This is Chauncy Morlan, and around 100 years ago his obesity was so shocking that people would pay money to see him as he toured the country as a circus “fat man”. I find the unremarkableness of his size to be a telling sign of how we’ve pushed the limits of obesity in the . . . → Read More: How the perception of obesity has changed
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I wouldn’t have thought you need to have a degree from the LSE to realise that the most effective way to reduce global CO2 emissions is to reduce the population. However that is what they have just stated in a new report (Fewer Emitters, Lower Emissions, Less Cost): It’s always been obvious that total . . . → Read More: No brainer I must admit I hate exercise. Apart from cycling, perhaps. We have cycled from Munich to the Czech border and back in two weeks a few years ago. But where we live now is at the top of a 12 km long uphill climb of about 500 meters and when we first moved here, . . . → Read More: How to keep young The Guardian reports that the mafia has started selling cheap bread in Naples, attracting lots of customers, but the local authorities warn that the bread could cause cancer and that it is not so easy to identify. Originally, it was sold from car boots, but now they are also supplying shops, making it difficult . . . → Read More: Risky – eating bread in Naples I don’t like sitting in a smoky restaurant or pub and intensely dislike having smoking in my house. So you might think I’d be upset at the “smoker’s victory” being reported by the local and international press. The constitutional court has ruled that the law in some German states, prohibiting smoking in one-room establishments, . . . → Read More: A smoker’s “victory” in Germany? The New Yorker asks if the world’s food system is collapsing, and looks at how modern agriculture has defied the predictions of Thomas Malthus in his book “Essay on the Principle of Population” written in 1798. The picture is not pretty: American consumers demand huge amounts of cheese and meat. One consequence is . . . → Read More: Is our food supply collapsing? Researchers today are capable of building their own viruses: Thanks to steady advances in computing power and DNA technology, a talented undergraduate with a decent laptop and access to any university biology lab can assemble a virus with ease. Five years ago, as if to prove that point, researchers from the State University of . . . → Read More: Reconstructing extinct viruses Looking back on this summer, I’d say that at least one person in the office has been suffering from a heavy cold at any moment in time. At least they don’t seem to have caught the mutation which has been discovered in the USA: A mutated version of an adenovirus, a common family of . . . → Read More: A “super cold” bug emerges in the USA The largest ever study of the links between lifestyle and cancer has made 10 stark recommendations to reduce the risk of developing the disease… More > Did we throw away the best weapon against malaria in the mid-1960′s? The New Scientist has an article on how, having nearly eradicated malaria betweeb 1958 and 1963, funds for the eradication were stopped one year earlier than would have been necessary to finish the job. Malaria today kills nearly as many people each . . . → Read More: How we lost a chance to eradicate malaria |
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