Monthly Archive: January 2007

The fundamental organization of the reproductive part of the vertebrate urogenital tract is straightforward: it’s a tube with a funnel at one end that captures eggs released by the ovary, and conducts them to...

There is no straight path from the renunciation of meat to a politics of virtue. Nazi vegetarianism raises obvious problems in this regard … Hitler’s strict adherence to a vegetarian diet was largely medical:...

Most drugs are developed by Big Pharma–Brobdingnagian corporations with vast teams of scientists who have, to date, failed to cure the common cold. Airborne’s creator is “Knight-McDowell Labs”–Victoria Knight-McDowell is a schoolteacher and her...

The low-tax, high-income countries are mostly English-speaking ones that share a direct historical lineage with 19th-century Britain and its theories of economic laissez-faire … Budgetary outlays for social purposes average around 27 percent of...

How is [Hugh Hefner] who’s 78 years old able to have sex with that many women?He doesn’t really do anything. He just lies there with his Viagra erection. It’s just a fake erection, and...

What the ancient Mayans relished was not solid chocolate as we now know it. Rather, it was a thick, gritty, generally unsweetened frothy beverage composed of ground cacao beans, water, and other spices and...

People’s incomes are swinging wildly—like winnings in a casino. In 1970, a [US] family in any given year had a one-in-fourteen chance of its income dropping by half; today, the chance is one in...

One-third of U.S. patients with health problems reported experiencing medical mistakes, medication errors, or inaccurate or delayed lab results—the highest rate of any of the six nations surveyed [Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, UK,...

The latest [US] BLS employment situation report states 4.5% unemployment, and 167,000 jobs created in December … the headline “unemployment” number we see every month isn’t the unemployment number — it’s one of many,...

It will only take a few tens of thousands of years at most before almost every trace of our present dominance has vanished completely. Alien visitors coming to Earth 100,000 years hence will find...