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
It’s a question that has bedeviled us for centuries — how do you treat the mentally ill? We know what doesn’t work; did you ever wonder about the origin of the word bedlam ( https://www.britannica.com/topic/Bedlam)? But perhaps what works best has been under our noses all along. This story begins with a young lady who
Whenever I try to write rhyming poetry, a strange things happens — it sounds very Seussian. I didn’t plan it that way, but the similarity is unmistakable. But I shouldn’t be surprised, because Dr. Seuss has been influencing kids for eighty years now. March 2 was the good doctor’s birthday. In tribute, here is his
How long does it take to convince a man not to harass women? For a female journalist in Australia, it was two hours. This young lady, Eleanor Gordon-Smith, had always been bothered by being on the receiving end of “catcalls” from males since she was a little girl (“Call me when you’re legal.”) So she
If you remember an early scene in Disney’s animated feature 101 Dalmatians where Pongo is looking out the window for a prospective mate for his “pet” (owner), every woman and her dog he sees is a matched pair. There could be some truth to that. Research has shown that people do choose dogs that share their
You may have wondered if you pet can dream like you do. Is there any way to find out? There may be. When we dream, we’re in Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep, when your eyes move rapidly and there’s lots of electrical activity in the brain. (By the way, REM sleep was discovered in 1953.)
I’ve never liked coffee. My mother made a cup for me when I was about ten years old, and I hated it. But I could be missing out. First, is coffee bad for you? Today most researchers say no. In fact, a recent study published in the journal Nature Medicine found that older people with
