Is obesity contagious? A Harvard groups says it is and that it is spreading via social networks.
If so, America's obesity epidemic won't plateau until at least 42 percent of adults are obese, according to their estimate derived by applying mathematical modeling to 40 years of Framingham Heart Study data.
Their work is contrary to recent assertions by some experts that the obesity rate has peaked at around 34 percent. 34 percent more American adults are overweight but not obese, according to the federal government's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates. The Harvard group say their modeling shows that the proliferation of obesity among American adults in recent decades owes in large part to its accelerating spread via social networks.
If you are reading this site, you already know "Battlestar Galactica" is the greatest science-fiction show of all time. Yes, yes, "Farscape" was terrific and "Star Trek" set the standard but Battlestar Galactica as number one brooks no argument. The only thing that could make it better is being able to play as part of a Battlestar Galactica MMORPG universe.
Bigpoint has announced today the successful launch of the first phase of its Battlestar Galactica Online closed beta. The initial phase granted hand-selected players from Europe and the United States the opportunity to experience one of the most ambitious browser-games ever developed.
Can plasma be beautiful? Surely, anything can, but physicists are luckier than most because when they probe the mysteries of plasma, the fourth state of matter, they often discover phenomena of striking beauty.
Plasmas support a large variety of waves, some familiar to all such as light and sound waves, but a great many exist nowhere else and one of the fundamental waves in magnetized plasma is the shear Alfvén wave, named after Nobel Prize winning scientist Hannes Alfvén, who predicted their existence.
The big knock on huge wind or solar farms in developed countries is whose back yard the new power lines will run through. Off-shore wind farms or solar farms in remote deserts may be a solution to that but current methods of transmission are unsuitable - at long distances, alternating current will have as much as 40% loss and while direct current will only lose about 7%, it means huge converter stations are essential before the power can reach homes.
High-voltage direct-current transmission (HVDCT) could be made more achievable using low-cost semiconductor cells, the focus of research at Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Systems and Device Technology IISB in Erlangen.
Voter turnout was huge in 2008 - some of that was due to advertising; since Sen. Obama did not limit adhere to campaign finance reform rules the way Sen. McCain did, Obama was able to raise and spend more money than Bush and Kerry did in 2004 combined, spending twice as much as his opponent. But a large part of that was message also, and it led to 64% of eligible voters showing up, the highest turnout since the 1960s.
Know why vegetarians are so angry? They don't eat meat, it seems. So this Thanksgiving, grab the turkey leg and tear off a hunk of flesh with your teeth and rationalize that evolutionary psychology thinks it made your cavemen ancestors nicer people.
In 2006, the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer released a state of the art clinical study of a new drug designed to treat high cholesterol, torcetrapid. The results were puzzling. The compound lowered low density lipoprotein, aka LDL or “bad” cholesterol. It also substantially pushed up high density lipoprotein, or HDL, the “good cholesterol.” By all accrued medical wisdom, torcetrapid should have lowered the rate of cardiovascular events—heart attacks, strokes, and, ultimately deaths.
But it did not. Instead, it increased both—by 61 percent. Worse: more heart patients died than those in a control group. What had happened? Why hadn’t the “good” cholesterol improved their odds of living longer?
Holy crap on a cracker. Here's propaganda and bull handed to us on a platter. You can't dress this up, make it pretty, pretend it to be anything other than an assault on reason and reality.
Mercola and Fisher are a nightmare team: fearmongering run rampant. And the scary thing is that over 27,000 folks have viewed the latest post already. Fisher's attached herself to Mercola's large (on the internet) audience. I wonder if it's to see the money roll in? By contrast, my little blog here and this post will be read by maybe 10% of that number.
Microwaves are a low frequency light, at least compared to visible light, say, or ionizing radiation like gamma rays. Thus, microwaves are quite harmless. A microwave oven baths the food in an oscillating electro-magnetic field. Molecules with permanent electrical dipole moments wiggle in the field and thus heat up the food.
Our brain, wrinkles on our faces and even mountain chains have one thing in common - all those things, though very different, result from the same process, namely the compression of a 'rigid membrane'.
Take a thin sheet of a solid material and try to compress it in such a way that it remains flat. You won't succeed, since the sheet bends systematically along its entire length. This is known as buckling. Now stick the same sheet onto a soft, thick substrate and compress it again in the same way: this time, it forms an extremely regular pattern of small wrinkles characterized by a particular distance between them, called the period.
