The navigation center now has a series of planter boxes and murals throughout the facility.
Credit: www.sfchronicle.com

Alan Nethe, who spent 15 years on the street, answers succinctly when asked what he likes about the new Navigation Center in San Francisco’s Mission District.

“Everything,” he says. “What’s not great about it? You’ve got food, laundry, showers, and everybody in here cares about the program and how it runs.”

It’s not just the kitchen, community room, laundry, and showers that make the center unique. Here, in the site of a former high school, city officials are trying something that hasn’t been done anywhere else: moving in whole homeless encampments. That means couples or communities that have formed can stay together. By providing a place to store their belongings, an area for their pets and no curfew so people can come and go, they are removing barriers that keep people out of shelters, says Bevan Dufty, the head of […]

No Comments

Denmark’s astronaut Andreas Mogensen gives a thumb up before boarding the Soyuz TMA-18M rocket just a few hours before his launch to the International Space Station.
Sergei Ilnitsky/epa/Corbis

European experts have pulled off a major advance that might one day help build new worlds in space after an astronaut in the International Space Station remotely guided a robot on Earth by feel.

Danish astronaut Andreas Mogensen performed the breath-taking experiment in which he placed a peg into a very tight hole on Monday under the careful control of the European Space Agency.

While orbiting some 400 kilometers (250 miles) above Earth, Mogensen took control of the Earthbound Interact Centaur rover, which has a pair […]

No Comments

Two solar farms alongside the Mass. Pike contain 2,100 panels each.
Credit: Joanne Rathe/Globe Staff

Five solar projects sprouting along the Massachusetts Turnpike and Route 3 are not the largest in the state, but they are among the most visible and striking examples of a solar industry that has grown more rapidly than most policy makers and energy specialists ever imagined.

As tens of thousands of commuters whiz by, the gleaming rows of solar panels in locations like the Interstate 90 service plaza in Framingham, an embankment on the turnpike near Natick, or a rest area on Route 3 in Plymouth show how solar power has been integrated into daily life. The Framingham and Natick projects are already generating power; when the other sites in Framingham and Plymouth become operational later this month, the five solar farms will produce a combined 2,500 kilowatts of electricity, enough to power about 500 homes.

The highway solar farms are part of an initiative launched […]

1 Comment

If you want to wage a war, you have to have an enemy. By almost any measure—scientific reports, documentaries, government announcements, and nearly thirty million Google searches—we have been waging a War on Obesity for many years. It is not going well. The most comprehensive recent data, from the 2012 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, found that sixty-eight million Americans qualified as obese, and sixty-five million more were overweight. Smaller but more recent studies show no easing of these numbers, which clearly amount to a public-health crisis.

In most wars, the enemy stays the enemy. In this one, however, our allies and demons keep swapping places. When I was young, fat was the principal nemesis, and any other form of calorie was considered acceptable. My mother, keenly interested in the health of her children, insisted that we put margarine on our Wonder Bread. I am not sure I knew what butter was until I read about it in a Hardy Boys book.

Along with our margarine, we drank skim milk, ate ice […]

1 Comment

Credit: lardbucket.org

How long will I live? It’s more than just an existential question – think how useful the knowledge would be: we could decide whether to save, stick or blow our savings in one mad rampage. It’s only once we go into noticeable decline that can doctors help with predictions of how long we have left, and even then it’s a notoriously inexact science as they try to apply population data to an individual case.

So what do we actually know about longevity? Who will live and who will die at a given age? Is it all in the genes or do the life choices we make trump any genetic advantage? And how do we make sense of a new study that confirms that bright people live longer and that the difference in intelligence is genetic and not related to upbringing?

“We’ve known for at least 10 years that brighter people live longer,” says the study’s co-author Dr Rosalind Arden, research associate at LSE. “The current commonsense view is […]

No Comments