Shrinking Glaciers Redraw Europe’s Borders
Shrinking Glaciers Redraw Europe’s Borders
Global warming is shrinking Europe’s alpine glaciers with such dramatic acceleration that Italy and Switzerland must now redraw their mountain borders, says a proposed law approved by the lower house of the Italian parliament at the end of April.
Running for 463 miles, mostly along the arc of the Alps, the demarcation line between Italy and Switzerland has been fixed since 1861, when Italy became a unified state.
In 1941, a convention between the two countries defined as criteria for border demarcation the ridge crest of the glaciers. Since then, the border has been occasionally modified, with the biggest change occurring in the 1970s when the Switzerland-Italy highway was built.
Your Blood Cells Are Crawling Inside You
Your Blood Cells Are Crawling Inside You
White blood cells, the immune system’s “soldiers” for your body, actually crawl along your blood vessels to find their way to infection and injury sites, new research shows.
The cells move like millipedes, creating many minute legs that adhere to the endothelial cells lining blood vessel walls, said researcher Ronen Alon of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Scientists had previously thought that these cells moved like inchworms, forming attachments at their front and back, then folding in the middle and pushing forward.
Instead, the cells’ tiny legs rapidly attach and detach themselves, allowing the cells to quickly migrate to their destination.
US red ink rising even higher, to $1.8T
US red ink rising even higher, to $1.8T
The government will have to borrow nearly 50 cents for every dollar it spends this year, exploding the record federal deficit past $1.8 trillion under new White House estimates.
Budget office figures released Monday would add $89 billion to the 2009 red ink — increasing it to more than four times last year’s all-time high as the government hands out billions more than expected for people who have lost jobs and takes in less tax revenue from people and companies making less money.
The unprecedented deficit figures flow from the deep recession, the Wall Street bailout and the cost of President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus bill — as well as a seemingly embedded structural imbalance between what the government spends and what it takes in.
Top 10 Most Common Ingredients in Fast Food
Top 10 Most Common Ingredients in Fast Food
Order a meal in any fast-food restaurant, and you’ll likely walk away with a sandwich, fries and a drink. If you had to identify the ingredients of this meal, you might list beef (or chicken), lettuce, tomato, cheese, ketchup, bread, potatoes and soda. Not complicated, right? Wrong.
Burger and chicken joints don’t think of the building blocks of a menu item as ingredients. They think of them as components, which are made of ingredients. For example, McDonald’s famous Big Mac jingle — “two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun” — suggests the sandwich has seven components. Would you believe it has 67 ingredients?
Clearly, fast food is more complicated than it looks. Many menu items contain processed foods, which have been modified from their natural state for safety or convenience. Processed foods tend to have multiple additives to keep them fresher longer. Across an entire fast-food menu, there are thousands of ingredients, ranging from the commonplace (water) to the exotic (xanthan gum).
What Google knows about you
Kevin Bankston, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, recently made that statement to this reporter. A few years ago, it might have sounded far-fetched. But if you’re one of the growing number of people who are using more and more products in Google’s ever-expanding stable (at last count, I was using a dozen), you might wonder if Bankston isn’t onto something.
It’s easy to understand why privacy advocates and policymakers are sounding alarms about online privacy in general — and singling out Google in particular. If you use Google’s search engine, Google knows what you searched for as well as your activity on partner Web sites that use its ad services. If you use the Chrome browser, it may know every Web site you’ve typed into the address bar, or “Omnibox.”
It may have all of your e-mail (Gmail), your appointments (Google Calendar) and even your last known location (Google Latitude). It may know what you’re watching (YouTube) and whom you are calling. It may have transcripts of your telephone messages (Google Voice).
Is multi-level marketing a good choice for you?
Is multi-level marketing a good choice for you?
If you’re an adult and you’re breathing, there’s a pretty good chance that sooner or later, a friend or acquaintance will approach you with a chance to “start your own business,” “be your own boss,” “become an independent distributor.”
What you’ll get is a pitch for a type of business referred to as multi-level marketing (MLM) – although it may be called by other names, including network, direct, affiliate, or matrix marketing. (Because these schemes get such a bad reputation, the companies change names to make them more attractive.)
Should you try it? After all, you may not have a lot of other choices, especially if you’re out of work. And your friend is very persuasive. They tell you how much they love the products or services they sell, how supportive the people in the program are, that they’ve made thousands of dollars. They’ll offer you a chance to start your own business for less than $199.
Switched at birth
An accidental mix-up 56 years ago changed two women’s lives forever. Secret finally came out last summer
Imagine cruising happily through the world - falling in love, raising a family and otherwise carving out a successful life - when results of a DNA test turn everything upside down.
That’s what happened to Kay Rene (Reed) Qualls, of Heppner, and DeeAnn (Angell) Shafer, of Richland, Wash. The two women, born 56 years ago at the same hospital, recently discovered they’d gone home with the wrong mothers.
Only two babies were born at Heppner’s Pioneer Memorial Hospital that spring day in 1953.
Are running shoes a waste of money?
Are running shoes a waste of money?
Thrust enhancers, roll bars, microchips…the $20 billion running - shoe industry wants us to believe that the latest technologies will cushion every stride. Yet in this extract from his controversial new book, Christopher McDougall claims that injury rates for runners are actually on the rise, that everything we’ve been told about running shoes is wrong - and that it might even be better to go barefoot…
At Stanford University, California, two sales representatives from Nike were watching the athletics team practise. Part of their job was to gather feedback from the company’s sponsored runners about which shoes they preferred.
Unfortunately, it was proving difficult that day as the runners all seemed to prefer… nothing.
‘Didn’t we send you enough shoes?’ they asked head coach Vin Lananna. They had, he was just refusing to use them.
Secrets of the Phallus: Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?
Secrets of the Phallus: Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?
If you’ve ever had a good, long look at the human phallus, whether yours or someone else’s, you’ve probably scratched your head over such a peculiarly shaped device. Let’s face it—it’s not the most intuitively shaped appendage in all of evolution. But according to evolutionary psychologist Gordon Gallup of the State University of New York at Albany, the human penis is actually an impressive “tool” in the truest sense of the word, one manufactured by nature over hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution. You may be surprised to discover just how highly specialized a tool it is. Furthermore, you’d be amazed at what its appearance can tell us about the nature of our sexuality.
The curious thing about the evolution of the human penis is that, for something that differs so obviously in shape and size from that of our closest living relatives, only in the past few years have researchers begun to study it in any detail. The reason for this neglect isn’t clear, though the most probable reason is because of its intrinsic snicker factor or, related to this, the likelihood of its stirring up uncomfortable puritanical sentiments. It takes a special type of psychological scientist to tell the little old lady sitting next to him on a flight to Denver that he studies how people use their penises when she asks what he does for a living. But I think labeling it as a “crude” or “disgusting” area of study reveals more about the critic than it does the researcher. And if you think there’s only one way to use your penis, that it’s merely an instrument of internal fertilization that doesn’t require further thought, or that size doesn’t matter, well, that just goes to show how much you can learn from Gallup’s research findings.
To Save the Earth, Start With Data
To Save the Earth, Start With Data
You can’t cast a stone without hitting a list of tips to save the planet, but few of them come with any hard data on how hand-washing your dishes will save polar bears. And all those companies “going green” just to do something on Earth Day could be hurting the cause, not helping.
“All these major media companies are giving people green tips. Frankly, three quarters of the time they have no clue what they’re talking about,” said Thomas Scaramellino, founder of Efficiency 2.0, which makes energy-efficiency software for utilities. “We think the general awareness is helpful, in principle. But you’re setting yourself up for a backfire into a deep skepticism.”
Conserving the Earth’s biodiversity and natural resources will not be simple and can’t be accomplished by a smallish group of like-minded people turning out their lights for an hour or walking to work for a day. The scale of that solution doesn’t fit the scale of the world’s intertwined energy problems. We’ve got declining petroleum resources in an oil-addicted world, too much carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere and billions of people without electricity.
