If you're reading this, your blood pressure is likely already that of a kid's pump rocket (blasts 30 feet in the air!!!). Never fear. You will survive Turkey Day. Gobble-fricking-gobble. Now to the list.

1. Turkey: Buy a cook-in-the-bag turkey breast roast. Turn on the oven. Throw it in. If your guests or house pets don’t see you carve it, they will never know your dinner never gobbled (or, more precisely, that it is the unholy conglomeration of many separate gobblers).

2. Mashed Potatoes: Buy instant. Just add boiling water and enough butter and cream cheese to mask the slightly musty taste.

3. Gravy: In the can.

4. Cranberry Sauce: In the can. Be sure to actually place in dish and mash until the dog-food-esque shape is unrecognizable.

Missouri can proudly claim it is first in the nation - first to test a new "diverging diamond" interchange that improves traffic flow by eliminating problematic left turns. Sound boring? I admit, the story didn't jump out at me at first. But the myriad diagrams with tiny cars moving across the screen got me hooked, and now I hope that the experiment, if successful, spreads across the country. Even Popular Science reported on the action.

This is the second part of a two-part collection of tips for particle physics graduate students. The first part is here.

Three: be a fool today if you want to be a guru tomorrow


The third advice I have in store for Jane is maybe the toughest to follow, at least at first. But I do believe it is of critical importance for her to grow, become knowledgeable, and distinguish herself from the rest of the pack.

The Wall Street Journal published a list of 20 medical advances for which we should be thankful. WSJ says that amid all the bad news about medicine in the media - H1N1, failed miracle drugs, etc, contentious health-care reform issues - it's easy to overlook how much progress has been made in recent years.

Without further ado:

As the world's oceans warm, they are absorbing less carbon dioxide, a new study in the November 25 issue of Geophysical Research Letters has found.  With the oceans currently absorbing over 40 percent of the CO2 emitted by human activity, this could quicken the pace of climate change.

University of Minnesota researchers have developed a new computer model called the Virtual StreamLab, designed to help restore real streams to a healthier state. The Virtual StreamLab demonstrates the physics of natural water flows at an unprecedented level of detail and realism and was unveiled for the first time this week at the 2009 American Physical Society Division of Fluid Dynamics meeting in Minneapolis.

 An international team of researchers probing the nerve-insulating myelin sheath have uncovered how mutations affect the structure of myelin, a focal point of research in multiple sclerosis and other neurological disorders.

The findings were central to the group's broader conclusion that a set of protein processes required in the early-stage conversion of glucose into fatty acids are critical to the proper formation and layering of myelin membrane. The researchers report their  in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

It's well known that young girls are very self-conscious about their bodies, but it may not be because of the unrealistically thin Disney characters they see on TV, as is often assumed.

A new study featured in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology suggests that while the media's portrayal of beauty does influence how young girls see themselves, they aren't likely to suffer short-term consequences from watching Cinderella, a conclusion in sharp contrast to earlier studies which suggest that the self-esteem of older girls and women suffers after short-term exposure to thin, beautiful models on television and in the movies.

The recent financial meltdown was perhaps the biggest economic crisis since the great depression, and a team of economists says that current macroeconomic models used to diagnose and treat the causes of the ongoing recession are woefully inadequate.

Their study, appearing in the November issue of Strategic Organization, argues that macroeconomics is not equipped to offer full solutions to this crisis. Its basic assumption is that factors of production, firms, and industries in the economy are homogeneous and interchangeable. Research in strategic management has consistently shown that the assumption that the economy is made up of homogeneous or interchangeable factors of production is incorrect.

The first large black holes in the universe likely grew deep inside gigantic, starlike cocoons that smothered their powerful x-ray radiation and prevented surrounding gases from being blown away, says a new study published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.