You’re at the office, on a budget, it’s almost lunch time and — you’re starving. You can’t go to a grocery store because you have no time to cook (although if you did go, you’d notice that most of the healthier items cost more than the heavily marketed junk). On the way out of the office you walk past a gym and cringe (now you’re likely to inadvertently increase your food consumption at lunch). Finally you reach the outside of McDonald’s, which represents the antithesis of your dieting goals. Secretly you’d like to gorge yourself on a Big Mac, but you stride into the ... Read More
The Empowering Power of Ice
February 8, 2010 • By • 1 Comment
Just when most of the country has "had it up to here" with ice, a coalition of publicly run electric utilities in Southern California say it has plans to cool the state's energy problems by making even more. The Southern California Public Power Authority announced last month it plans to construct a 53 megawatt energy storage project over the next two years to store power — in blocks of ice. David Walden, energy systems manager for the authority, said on-peak power demand is the one of the biggest problems facing the region's electric utilities. He told Miller-McCune that power ... Read More
Female Teachers Add to Students’ Math Anxiety
February 5, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
In spite of the multitude of research indicating otherwise, the assumption that boys are biologically better at math than girls is alive and well at schools across the nation. And a new study indicates that when female teachers believe the stereotype, they pass their own mathematical anxiety on to the girls in their classes. While the perpetuation of the idea is troubling, the implications are more so: The girls who believe their gender possesses inferior math skills do significantly worse in the subject than the girls who don't. Researchers at the University of Chicago conducted a ... Read More
U.S. Defense Review Serious About Climate Change
February 5, 2010 • By • 1 Comment
In October, Miller-McCune.com considered how global warming might affect American national security, noting that there is “growing concern in Washington” that it could destabilize governments and societies all over the world. The “clearest evidence that [Washington] is taking climate change seriously as a security threat,” Miller-McCune.com wrote at the time, “will come in February, when the Pentagon issues its Quadrennial Defense Review to Congress.” The QDR, which is considered the most important long-term national security strategy document the military produces, was ... Read More
To Feel Good, Reach for the Sky
February 4, 2010 • By • 2 Comments
Recent studies have raised the alarming possibility that Botox may inhibit our emotional lives. Essentially, they warn that without the means to physically express certain feelings (as when cosmetic surgery makes it difficult to smile or raise an eyebrow), we may have trouble processing them. As Carl Zimmer wrote last year in Discover magazine, “by altering our faces we’re tampering with the ancient lines of communication between face and brain that may change our minds in ways we don’t yet understand.” But the link between motion and emotion goes beyond such straightforward signals ... Read More