Yet one more reason to avoid childhood obesity: kids who are overweight or obese are more likely to have allergic reactions. The article reviews a study conducted on the subject, and briefly explains the conclusions, which are actually inconclusive--the author of the study just says that it's one more reason to prevent childhood obesity.
This is an interesting article about those people who can recognize a face out of a crowd. The author cites a number of sources, including the author of the study about the "super-recognizers." It discusses how people recognize faces differently, and compares it to prosopagnosia, or "face blindness."
This article illustrates the issue of food insecurity and the benefits of something as simple as a community garden. The author uses the story of an older South African woman and her township with their struggles to obtain fresh vegetables to explain how a very poor area can use community gardens to help a large number of people.
With the amount of media coverage of the swine flu, it's hard to decipher what we actually need to know. News stations, newspapers, news websites, and blogs are all talking about it and it can get a bit overwhelming; Kurtz gives interesting insight to the coverage and how it affects our perception of the extent of the outbreak.
It's interesting to see how new media and technology is being used in a worldwide epidemic, and this article looks at how Twitter has affected the attention of the swine flu epidemic. The reporter was able to look at how people are getting their information and whether Twitter is effective in this type of situation.
With all the controversy surrounding corn syrup lately, it's hard to get the facts straight--especially with the Corn Refiners Association's recent commercials claiming that it's basically the same as regular sugar. This article describes a study done by researchers at UC Davis, headed by a professor of nutrition there, who explored the health effects of fructose, glucose, and sucrose. The chair of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health and an obesity researcher at the Obesity Research Center in the University of Cincinnati are also sources.
The journalist wrote the article in a way that made the science of predicting earthquakes understandable and interesting. Several examples of earthquake predictions are explained, as well as how certain human activity can cause them. The sources that are referred to are reputable, including a professor of geophysics at UC Berkeley, a research scientist at Columbia University, and a seismologist at the United States Geological Survey.
As someone who has been in many earthquakes, including a pretty big one (6.8), it was interesting to read about what scientists have to say about predicting them. The bottom line? We still don't exactly know how to.
This article gives a brief look into one aspect of carbon sequestration. Both sides are briefly discussed, as well as certain repercussions.
Re-training our sweet tooth does seem to be the simplest approach, but it will be hard to get companies that produce items with high sugar contents on board, since high-fructose corn syrups is one of the cheapest sweeteners. Individuals will have to be the ones to do the re-training themselves by avoiding products with a high sugar content--for now, at least.