with a toilet brush before sedatives knocked her out on top of a refrigerator. The 120-pound primate, Judy, escaped yesterday into a service area when a zookeeper opened a door to her sleeping quarters, unaware the animal was still inside. As keepers tried to woo Judy back into her cage, she rummaged through a refrigerator where chimp snacks are stored. She opened kitchen cupboards, pulled out juice and soft drinks and took a swig from bottles she…

It isn't "Big Food," the problem is bad choices

Greg Beato in Reason: "It will take a grassroots effort of doctors, community leaders and consumers to force the government and the food industry to get those sugary foods out of mainstream American diets" [Robert] Lustig [of UCSF] told the San Francisco Chronicle. "Everyone's assuming you have a choice, but when your brain is starving, you don't have a choice.... Congress says you can't sue McDonald's for obesity because it's your fault. Except the thing is, when you don't have a choice, it's not your fault." ... ...forget "starving brains" and the notion that we have "no choice" in the…