How “stop-and-frisk” backfires

Young people who are randomly stopped for questioning by the police—even if they’ve done nothing wrong—are more likely to engage in criminal behavior later than those who aren’t stopped, a new study has found. University of Missouri researchers say that “stop-and-frisk” programs intended to deter crime may actually create more criminals. Researchers followed 2,600 students for seven years and recorded […]

Read more

Personalized Diets

Personalized Diets

For years the Federal Dietary Guidelines have handed out a blueprint to Americans for good nutrition.  As it turns out this may not be a good outline for all Americans.  People are different in all respects; even identical twins have different ways they respond to food. People have been told to follow the same diet as the next person. Now […]

Read more

Why the obese keep eating

Could obesity be treated as a form of drug addiction? A new study suggests that some overweight people may be addicted to eating in the same way that, say, a cocaine addict craves another hit of his favorite drug. Researchers at Yale University gave a small group of young women questionnaires to determine their levels of food addiction. Then they […]

Read more

Africa’s disappearing lions

Africa’s lions are dwindling toward extinction at an alarming rate, Duke University researchers say. Using new high-resolution satellite data from Google Earth, they’ve discovered that the savanna habitat that lions need to survive has shrunk by 75 percent over the past 50 years and is far more fragmented than conservationists previously realized. Over the same period, the lion population is […]

Read more

How Supervolcanoes Erupt

  Luckily for most of the U.S., the likelihood this eruption would happen is pretty low: about one in 100,000 any given year. If it did happen, it would be pretty devastating, though. “Thinking about a Yellowstone super eruption is like imagining a large asteroid hitting the Earth,” says Jacob Lowenstern, a research geologist with the USGS and Scientist-in-Charge of […]

Read more

Envying the lower castes

Suddenly everyone wants to be low-caste, said Badri Narayan. It used to be considered an extreme disadvantage to be in one of India’s oppressed castes or indigenous tribes. But decades of affirmative action and quota systems have changed all that. Now, many lower-middle castes are agitating to be reclassified as “more backward,” in effect “struggling to move down the ladder […]

Read more

Our culture’s worship of celebrity

It was in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age that the modern concept of celebrity was born, said George Packer. But if the worship of gaudy wealth and fame began in The Great Gatsby era, we’ve taken it to new, “perverse” heights in 21st-century America. Today, celebrity demigods dominate every field: There are celebrity chefs, bankers, computer engineers, chief executives, hip-hop […]

Read more
1 18 19 20 21 22 30