In the 2004 documentary "Super Size Me", Morgan Spurlock ate nothing but McDonald's food for a month.  He felt terrible at the end of it, but it was for art. 

Fast food has a lot of calories, most people could subsist just fine for 30 days eating just one such meal a day - but even one McDonald's meal every single day in conjunction with two other meals can still lead to weight loss, says Don Thompson.

He lost 20 lbs. in the last year despite eating McDonald's food every day - it's part of his job because he is CEO of McDonald's. Speaking at the At the Sanford Bernstein analyst conference on Wednesday, he revealed that his weight loss was due to getting his "butt up" and "working out again", his McDonald's food didn't have to go.

Stephen Hawking recently declared that philosophy is "dead" - meaning metaphysics, the branch of philosophy that aspires to the most general understanding of space and time and other fundamental stuff of the world. Get rid of sophistry and defining into oblivion, learn some math and read some physics, he said. Pick any science and philosophers can drag it into the mud.

Philosophers disagree and say just the opposite - physics needs metaphysics more than ever. 

Carmat in France is getting ready to test a complex artificial heart that combines biology with machinery. 

The race is on to build a better heart and provide a safe bridge for cases where organ transplant is not available. Carmat's version uses synthetic and biological materials as well as sensors and software that detect a patient’s level of exertion and adjust output accordingly. It will be tested in patients at four cardiac surgery centers in Europe and the Middle East. 

Around 5.7 million people in the U.S. have had heart failure, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Two separate carbon-dating tests have confirmed the oldest known complete Torah scroll, a sheepskin document dating from 1155-1225. It had been mistakenly cataloged a century ago as dating from the 17th century.

The find isn't the oldest Torah text in the world, Hebrew codexes known as the Leningrad and the Aleppo bibles, date hundreds of years earlier but this is the oldest Torah scroll of the Pentateuch, the five books of Moses, according to Mauro Perani, a professor of Hebrew in the University of Bologna's cultural heritage department.

The makers of the uChek app, which analyzes photos of urine samples to give users quick health information, recently got a letter from the FDA asking it to show it had approval from the FDA or document why it doesn't need it.

The FDA lets the entire NIH National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) get $128 million per year without giggling but this iPhone app is apparently a concern. How would they feel jurisdiction over an iPhone? The chemical strips which determine the levels of elements in urine become, when used by uChek, part of an "automated strip reader" and therefore a medical testing system that requires its approval.  Even though the strips are meant to be read by eyes.

The family which originally sold the Dead Sea Scrolls to collectors and institutions about 70 years ago says they kept some fragments in a Swiss safe deposit box all these years - and those have been up for sale.  The manuscripts are the earliest copies of the Hebrew Bible ever found and the oldest written evidence of the roots of Judaism and Christianity in the Holy Land.

Lost in the media crush of celebrity worshipers extolling or criticizing actress Angelina Jolie for her op-ed on opting to have a double mastectomy was the science factoid that trumps everything else:

99% of women do not have the BRCA1 mutation. 

The BRCA1 mutation is a very bad thing, it represents a gigantic increase in the chances of getting breast or ovarian cancer.

Elements Make Headlines

If you ever enjoyed Tom Lehrer's take on the elements, or even if not, check out this way of using the names of the elements in a novel way:

http://news.knowledgedoor.s3.amazonaws.com/home_headlines.html

Students of sociology professor Dr. Leszek Sibilski at University of Maryland made a video asking for action on climate change.  They regard climate change as a social problem - most in science would regard it as a physics one but certainly taking action is a political, and therefore social, issue.