The Incredible Shrinking Sheep of Scotland

News alert: the sheep of Scotland are shrinking! On Soay Island, off the western coast of Scotland, wild sheep are apparently defying the theory of evolution and progressively getting smaller. Why In short, because of climate change. Generally, the sheep’s life cycle goes like this: they fatten up on grass during the fertile, sunny summer; then the harsh winter comes, the grass disappears and the smallest, scrawniest sheep die off, while their bigger cousins survive

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Big Tobacco: A history of its decline

In the 1960s and 1970s, Big Tobacco was widely viewed as the model for effective special-interest lobbying. “My own view is that in many ways, the tobacco industry invented the kind of special-interest lobbying that has become so characteristic of the late 20th- and earlier 21st-century American politics,” said Allan Brandt, dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

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Congress Finally Gets Tough on Food Safety

Every few months, it seems, a new food-contamination scandal grips the nation, playing out in the same troubling way. Someone dies of a food-borne infection with a scary Latin name. The government recalls a dinner-table staple and traces its contamination to dirty irrigation water or a processing plant

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Two New Museums for Tintin and Magritte

It’s an old parlor game: Can you name 10 famous Belgians? Belgium is a tiny nation, and often the butt of its neighbors’ jokes, but it can claim two 20th-century artistic giants who would make it onto that list: HergĂ© — or at least his globetrotting comic strip character Tintin — and RenĂ© Magritte, the subversive surrealist painter

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