Back to the future?
"Humanity must urgently embark on a massive program to power civilization from wood to stave off catastrophic climate change, one of the world's top scientists has told The Independent on Sunday," the paper's environment editor, Geoffrey Lean, writes. "Twenty years ago, professor James Hansen was the first leading scientist to announce that global warming was taking place. Now he has issued a warning that a back-to-the-future return to one of the oldest fuels is imperative because the world has exceeded the danger level for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Growing trees, which absorb the gas from the air as they grow, burning them instead of fossil fuels to generate electricity, and capturing and storing the carbon produced in the process is needed to get the greenhouse effect down to safe levels, he says. ... [H]is views will command respect because, as director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies for the past 27 years, he has been one of the few climate scientists ready to risk his reputation by openly stating what many suspect to be true."
How to calm down
"Science has a habit of debunking conventional wisdom," Leigh Dayton writes in The Australian. "But when it comes to controlling anger by taking a deep breath and counting to 10, brain imaging studies prove it works. What's more, some widely used tricks of psychotherapy are more than psychobabble, claims social cognitive neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman. According to Prof. Lieberman, functional magnetic resonance imaging studies conducted in his laboratory at the University of California at Los Angeles show some techniques do help people stay cool." They
include:
Reappraisal, or finding a different way to think about a bad event. Instead of dwelling on how awful it was not to get that job, for instance, consider that now there is time for a holiday.
The Buddhist practice of "noting" also gets the thumbs up. The idea is to state an emotion - "here is anger" or "here is fear" - but not to try to change it.
Hit the road, Jack
Robert Giroux, 94, who died this month, had a six-decade career as a publisher and editor. "Obituaries," The Daily Telegraph says, "may have reported Giroux's most celebrated near misses - [Jack] Kerouac's On the Road, which caused consternation when it was delivered on a 120-foot scroll, and The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger - but, of course, his successful commissions vastly outweighed such momentary mishaps (and, to be fair, most editors would raise their eyebrows at a writer who, like Kerouac, insisted that [his] novel had been dictated by the Holy Ghost and was thus beyond editorial suggestion)."
Long legs? A nuisance
Svetlana Pankratova is listed in Guinness World Records 2009 as having the world's longest legs. Just over 6 foot 4 (193 cm), Ms. Pankratova, 36, who is Russian but lives in Spain, has legs that are nearly 4 feet 4 inches (132 centimetres) long, Associated Press reports. "Her upper body has nearly typical proportions, giving her a giraffe-like appearance. Dressed in a bright blue mini-dress and low-heeled pumps, Ms. Pankratova ... said she liked her legs, though they can complicate things. 'It's hard to find clothes, especially pants,' she said."
Basement biology?
A do-it-yourself biology movement that aims to move science into the hands of hobbyists is beginning to spark the attention, interest - and sometimes safety concern - of professional scientists. "The ['biohacker'] dream, already playing out in the annual International Genetically Engineered Machine competition at MIT, is that biology novices could browse a catalogue of ready-made biological parts and use them to create customized organisms," writes Carolyn Y. Johnson of The Boston Globe. "Technological advances have made it quite simple to insert genes into bacteria to give them the ability to, for example, detect arsenic or produce vitamins. ... But the work also raises fears that people could create a deadly microbe on purpose, just as computer hackers have unleashed crippling viruses or broken into government websites."
Chickenpox parties
"As Tabitha Keller drove her two young children to attend a chickenpox party earlier this year, she felt a moment of doubt about the wisdom of intentionally infecting her kids with the bug," Jeremy Manier writes in the Chicago Tribune. "Keller did not trust the chickenpox vaccine, so she was arranging for her children to get immunity the old-fashioned way, by catching the disease from an infected child and muddling through weeks of itchiness. Such chickenpox parties were also held in the pre-vaccine era because some experts argued it was safest for kids to get the disease early in life, when the effects tend to be relatively mild. ... 'It was so
ironic and strange to be driving out to this house, hoping that my kids would get sick,' [Ms.] Keller said. 'That's pretty much what you spend your entire life avoiding.' "
Thought du jour
"An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't."
- Anatole France, quoted
in The Wall Street Journal
