Current Affairs

If you ever accused the teens around you of not even knowing what time it was, you now have science to back you up:

The major problem with teenagers and sleep can be boiled down to two things, researchers say: melatonin and school start times.

Spend some time learning from a real hero, either by listening to Penn Gillette's podcast or reading Ronald Bailey's interview:

Norman Borlaug, as the "Father of the Green Revolution," is the single human being who has saved more human lives than any other person in all of history. How many lives has he saved? My guess is easily more than billion. For his work in dramatically improving crop yields, Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.

Those dastardly federal officials are operating in secret again:

Chertoff's stealthy information-gathering was just one example of the U.S. government's secretive response to an emerging terrorist plot, in which at least 41 suspects were arrested in Britain and Pakistan in connection with alleged plans to blow up jetliners as they flew from London to the United States.

I saw Russ Feingold on one of the Sunday news shows yesterday, and he reminded me an awful lot of someone else. He looks more like Soupy Sales than Soupy Sales does.

Two stories caught my eye yesterday:

Riding your little scooter isn't as responsible as you might think it is:

With temperatures rising like gas prices, scooters may seem the perfect mode of transportation.

You get up to 100 miles per gallon, on top of the hipster factor and the feel of the wind in your hair. But there's one imperfection to these sassy little two-wheeled machines: A March 2005 study by the Environmental Protection Agency shows most scooters on the road pollute more than SUVs.

The 10 creepiest icons in advertising history.

(If you do not have time to read this entire post, just skip to the very last sentence.)

Print has long catered to our short attention spans. Remember the Reader's Digest condensed versions and Classics Illustrated and Cliff Notes? What's surprising is that film, which claims our attention even less than print, hasn't gone into this much more:

My goodness. Drinking sugar-laden soft drinks makes us fat. That expensive scientific research just keeps hitting us with shocking news:

Americans have sipped and slurped their way to fatness by drinking far more soda and other sugary drinks over the last four decades, a new scientific review concludes.

It's a heck of a world when McDonald's burger flippers are telling us how to behave:

Two octogenarians have been in the news with health-related issues. One has exerted total control over everything his country does. The other has preached that a total lack of self-control is the highest virtue. That would make them interesting companions in hell, I think, with lots to talk about.