A large number of crows are dying in Lewiston, Maine, and the pattern of their deaths does not suggest either disease or accidental poisoning. It could be that the birds are being intentionally poisoned, but the fact that their deaths have been confined to a few certain trees in the area mitigates against this as well, and suggests that these deaths might be a genuine mystery.
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This year, Christmas was on Monday, which I think is the most counter-intuitive day of the week for such a festive holiday. You can’t figure out what you’re supposed to be doing the rest of the week or when stores, schools and post offices will be closed or open, etc. My Christmas was even more confusing than usual, because while we had planned to go to Texas to spend the day at the annual big family celebration, we had an important meeting scheduled on the Wednesday after the holiday, so we had to cancel our plans. I kept thinking, “There must be some REASON I’m going to be here for Christmas, and I need to figure out what it is.” It turned out to be a fairly straightforward version of the loaves & fishes.
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People?especially overweight people?consume up to 50% MORE calories when they eat low-fat versions of snack foods than when they eat the regular versions. And dieters want to know: are “trans fats” (whatever they are) really bad for you?
New York City has now banned the use of trans fats in its restaurants, and Los Angeles, Boston and Chicago are considering doing the same thing, but most of us don’t really know what these are. Trans fats are artificially produced when hydrogen is added to vegetable oils, producing hydrogenated oils, in order to extend shelf life and make solid shortenings. Trans fatty acids occur naturally in meat and dairy products, but in small amounts.
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In 1961, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram discovered that ordinary people would give deadly electric shocks to people they didn’t know, despite the fact that they could hear their screams, if they were directed to do so by "authority figures." The people telling them to do this were fake, and so were their victims? screams, but the participants didn’t know this when they pushed the buttons that supposedly delivered the lethal shocks. This was done at a time when people were trying to understand how a whole nation could be persuaded to follow an evil leader like Hitler.
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