Three years ago I wrote an apology for not being a vegetarian or a vegan. There are three reasons given for favoring such a diet. One is moral. To eat meat is to use another sentient being for one’s own ends and to be part of the cruel factory farming system that exists in the US. The second is ecological, since using plants to feed animals results in roughly 90% of the energy used to produce plants being lost in the conversion to animal protein, which is a waste of resources. The third is for health since vegetables and fruits reportedly led to better health outcomes.
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CNN ran the story of Rukhsar Khatoon, a four-year old girl who is the last recorded case of polio in India. She contracted the disease in 2011 when she was just 18 months old. She had not been vaccinated against the disease but this was not a case of anti-vaxxer parents. They had held off vaccinating her because “she was a sickly child, in and out of hospital with liver infections and diarrhea” and “they thought it safer not to subject her to more medication.” They now bitterly blame themselves for her condition.
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Breaking free of addictions such as alcohol, drugs, and smoking is hard and very often people who seek to do so enroll in the many 12-step programs modeled on the one made famous by Alcoholics Anonymous. Some judges even use such programs as part of their sentencing requirements.
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If you follow this link it will take you to ten short videos that were created as part of a study to see to what extent people give off cues as to whether they are lying or not. Each person was told to either tell the truth or lie in response of a question.
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Some time ago, I wrote about a study that said that we humans could smell 390 different smells. This seemed big enough to me but as commenter ChasCPeterson pointed out, this was not the full story because that number referred to the distinct number of olfactory sensors we have that can identify specific molecules but that we can actually smell combinations of these basic smells and the number of combinations can thus be much larger.
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Ed Yong has a fascinating story about six Burmese pythons who were captured in the Florida Everglades (where they have become a voracious invasive species killing off the native wildlife), implanted with radio-transmitters to track their movements, and then let loose at various locations that were 21 to 36 kilometers away from their point of capture.
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A team of scientists has announced that they have detected direct evidence for one of the key elements of the inflationary model of the universe, that there was a rapid rate of expansion soon after ‘the beginning’, i.e., at times shortly after t=0. They did this by using a radiotelescope located at the South Pole called BICEP2, looking for signs of the imprint in the cosmic microwave background caused by gravitational waves triggered by the event.
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It happens to me quite often. When I encounter people, especially in a location other than where I usually meet them, I often do not recognize them and cannot place them or recall their names. The problem is that those people seem to recognize me at once and smile and wave and even come up and talk to me. My strategy in such situations is to also smile and wave and to engage in small talk, desperately hoping that my memory will kick into gear and rescue me or that the conversation will elicit some clues as to their identity.
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