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Who finds it harder, men or women? – The New Year is coming soon, which is the time for all those resolutions. We?ll bet that a big one on every smoker?s list is quitting. Women have more withdrawal symptoms but they also have more reason to quit, because, contrary to what most women believe, smoking makes you fat.

A new study shows that smokers who carry a particular version of a gene that regulates dopamine in the brain may suffer from concentration problems when they try to quit?a problem that puts them at risk for relapse.Remember the cool girls, huddled together in high school restrooms, puffing their cigarettes? Well, here’s consolation for the rest of us: Those teen smokers are more likely to get fat as adults.
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?But we don’t need to adjust our clocks – The spin of the Earth is slowing down. Not by much; only about 0.002 seconds a day (it varies), relative to our modern definition of the second. The varying rotation of the Earth is due to the cumulative effect of friction from the ocean’s tides, the moon?s orbital momentum, snow (and the lack thereof) at the polar ice caps, the 23-degree tilt of the earth, the atmosphere, solar wind, space dust and magnetic storms. Because of all these factors, the earth does not rotate EXACTLY one time every 24 hours (or 86,400 seconds).
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What’s ahead for 2009? Futurists are making the following predictions: Anxiety and depression will threaten Americans’ mental health, the US will pull out of Iraq, 100 more banks will fail and healthy eating will fall by the wayside. Keep reading for details.
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In earthfiles.com, our Dreamland science reporter Linda Howe writes that after many warnings, it’s finally happened: Yellowstone has become dangerously restless. But it’s not the volcano eruption that has long been anticipated, it’s an “intense earthquake swarm,” consisting of 250 separate quakes, that could lead to an eruption.

Linda writes, “This energetic sequence of events was most intense on December 27, when the largest number of events of magnitude 3 and up to 3.9 occurred. The Yellowstone Caldera erupted about 640,000 years ago in a ‘super volcano’ that produced 240 cubic miles of ash distributed in a radial pattern from Lava Creek around the caldera.”
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