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
Tag Archives: science
Can Wind Power Get Up to Speed?
Pop quiz: what source of power doesn’t come out of the ground, doesn’t burn and isn’t radioactive? Hint: it contributed the most new electricity generation to the U.S. grid in 2008
The Trouble With Biofuels
Maybe it was simply too good to be true. For proponents, biofuels — petroleum substitutes made from plant matter like corn or sugar cane — seemed to promise everything.
Fast Food: Would You Like 1,000 Calories with That?
How sloppy is that triple Whopper with cheese? It has 1,250 calories, or 62.5% of the recommended 2,000-calories-per-day diet.
Can Genetics Help You Find Love?
Remember the famous sweaty-T-shirt experiment? When asked to sniff men’s shirts back in 1995, women who were not on the Pill preferred the scent of men who had certain genes that were more dissimilar to their own
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
A Brief History Of Bachelor Parties
The trees are blooming; the birds are singing; the newspaper society sections are thick with marriage announcements. As the last soggy weeks of spring give way to the balmy days of summer, wedding season has arrived — and with it an onslaught of bachelor parties
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
Tetris: From Russia With Fun!
Sputnik burned up in the atmosphere, Berlin is now one city, but 25 years later, the Soviet-designed Tetris remains one of the most popular and ubiquitous video games ever created.
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: Hergé — or at least his globetrotting comic strip character Tintin — and René Magritte, the subversive surrealist painter