There is a lot we take for granted in our modern world. Like cookbooks, for example. March 23 is kind of a milestone anniversary in home economics. On that day in 1857, Fannie Merritt Farmer was born in Boston. According The Writers’ Almanac, Fannie is remembered for publishing the first cookbook in American history. Up
Science gives us wonderful tools — everything from penicillin to a GPS system to life itself. How we use these tools, however, is up to us. What has caught my eye recently was a report, originally in the Chicago Tribune, that Great Britain’s Newcastle University has been given permission to create babies using the DNA
I hope everyone has adjusted to our switch to Daylight Savings Time by now. Do you notice any impact on your daily routine? Apparently there are some negatives, because on March 8, 2017, the Time magazine Newsbrief listed seven negative impacts on health. According to Dr. Sandhya Kumar, assistant professor of neurology and medical director
Giant pandas have always captured our imagination. Their distinctive coloration certainly gives a new meaning to the word cute. But why are they colored that way? A new study, published February 28, 2017 in Behavioral Ecology, suggests two reasons — camouflage and communication. Tim Caro, a professor in the Department of Wildlife, Fish and Conservation Biology
I am constantly misplacing things around my house. I attribute this to owning a lot of black objects, which I tend to lay on black furniture. It also doesn’t help that the spot I remember placing them is about three iterations old. Fortunately, I’m not the only one. I’ve just heard about a clever writer
From the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction department — Talk about they way children are treated in different cultures, babies on the Indonesian island of Bali are subjected to an unusual custom — their feet should not touch the ground for their first 105 days of life. This is because belief in reincarnation is widespread and a birth is
In celebration of International Women’s Day on Wednesday, March 8, 2017, the organizers of the January 21st Women’s March organized a “Day Without Women” protest that encouraged women to stay home from their jobs. So what? Time magazine, in its March 8 Daily News Brief, included a feature entitled “Here’s What a Day Without Women
From the life-is-stranger-than-fiction department — If you are a real sports fan, you root for teams to win. But when would it be an advantage to lose? Granted, there are times to rest star players. In football, it may be a tactical advantage to give the other team a safety. But to deliberately try to
I’m writing this on International Women’s Day, not because I’m an expert on women (far from it), but because I’ve just read an interesting theory about how women took control of their bodies — tattoos. In a “Quick Take” essay on page 23 of the March 13, 2017 issue of Time magazine, Olivia B. Waxman
We like to think that our ancestors were pretty limited when it came to available medications, but that’s not entirely true. Granted, they didn’t have the modern miracle drugs, but they did have their own arsenal of remedies. I saw this first-hand in Egypt where I learned how effectively inhaling vapors from mint extract in