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slate.com - the word flexitarian for its utility in describing a growing demographic—the "vegetarian who occasionally eats meat." Now there's evidence that going flexi is good for the environment and good for your health. A study released last October found that a plant-based diet, augmented with a small amount of dairy and meat, maximizes land-use efficiency.
- Thirteen percent of U.S. adults are "semivegetarian," meaning they eat meat with fewer than half of all their meals. In comparison, true vegetarians—those who never, ever consume animal flesh—compose just 1 percent.
- There is no more contentious question in the world of veganism than the one posed by honey... Does honey qualify as a forbidden animal product since it's made by bees? Or is it OK since the bees don't seem too put out by making it?
- The hard-liners argue that beekeeping, like dairy farming, is cruel and exploitative. The bees are forced to construct their honeycombs in racks of removable trays, according to a design that standardizes the size of each hexagonal chamber. (Some say the more chaotic combs found in the wild are less vulnerable to parasitic mites.) Queens are imprisoned in certain parts of the hive, while colonies are split to increase production and sprinkled with prophylactic antibiotics. In the meantime, keepers control the animals by pumping their hives full of smoke, which masks the scent of their alarm pheromones and keeps them from defending their honey stores. And some say the bees aren't making the honey for us, so its removal from the hive could be construed as a form of theft.
- The flexitarians counter that if you follow the hard-line argument to its logical extreme, you end up with a diet so restrictive it borders on the absurd. After all, you can't worry over the ethics of honey production without worrying over the entire beekeeping industry. Honey accounts for only a small percentage of the total honeybee economy in the United States; most comes from the use of rental hives to pollinate fruit and vegetable crops... Life for these rental bees may be far worse than it is for the ones producing honey. The industrial pollinators face all the same hardships, plus a few more: They spend much of their lives sealed in the back of 18-wheelers, subsisting on a diet of high-fructose corn syrup as they're shipped back and forth across the country. Husbandry and breeding practices have reduced their genetic diversity and left them particularly susceptible to large-scale die-offs.
Drugs Offer Promise of Fitness Without EffortNew York Times - 34 minutes ago By NICHOLAS WADE Can you enjoy the benefits of exercise without the pain of exertion? The answer may one day be yes - just take a pill that tricks the muscles into thinking they have been working out furiously.Scientists say they've found exercise in a pill Los Angeles Times Exercise in a Pill? Maybe WebMD - Can you enjoy the benefits of exercise without the pain of exertion? The answer may one day be yes — just take a pill that tricks the muscles into thinking they have been working out furiously.
- Researchers at the Salk Institute report they have found two drugs that do wonders for the athletic endurance of couch potato mice. One drug, known as Aicar, increased the mice's endurance on a treadmill by 44 percent after just four weeks of treatment.
- A second drug, GW1516, supercharged the mice to a 75 percent increase in endurance, but had to be combined with exercise to have any effect.
- They should help people who are too frail to exercise and those with health problems such as diabetes that are improved with exercise, he said.
- In a report published in the Friday issue of Cell, he describes the two drugs that successfully activate the muscle-remodeling system in mice. One, GW1516, activates PPAR-delta but the mice must also have exercise training to show increased endurance. It seems that PPAR-delta switches on one set of genes, and exercise another, and both sets are needed for great endurance.
- The second drug, called Aicar, improves endurance without any training. Dr. Evans believes it both mimics the effects of exercise and activates PPAR-delta, thus being able to switch on both sets of genes needed for the endurance signal.
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slate.com - nowadays when you are lost, your phone can probably assist you. So it's no surprise that GPS firms are suffering.
- The Dash Express navigator packs a killer feature that other GPS systems lack: the Internet. Network connectivity powers Dash's primary attraction: what the company calls "crowd-sourced traffic." As you traverse your favored metropolis, the Dash Express anonymously transmits information about its location and speed to a central server. Every other Dash driver does the same. Using this data, Dash can paint a stunningly accurate picture of traffic patterns. Have you ever been stuck in a jam and wished there were some way to look two miles ahead to see whether things are still ugly? Dash essentially does that for you.
- I've been testing the Dash Express for a week, and I'm floored. One morning rush hour this week, I drove from my home in San Francisco to Stanford University. At the start of the 30-mile trip, I plugged my destination into the Dash Express. The device gave me three possible routes, each with an estimated travel time based on traffic conditions gleaned from other drivers currently moving down those roads. I chose what Dash said was the fastest route, a straight shot down the congested 101 freeway. The device guessed I would arrive at Stanford in 59 minutes. Sixty-two minutes later, I was there. Along the way, the Dash predicted nearly every hurdle along my trip with eerie accuracy: Traffic slowed down just where the color-coded map showed yellow, orange, and red roads, and speeds picked up again exactly where Dash's map was painted green.
- Dash also receives incident and sensor data, but it adjusts all its numbers with on-the-ground conditions fed back by real drivers. The system uses this info both to plan your route and to suggest changes as you're driving. If Dash senses a sudden slow-down ahead, it will ask whether you'd like to be routed around it. Sometimes, it will even guide you off the freeway and through surface streets, for which Dash also knows traffic conditions. (The system tracks traffic patterns over time, compiling a database of how quickly all roads move during 672 discrete intervals during the day.)
- Dash's Internet connectivity helps with things besides traffic. Traditional GPS devices ship with databases of millions of shops and attractions across the country. Like a printed phone book, these databases go out of date: If you bought your GPS a couple of months ago, for instance, it will think there are 600 more Starbucks in the country than there now are. Over time, as roads shut down and new developments spring up, maps go stale. In order to refresh your device, you've got to buy an update disk.
- Dash updates itself automatically with the latest maps, and it offers something an order of magnitude more useful than a built-in database of attractions: a Web-based search engine. When you look for nearby shops in Dash, you're really searching Yahoo, which already knows about all those shuttered Starbucks.
- For all this great functionality, Dash faces a major vulnerability as a business proposition: Many of its features can be replicated on smartphones. Technically, the iPhone can do everything Dash does—it's got the Internet, GPS, and a touch-screen interface. It's possible to imagine another start-up building a Dash clone on Apple's device or on any other advanced phone. Considering how many of them are out there, the crowd-sourced traffic information generated by the iPhone would put Dash's data to shame.
- In the meantime, the traffic data that Dash learns from its drivers could also prove valuable. The licensing possibilities look lucrative—Google, Microsoft, and Apple might all want better traffic data for their maps products. UPS, FedEx, and the Postal Service could probably also do with a clearer picture of road conditions. And Dash might even be able to help Starbucks out. At a recent tech conference, a Dash executive pointed out that Dash knows where people drive and knows where people search for coffee. That means it knows exactly where Starbucks should open up its next location in Arkansas: Highway 40, between Little Rock and Memphis, Tenn.
