Nobody dreams of growing up and landing a low-paying job in New Jersey making chemicals used in shampoos and hair gels. And on those long, tedious days back in 1991 when a 24-year-old lab technician named Patrick Arnold stood alone in a room stirring thickening agents into smelly vats of goo, there was plenty of time to reflect on the twists of fate that had condemned him to work in a place where “nothing interesting ever happened,” in a job that was “just going nowhere.”
It took months to find the way out, but the path was there in front of him all along. Arnold was an avid weight lifter, cursed with an average build that had long ago stopped cooperating with his efforts to get bigger. Even so, every night after work he would head to one of several gyms where he pumped iron and talked shop with other muscleheads. The conversation would often turn to anabolic steroids. Arnold had majored in chemistry at the University of New Haven, and those weight-room discussions got him thinking.
One afternoon after starting the day’s reactions at work, Arnold marched down the hall to the chemistry library on his floor and looked up the molecular structures of the steroids mentioned in his muscle magazines. Anabolic steroids, which are essentially synthetic testosterone, had only just been declared controlled substances, so there was still an awful lot of information available about them.
Read more HERE.
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Consumer Reports “Product reviews and Ratings on cars, appliances, electronics and more from Consumer Reports.”
The sun rotates on its axis once every 25.38 Earth days or 609.12 hours. – Provided by RandomHistory.com
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Why it’s called dope…
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Colorado College band Bill Nye and the Science Guys, featuring the man himself. The band is unrelated to Mr. Nye, but are huge fans. He was in the Colorado Springs area and wanted to do a gig with the Science Guys, and the rest is history.
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Psychedelic Spring: A new Grateful Dead documentary gives Deadheads a reason to tune in and turn on
Every spring, I listen to the Grateful Dead with fresh ears, not to the exclusion of everything else, but close to it. (I’m not alone in this. How many people in the Northeast associate the Dead’s music with thaw, both literal and spiritual?)
Despite the mild winter, the attraction this year is stronger than ever, and it’s timely to have several new Dead distractions to chew on; Spotify now streams every excellent studio album (and the bad ones), Dick’s Picks and the Grateful Dead Download series entries, further enabling total immersion. (Dusting off fourth-generation audience recordings on cassette is no longer necessary.) There’s a newer archival series, Dave’s Picks (the most recent release is from Hartford, 7/31/74), and the complete recordings of the Europe ’72 run can be had as well, if you’ve got ample scratch burning a hole in your pocket.
For more visual folks, a complete, previously unreleased show, recorded at the Alpine Valley Music Theatre on July 18, 1989 – crackling with energy and featuring a slimmed-down, fighting weight Jerry Garcia – airs in more than 550 theaters nationwide on April 19. Audiences will view the two-and-a-half hour concert – “Sugar Magnolia,” “Dear Mr. Fantasy,” the “Hey Jude Medley” and all – in its entirety among like-minded Deadheads.
Read more HERE.
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Researchers Say Breast Cancer Not 1 Disease But 10
In what is being hailed as a landmark study on the genetics of breast cancer, researchers concluded that the disease has 10 distinct subtypes. They say that breast cancer should now be considered an umbrella term for a group of diseases rather than a single malady. The findings could allow scientists to develop more effective treatments precisely tailored to target the specific tumor type. Whereas breast cancers are currently classified according to the presence of certain biomarkers, like estrogen receptors, the new research examines the genetics of the tumor cells and categorizes them according to the genes driving their growth. More …
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Karen X. Chang quit Microsoft this week after three years working on Excel code. Of course, as an amateur musician, she chose to offer her resignation to her team in a song.
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Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill, 1885 William Notman studios
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How much do we know about the birth of Islam? Much less than we think, argues the popular historian Tom Holland in his new book, In the Shadow of the Sword.
In Holland’s opinion, the Quran was written long after the death of Muhammad, Mecca is not necessarily the birthplace of the Prophet and modern Muslims’ reverence for their holy writings stops them from confronting the texts’ dubious historical origins.
Bryan Appleyard has described the conclusion of In the Shadow of the Sword as “seismic”; he wrote in the Sunday Times that “Holland’s book leaves almost no aspect of the traditional story of Islam intact”. Another reviewer likened its treatment of the Quran to Dan Brown’s Christianity-as-conspiracy in The Da Vinci Code, “though with a little more class”.
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Early on a drab afternoon in January, a dozen third graders from the working-class suburb of Chicago Heights, Ill., burst into the Mac Lab on the ground floor of Washington-McKinley School in a blur of blue pants, blue vests and white shirts. Minutes later, they were hunkered down in front of the Apple computers lining the room’s perimeter, hoping to do what was, until recently, considered impossible: increase their intelligence through training.
“Can somebody raise their hand,” asked Kate Wulfson, the instructor, “and explain to me how you get points?”
On each of the children’s monitors, there was a cartoon image of a haunted house, with bats and a crescent moon in a midnight blue sky. Every few seconds, a black cat appeared in one of the house’s five windows, then vanished. The exercise was divided into levels. On Level 1, the children earned a point by remembering which window the cat was just in. Easy. But the game is progressive: the cats keep coming, and the kids have to keep watching and remembering.
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Idleness—that beautiful, historically encumbered word. Beautiful because childhood is its first sanctuary and still somehow inheres in its three easy syllables—and who among us doesn’t sway toward the thought of it, often, conjuring what life might be like if it were still a play of appetites and inclinations rather than a roster of the duties and oughts that fill our calendar—indeed, make it necessary that we keep a calendar at all? Encumbered because the word has never not carried the taint of its associations. Idle hands, the idle rich, the downturns that idle workers. Idleness has been branded the obverse of industry, a slap in the face to all healthy ambition. So-and-so is a layabout, a ne’er-do-well, an idler. But for all that, we have not made the word unbeautiful; there is a light at the core, to be remarked, gleaned from the righteous attributions of the anxiously busy.
It is a confusing concept, though, and to find that pure and valid strain, it would help to say what it is not. Idleness is not inertness, for example. Inertness is immobile, inattentive, somehow lacking potential. Neither is idleness quite laziness, for it does not convey disinclination. It is not torpor, or acedia—the so-called Demon of Noontide—nor is it any form of passive resistance, for these require an engagement of the will, and idleness is manifestly not about that. Gandhi was not promulgating idleness, nor was Bartleby the scrivener exhibiting it when he owned that he would “prefer not to.” Nor are we talking about the purged consciousness that Zen would aspire to, or any spiritually influenced condition: idleness is not prayer, meditation, or contemplation, though it may carry tonal shadings of some of these states.
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A documentary feature film about the unintended consequences of suburban sprawl.
It illustrates the importance of altering the course of how we develop our nation’s cities. It communicates the dangers of continuing to invest in the inefficient horizontal growth patterns of suburban communities, and details how they threaten to bankrupt the remaining wealth of our nation. It explores how the depletion of fossil fuels will impact this living arrangement, and investigates the viability of alternative energies that are currently available. This film sounds the alarm that the cheap fossil-fuel-dependent suburban American way of life is not just at risk. It is in peril!.
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In America, financial inequality has soared over the past few decades. But the issue has had surprisingly little political traction.
In America, financial inequality has soared over the past few decades. But the issue has had surprisingly little political traction.
The most striking change in American society in the past generation—roughly since Ronald Reagan was elected President—has been the increase in the inequality of income and wealth. Timothy Noah’s “The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It” (Bloomsbury), a good general guide to the subject, tells us that in 1979 members of the much discussed “one per cent” got nine per cent of all personal income. Now they get a quarter of it. The gains have increased the farther up you go. The top tenth of one per cent get about ten per cent of income, and the top hundredth of one per cent about five per cent. While the Great Recession was felt most severely by those at the bottom, the recovery has hardly benefitted them. In 2010, ninety-three per cent of the year’s gains went to the top one per cent.
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Polar Bears Did Not Descend From Brown Bears, DNA Study Indicates
Instead, according to a research team that looked at DNA samples from the two species and from black bears, the brown bear and polar bear ancestral lines have a common ancestor and split about 600,000 years ago.
The report, published online on Thursday in the journal Science, is the latest attempt to understand the surprisingly murky origins of one of the most familiar animals on earth, and a potent environmental symbol because it is losing the sea ice it depends on to a warming climate. Because of climate change, and threats from shipping, hunting and pollution, the polar bear is listed as “vulnerable,” one level below endangered, by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
The report comes to no conclusion about how sensitive the bears are to the current loss of the sea ice that they live on, and the evolutionary tale it presents can be read in different ways.
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The tiny box designed to help anyone make a call or get on the net from anywhere on the planet.
“I’m five years too early with everything. I don’t know if that’s a bug, or a feature, but it is what it is,” says Aaron Huslage with a laugh. He’s explaining to me how, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, he came up with the idea for tethr, a shoebox-sized set of hardware designed to help anyone get internet and phone connections from any spot on the planet.
At the time of the disaster, Huslage helped a group of volunteers build a working wireless network from Gulfport, Mississippi, to the Louisiana border. Using donated equipment, expertise and time, the group managed to create a network that provided free internet and phone service to between 70,000 and 80,000 people for half a year following the hurricane. Huslage did most of his work on the project remotely as he was living at the other end of the country in Portland, Oregon at the time. “I was mostly just wrangling things,” he says. “Making sure people were going where they were supposed to go and that things were delivered to the right place at the right time.” But he did eventually go down to the Gulf Coast for a week to work the project.
Read more HERE.
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What about men? That was the first thought that came to mind after reading Katie Roiphe’s Newsweek cover story on the BDSM-themed “Fifty Shades of Grey” phenomenon, in which she controversially speculated that women’s current fascination with the book’s story line of female submission was the result of the “pressure of economic participation” and the “hard work” of striving for equality. The desire for submission is hardly something unique to women.
Who understands this better than professional dominatrixes? With so many speculating this week on Roiphe’s article, I decided to hand the microphone over to women with a unique perspective on the dynamics in power and play.
Several said that Roiphe is actually on to something when she talks about submission as an escape from life’s stresses — only, this reasonable point is overwritten by her wrongheaded focus on women and the impact of feminism. Roiphe wonders whether there is “something exhausting about the relentless responsibility of a contemporary woman’s life … all that strength and independence and desire and going out into the world,” and suggests “that, for some, the more theatrical fantasies of sexual surrender offer a release, a vacation, an escape from the dreariness and hard work of equality.” What about the exhausting, relentless responsibility of contemporary people’s lives?
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Scientists have discovered proof that the evolution of intelligence and larger brain sizes can be driven by cooperation and teamwork, shedding new light on the origins of what it means to be human. The study appears online in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B and was led by scientists at Trinity College Dublin: PhD student, Luke McNally and Assistant Professor Dr Andrew Jackson at the School of Natural Sciences in collaboration with Dr Sam Brown of the University of Edinburgh. The researchers constructed computer models of artificial organisms, endowed with artificial brains, which played each other in classic games, such as the ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’, that encapsulate human social interaction. They used 50 simple brains, each with up to 10 internal processing and 10 associated memory nodes. The brains were pitted against each other in these classic games.
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“The world’s most important story”
This is the text of a speech given by Jonathan Watts at the 2012 China Environmental Press Awards in Beijing on April 10. The annual awards are co-organised by chinadialogue and The Guardian, in cooperation with Sina and with the support of the SEE Foundation. They aim to recognise and promote outstanding environmental journalism in China.
It is a very great pleasure to speak to you today for professional and personal reasons.
Professionally, I am delighted because the China Environmental Press Awards are now strongly established after three years and the partnership between The Guardian, chinadialogue and Sina to organise this event has moved from strength to strength. On behalf of The Guardian Media Group, let me extend our appreciation to our excellent partners, and to all of you for participating.
Personally, this is also a special moment. I will be leaving China later this month, and I would like to take this opportunity to share some reflections on my nine years in China. In essence, what I am going to say is that I believe you are covering the most important story in the world, but that story is too often shunted into a cul-de-sac. It is necessary to be more assertive and to take the key issues into other areas – economics, politics, foreign affairs.
That is a bold statement. I want to explain how I reached such a viewpoint. It is mainly as a result of working in China since 2003, first as a general news correspondent up until the 2008 Olympics and then as Asia environment correspondent.
I did not come to China expecting to become an environmental writer.
Read more HERE.
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Scientists say the notoriously dry continent of Africa is sitting on a vast reservoir of groundwater.
They argue that the total volume of water in aquifers underground is 100 times the amount found on the surface.
The team have produced the most detailed map yet of the scale and potential of this hidden resource. >Writing in the journal Environmental Research Letters , they stress that large scale drilling might not be the best way of increasing water supplies.
Across Africa more than 300 million people are said not to have access to safe drinking water. >Demand for water is set to grow markedly in coming decades due to population growth and the need for irrigation to grow crops. Africa aquifer map
Freshwater rivers and lakes are subject to seasonal floods and droughts that can limit their availability for people and for agriculture. At present only 5% of arable land is irrigated.
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Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
In October 1861 Alfred Lewis Castleman, a surgeon in the Fifth Regiment of the Wisconsin Volunteers, described the first death in his regiment. It was not from battle. “The poor fellow died of Nostalgia (home-sickness), raving to the last breath about wife and children,” he wrote. “Deaths from this cause are very frequent in the army.”
While today “nostalgia” is used to describe the longing for a lost time, the word originally signified acute homesickness, a condition widely regarded as a dangerous and often deadly illness. Doctors maintained that it could kill, either by worsening existing maladies or by causing its own physical symptoms, which included heart palpitations, lesions, damage to internal organs, “hectic fever,” bowel problems and incontinence.
A Civil War veteran described nostalgia’s effects in 1866, noting how it “fastens upon the breast of its prey, and sucks, vampyre-like, the breath of his nostrils. Many a heroic spirit after braving death at the cannon’s mouth … has at length succumbed unresistingly to this vampyre, Nostalgia.” During the Civil War, with close to three million men away from home and therefore potential victim to its ravages, Americans both on the battlefield and on the home front worried about nostalgia.
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I am a sleep fucker. Like everything else I’m self-conscious about, I first heard about my disorder from my girlfriend. We had just moved in together and, of course, I didn’t believe her at first. My girlfriend, after all, exhibits all the hallmarks of paranoid personality disorder. Sure, I left the toilet seat up. Sure, I left my dirty socks on the floor. Sure, I felt you up in the wee hours of the morning and then turned over as if nothing happened.
Couldn’t it be, I thought, that she was just dreaming about me initiating sex in the middle of night? Or maybe, I theorized, she was sleepwalking. “I wasn’t sleepwalking,” she insisted, looking at me like she regretted our entire living situation.
A few nights later, I woke up to find myself fondling my girlfriend’s breasts. “It’s 4 am,” she said. “What are you doing?” For once, I didn’t have an answer.
Read more HERE.
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Creative Dad Takes Crazy Photos Of Daughters
Originally posted 2012-04-20 11:10:28. Republished by Blog Post Promoter