People in America have fewer close friends nowadays than two decades ago, researchers announced today. New research compared studies from 1985 and 2004. On average, each person in 2004 reported 2.08 close friends-those they can discuss important matters with. That’s down from 2.94 people in 1985. People who said they had no one with whom to discuss such matters more than doubled, to nearly 25 percent. ‘The evidence shows that Americans have fewer confidants and those ties are also more family-based than they used to be,’ said Lynn Smith-Lovin, professor of sociology at Duke University. ‘This change indicates something that’s not good for our society,’ Smith-Lovin said. ‘Ties with a close network of people create a safety net. These ties also lead to civic engagement and local political action.’ The findings are published in the June 2006 issue of the journal American Sociological Review. The research also showed that people who talk only to family members about important matters increased from 57 percent to 80 percent over the two decades, while the number who depend totally on a spouse rose from 5 percent to 9 percent. The results are based on responses from […]
Warren E. Buffett, the chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and one of the world’s wealthiest men, plans to donate the bulk of his $44 billion fortune to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and four other philanthropies starting in July. The donations, outlined in a series of letters that Mr. Buffett released yesterday and will execute today, represent a singular and historic act of charitable giving that vaults him into the top tier of industrialists and entrepreneurs like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller Sr., Henry Ford, J. Paul Getty, W. K. Kellogg and Mr. Gates himself, all men whose fortunes have endowed some of the world’s richest private foundations. Mr. Buffett plans to give away 85 percent of his fortune, or about $37.4 billion, all in Berkshire stock. Of that amount, he will channel the greatest share, about $31 billion, into the Gates Foundation. The Gates Foundation, dedicated to improving health and education, especially in poor nations, is already the United States’ largest grant-making foundation, with current assets of almost $30 billion. Mr. Buffett’s huge contribution may permanently solidify that philanthropy’s standing as the biggest and most influential organization of its kind. Mr. Buffett will join Mr. and […]
The primary instrument aboard the Hubble Space Telescope shut down this week, an unwelcome reminder that the observatory’s future is tightly tied to NASA’s upcoming space shuttle launch. Project managers expect the telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys to be out of commission at least through the end of the month, but have high hopes it eventually will be recovered. ‘I think we’ve identified where the problem area is,’ Edward Ruitberg, the program’s deputy manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said in an interview. advertisement line If engineers’ initial troubleshooting efforts are correct, the problem should be resolved by switching to a backup electronics unit. A circuit on the primary unit is believed to have failed. The backup unit was extensively tested before Hubble was put into orbit in 1990 but has not been powered on since. ‘We fully expect that it will be working,’ Ruitberg said. While Hubble’s flight control team works to revive the camera, other engineers have been busy for months devising ways to eke out more power from the observatory’s batteries and develop methods for precision pointing using just one gyroscope, rather than three, as was originally […]
SOUTHFIELD, Michigan — General Motors Corp, losing sales to fuel-efficient cars from Toyota Motor Corp, is developing a hybrid-electric vehicle with a battery that recharges at any outlet, said GM officials familiar with the plan. The so-called plug-in hybrid would travel more than 60 miles on a gallon of gasoline, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the research is secret. GM, which had the first modern electric car in 1996, lags behind Toyota in hybrids, which combine electric motors and gasoline engines. A 28% rise in US gasoline prices this year helped boost sales of Toyota’s gasoline-electric models 37%, giving the Japanese automaker almost three-fourths of US retail hybrid sales. GM doesn’t make competing vehicles now. Automakers are trying to raise fuel efficiency as US lawmakers consider tougher requirements for cars and trucks. ‘There is rising regulatory demand and consumer demand for improved fuel economy and lower emissions,” said John Casesa, an auto analyst at New York-based Casesa Shapiro Group LLC. ‘There’s a lot of pressure to show you’re responsive.” The plug-in designs GM is testing may be ready in time for the Detroit auto show in January, the people said. Any commercial […]
Archaeologists say they have found evidence that in one respect people were behaving like thoroughly modern humans as early as 100,000 years ago: they were apparently decorating themselves with a kind of status-defining jewelry - the earliest known shell necklaces. If this interpretation is correct, it means that human self-adornment, considered a manifestation of symbolic thinking, was practiced at least 25,000 years earlier than previously thought. An international team of archaeologists, writing today in the journal Science, reported its analysis of small shells with distinctive perforations that appeared to have been strung together as ornamental beads. Chemical study showed that the two shells from the Skhul rock shelter in Israel were more than 100,000 years old, and the single shell from Oued Djebbana, in Algeria, was about 90,000 years old. Three shells may not be much to go on, the archaeologists conceded. But they emphasized that the shells were from the same genus of marine snail and were worked in the same manner as those from the Blombos Cave, near Cape Town in South Africa, which were reported two years ago as the earliest jewelry, dated at 75,000 years ago. The Blombos find was hotly contested […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
