When is a smoker not a smoker?

When they live in California and simply choose to self-identify as a non-smoker. Who are we to criticize the self-identify of people in a state where boys can just declare they are female and use a girl's restroom?

Smoking has plummeted in the last few decades- health statistics, rampant sin taxes and billions of dollars in anti-smoking campaigns will do that - but University of California, San Diego School of Medicine scholars wonder about people who say they use cigarettes but didn't consider themselves to be "smokers" in  the 2011 California Longitudinal Smokers Survey.

People who gravitate toward the latest technology regard themselves as progressives mavericks on the cutting edge - and then they stand in a line outside the Apple store.

Apple products don't look good, and they aren't particularly original - having to jailbreak your phone to use it the way you want and being told you can only use their power supply is more Soviet gulag than 21st century technological freedom but a lot of people still consider them cool. And perception matters most. If a product appears to be losing its coolness, it's over, Friendster.

Who better to know what cool is than a big university academic? Like with business, they can create trends from past data even if they can't create a product themselves.

Though the evidence shows that people are not really different during a full moon, like homeopathy or organic food benefits happen just often enough that people are convinced by the placebo/nocebo effect to believe there must be something to it.

And science has its moon quirks too. Why, for example, would signals bouncing off the moon be so faint on full moon evenings?

The answer is in an eclipse, which has had its own share of superstitious attributions.

Researchers have aimed laser beams at suitcase-sized reflectors placed on the moon by Apollo astronauts and unmanned Soviet rovers. By precisely timing the light's return to Earth, they can measure the distance from here to the moon with millimeter precision.

In the endless war on pharmaceutical companies, there is a consistent refrain; the US Food and Drug Administration is too slow to approve new drugs unless it approved drugs too quickly and the product hurt someone. Mainstream media highlight the complaints of doctors and patients that some drug or another is available in Europe or Asia but not here and then on another page delights in a lawsuit about how evil the company was for making a drug which carried risks.

Many people in their school years like Manga comics. They predate the American kind by about 150 years, are generally more complex and even older American adults got an introduction to it in cartoon versions of "Astro Boy."

In recent decades, they have grown in popularity so it was only a matter of time before someone came up with the idea of social engineering using them. A recent pilot program in Brooklyn used minority students and found that exposure to Manga promoting fruit intake significantly improved healthy snack selection. Conclusion: we can solve obesity by using a Transportation-Imagery Model

Cool roofs, green roofs and hybrids of the two are all of the rage for city planners who want to do something about greenhouse-gas induced warming.

They sound great but is it going to work, or is it another idealized wish that incurs cost but has little benefit (like replacing spoons in the Congressional cafeteria with corn-based alternatives that melted in soup and ending up being worse for the environment) outside public relations campaigns?
 

There used to be a saying that we should all try to be the person our dogs think we are.

In the 21st century we idealize ourselves in online avatars, according to a new paper in Psychological Science,
 which has far-reaching implications if how you represent yourself in the virtual world of video games may affect how you behave toward others in the real world.