As reported by The Birmingham Post (UK), insufficient sleep can make you fat: The Warwick Medical School study, led by Professor Francesco Cappuccio, found that adults who slept for less than seven hours and children who regularly got less than ten hours' rest faced an increased risk of obesity .…
Here's a provocative article about why bicycling might, in the long run, be harmful to the environment. Here are the author's main conclusions: Human-powered transportation can substitute for trips by single-occupant automobiles. This substitution has a direct and immediate benefit of reducing energy consumption, even accounting for the latent energy content of…
A few weeks back, one of my teachers asked the class to make a five-minute PowerPoint Presentation on any topic of our choice. I chose to address a question which has long intrigued several people around me, including my classmates: “Why am I vegan?”
I thought long and hard on how I should present my views on the subject. I finally decided that my presentation would consist of pictures of factory-farmed animals being ill-treated. The presentation was appreciated by everyone but, in reality, those pictures barely account for my being vegan. Make no mistake, the depravity of the manner in which animals are treated on farms does disturb me. But my convictions about vegetarianism are rooted in a larger moral framework, one which recognizes the rights of all forms of substantial intelligence, including animals.
I was recently discussing animals’ rights with my friend, who remarked, “Rights? They are just animals for god’s sake!”
His remark that they were just animals revealed a common attitude held towards animals. Many people see animals as no different from other resources which can be harnessed for human use. They do understand the concept of rights, but this word for them, applies only to humans. I wonder if these people have thought through the concept of human rights at all. Are these rights given to humans, simply because they possess the “form” of humans?
Today, most people have a decent understanding of human rights. We generally deem it to be important for all humans, irrespective …
Uh-oh, I’m annoyed again. Nothing new, just a recycled annoyance that popped into my craw today and won’t leave, I suppose, because this particular instance, while merely a minor irritation on the surface, indicates a raging cultural infection coursing underneath.
I’m easily annoyed by words used incorrectly in the hopes of making either the subject matter or the speaker sound more important or intelligent or valuable or necessary than it probably is. This happens regularly; verbal faux pas have been catalogued, column-ized and syndicated. Corporatespeak has created a behemoth of misuses and our own president plays with English as if it were a Nerf football to be tossed about, squished, stepped on, soaked in mud then caught in the dog’s teeth, and hey, don’t worry if a few chunks of actual meaning are missing.
This day, however, the word wasn’t grammatically trounced, but it assaulted my senses nevertheless, leaving an irksome sensation of unpleasantness, a bad taste on my cultural tongue. I was listening to news in the car, as most of my city lay without power after treacherous storms roared through the region. I mention this only because I normally listen to CDs in my car, music to soothe rather than news to agitate. I need calming when I drive so as to avoid my propensity toward early-onset road rage. Anyway, in the midst of the news, a commercial ran for a plastic surgeon who promises to make us all beautiful. He can create perfection. Upgrade us from our …
As reported by Think Progress, Karl Rove –"told the Denver Post that 'recent studies' show researchers 'have far more promise from adult stem cells than from embryonic stem cells.'" This provoked the people at Think Progress to do some digging. Here's what they found: The Chicago Tribune contacted a dozen…