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We may be entering the largest solar cycle ever recorded. While the sun is not responsible for global warming?human emissions are behind that?sunspots CAN make things worse?just when we thought we might be getting a reprieve.

In BBC News, Dr. David Whitehouse reports on a drilling of ice cores in Greenland that reveals that the sun is more active now than it has been at anytime in the last 1,000 years. While we can now view sunspots with satellite technology, humans have been looking at them through telescopes for almost 400 years. Between 1645 and 1715, sunspot activity was greatly reduced and this brought on what has come to be known as the “little ice age” in Europe.
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One of the most confusing things about being pregnant is figuring out what to eat. And did you know there?s something you should eat if you WANT to get pregnant?

In New Scientist, Phil McKenna reports that women who want to get pregnant but are having trouble doing so may need to switch to a high fat diet, because fertility experts have found that a low fat dairy diet of skimmed milk and other low fat dairy foods) can prevent ovulation.

In another New Scientist article, Roxanne Khamsi reports that once you ARE pregnant, you should lay off the beef. Scientists are trying to solve the mystery of why so many men born in the last 30 years have low sperm count, and they think it may be because their pregnant mothers ate a lot of hormone-treated beef.
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In the past, I have written about what it’s like to experience some glamorous events: the opening of a major feature film, sitting in the Green Room while your husband is on national TV, being in the audience while your husband is one of the guests during the filming of a TV pilot and what it’s like to be in a porn film without taking off your clothes. Now I’m going to write about something decidedly less glamorous: what it’s like to have a colonoscopy.
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More than half a century before the modern mathematical theory called quasicrystal geometry was discovered in the West, Muslim artists were using it to create intricate, non-repeating tile patterns in buildings. These patterns are now known as Penrose tiling, after the quantum physicist Roger Penrose, who only discovered this theory 30 years ago.
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