After years of refusing to drink anything that didn’t come from a plastic bottle, some Americans have begun to think again about their wasteful approach to water. As their campaign hots up. David Usborne reports on a refreshing trend July is surrendering to August, and a blazing afternoon sun has drawn the lazy crowds into Union Square in Manhattan. Loving couples are entangled on its dusty lawns, mothers perambulate babies, young men escape into their iPods while tatty old dames lounge on benches clasping paper fans. In this heat, one prop binds the human diversity together, however: the plastic bottle of water. Never mind that dotted conspicuously at decent intervals all around the shady park are public water fountains. On this sultry afternoon, they are lonely and neglected, except for one where a nanny and infant are playing at putting fingers over the spout to see how far they can make it spray. A newly purchased bottle of spring water rests in a cup holder of the pram, in case either one of them should actually need to slake their thirst. Even a decade ago, there would have been queues for the fountains. No longer. They have […]
Out of the mouths of babes spurts a rush of words, at least once they reach their second year. Now mathematics may finally explain why. A sudden explosion in a child’s vocabulary usually strikes at around 18 months, with usage expanding dramatically to include more complex words, but scientists have previously failed to provide a convincing explanation. Writing in the US journal Science, psychologist Bob McMurray, at the University of Iowa, shows that the rapid improvement is an inevitable consequence of the way languages are structured. Between birth and adulthood, children learn around 60,000 words, an average of eight-10 a day. Studies of word usage by infants show that while a smattering of easy words, such as ‘hi’ and ‘bye’ are grasped by 12 months, just four months later, their lexicon has often broadened substantially to balls, dogs, birds and bottles, babies, books and shoes. According to Dr McMurray, the reason lies in statistics. In almost every language studied, there are relatively few very easy words and far more moderate and harder words to learn. Easy words tend to be nouns that can be quickly linked to an object, such as a cup or a cat. […]
Society tells us it’s better to be tall. Think NBA stars, supermodels and winning presidential candidates. Studies have even linked height to higher salaries. Weight, too, is an indicator of health-or lack thereof. Obese people are at greater risk for serious conditions like diabetes and heart disease-not to mention the social stigma associated with being larger than their peers. So what does it mean that Americans are now among the shortest and fattest people in the industrialized world? If a number of studies out in the last two months are any indication, the stagnating height and expanding girth in the United States are not only related, they may be a sign of a decline in the overall health of Americans-particularly children. Currently two thirds of U.S. adults are overweight or obese and the trend shows no signs of letting up any time soon. A study by Johns Hopkins researchers this month found that by 2015, three quarters of adult Americans will be overweight or obese. America was the fattest industrialized country in an obesity ranking put out by World Health Organization earlier this year. As far as height goes, Americans are losing ground there, too. The June […]
WASHINGTON — The Senate gave final approval Thursday to a sweeping package of new ethics and lobbying rules, with an overwhelming majority of Republicans and Democrats agreeing to better police the relationship between lawmakers and lobbyists. If President George W. Bush signs the bill into law, which administration officials indicated that he would, members of Congress will face a battery of new restrictions. The legislation, which grew out of a series of scandals, calls for banning gifts, meals and travel from lobbyists as well as making it more difficult for lawmakers to quickly capitalize on their connections when joining the private sector. The measure, which passed the Senate 83 to 14, represents a significant cultural shift for Congress. But even as proponents hailed the measure as the broadest reforms since the Watergate scandal, when Richard Nixon was president, it remained an open question how the provisions would be enforced and whether it would change how members of Congress finance pet projects, or ‘earmarks.’ Still, the legislation requires more disclosure in how the projects are selected. This is an effort to shed light on backroom dealing that has been at the root of scandals that have […]
MOSCOW — Russian explorers dived deep below the North Pole in a submersible on Thursday and planted a national flag on the seabed to stake a symbolic claim to the energy riches of the Arctic. A mechanical arm dropped a specially made rust-proof titanium flag onto the Arctic seabed at a depth of 4,261 meters (13,980 ft), Itar-Tass news agency quoted expedition officials as saying. Russia wants to extend right up to the North Pole the territory it controls in the Arctic, believed to hold vast reserves of untapped oil and natural gas. But Canada mocked Russia’s ambitions and said the expedition was nothing more than a show. ‘This isn’t the 15th century. You can’t go around the world and just plant flags and say ‘We’re claiming this territory’,’ Canadian Foreign Minister Peter MacKay told CTV television. Under international law, the five states with territory inside the Arctic Circle — Canada, Norway, Russia, the United States and Denmark via its control of Greenland — have a 320 km (200 mile) economic zone around the north of their coastline. Russia is claiming a larger slice extending as far as the pole because, Moscow says, the […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
