Do yourself, your family, and your friends a favor, and stop eating fast food. It literally destroys your ability to think and correctly assess situations, and it turns you into a glutton.
Credit: T. L. Furrer / stock.adobe.com
HERSHEY, PENNSYLVANIA — Eating fatty foods like burgers and fried chicken can obviously lead to obesity, but not in the way you may think. Researchers say a high-fat diet and junk food rewires the brain, reduces our ability to regulate appetite and regulate calorie consumption.
The discovery could open the door to an anti-obesity pill that targets neurons in the brain. Experiments in rats show that cells called astrocytes control a chemical pathway to the gut. However, the study suggests that continuously gorging on fatty and sugary products disrupts that link.
“Calorie intake seems to be regulated in the short-term by astrocytes. We found that a brief exposure (three to five days) of high fat/calorie diet has the greatest effect on astrocytes, triggering the normal signaling pathway to control the stomach. Over time, astrocytes seem to desensitize to the high fat food. Around 10-14 days of eating high fat/calorie diet, astrocytes seem to fail to react and the brain’s ability to regulate calorie intake seems to be lost. This disrupts the signaling to […]
When you look at the factual data on police violence, as this report lays out, the blatant racism of most police departments, and especially sheriff's departments becomes obvious. But I think there is something else going on. American police are the least educated, and the least trained of all police departments in any developed democracy. I think that is strongly brought into focus by the murder of Tyre Nichols. I have seen a dozen television news accounts of his murder, and read another dozen website and print media stories. Not one. Let me say it again, not one has emphasized this reality: A Black man was murdered by five Black police officers. It is hard to think of that as racist, but it clearly is an example of poor education and poor training. All of these arguments about funding or defunding the police fail to mention what ought to be obvious. The murderous violence of American police is a function of poor selection of personnel, followed by poor education, and poor training. It has nothing to do with buying military gear. Here is my bottom line: To become a police officer in the United States you should have a college degree, and you should then go through two years of training before they give you a gun and put you on the street.
The year 2022 was the deadliest year on record in the United States for fatalities at the hands of law enforcement. According to the Washington Post’s police shootings database, law enforcement officers shot and killed 1,096 people last year. In comparison, there were 1,048 shooting fatalities at the hands of police the year before, 1,019 the year before that, 997 the year before that, and so on.
These numbers are most likely underestimated. According to Abdul Nasser Rad, managing director of research and data at Mapping Police Violence, the Post “only captures incidents where a police officer discharges their firearm and the victim is killed.” This means that it doesn’t count events like the 2014 killing of Eric Garner in New York and the 2020 killing of George Floyd in Minnesota, as both deaths resulted from asphyxiation.
In contrast, Mapping Police Violence includes any action that a law enforcement officer takes that results in a fatal encounter. For example, Rad’s project concluded that police killed
Daniel Bessner, Associate Professor of International Studies in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington and a Co-host of the Foreign Affairs Podcast “American Prestige.” - The New York Times
Stephan:
I have been looking for some time for a story on this trend because I think it is highly significant and happening almost without notice. We have one party, The Republican Party, that wants to indoctrinate rather than educate students at all levels from grade school to university about American history. White Republicans don't like to talk about slavery and racism. They tell each other lies about these subjects and want those lies to be made the official story. Just listen to Ron DeSantis. But another effect of this trend is that fewer people are taking the time to become historians. We are losing our past, and so we are being condemned to repeat the same evil errors.
Credit: Soohee Cho
When I received my Ph.D. in history in 2013, I didn’t expect that within a decade fights over history — and historiography, even if few people use that word — would become front-page news. But over the last few years that is precisely what has happened: Just look at the recent debates over America’s legacy of slavery, what can be taught in public schools about the nation’s founders and even the definition of what constitutes fascism. The interpretation of the American past has not in recent memory been as public or as contentious as it is now.
Maybe it started with The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, which sought to “reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of our national narrative” and which accompanied a national reckoning around race. That provoked, perhaps inevitably, a right-wing backlash in the form of “The 1776 Report,” a triumphalist, Donald Trump-directed effort. Then came a raft of laws in […]
Here is the beginning of a trend that I think could become quite significant, and I see it as good news. This is the sort of change that will have to be made if we are to learn how to cope with climate change.
Raspberry crops grow under solar panels at an agrivoltaic farm in the Netherlands on July 12, 2022. Credit: Francois Walschaerts / AFP/ Getty
Now, scientists are looking into how to harness the sun’s light spectrum in a way that can improve the efficiency of agrivoltaic systems in areas with arid farmland.
In a new study, scientists at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis), discovered that the blue part of the light spectrum is more efficient for solar energy production, while the red part of the spectrum is better for plant growth, a press release from UC Davis said.
The study, “Not All Light Spectra Were Created Equal: Can We Harvest Light for Optimum Food-Energy Co-Generation?” was published in the journal Earth’s Future.
“This paper is a door opener for all sorts of technological advancements,” said associate professor at the Department of Land, Air and Water […]
Here is some very good news. I have very strong feelings and have been a long-time advocate for protecting endangered species. And we now know on the basis of objectively verifiable facts that the Endangered Species Act has worked.
bald eagle with fish Credit:Jongsun Lee
The Endangered Species Act has been around for five decades. How successful has it been in protecting and restoring threatened and endangered species? – A.J. Munson, Bern, North Carolina
The Endangered Species Act (ESA) has been successful in preventing the extinction of hundreds of wildlife species and in promoting the recovery of thousands more since its inception in 1973.
According to the Center of Biological Diversity, a leading nonprofit with the simple mission of “saving life on Earth,” the ESA has protected more than 1,600 species in the U.S., preventing the extinction of 99 percent of the species listed under it.
