During the recent whirl of the royal wedding in the UK, much attention was focused on the bride’s dress. Wedding gowns are getting sexier lately (i.e. going strapless), but that NEVER would have happened during the era of the Queen who STARTED the trend for brides wearing white. And a new study shows that Hollywood continues to be a difficult place for women to find on- and off-screen role models, and provides some grim details about society’s sexualization of teenaged girls.
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In his story "The Purloined Letter," Edgar Allan Poe writes about a man who hides a letter he doesn’t want found in plain sight, amongst the other letters and bills on his desk. Whenever I’ve wanted to hide something, I’ve remembered that story. Apparently, Osama bin-Laden read it too, since he was killed while hiding in plain sight.
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You can read a book or magazine article on them, which can be convenient (and maybe they’re even spying on you!) but the people who really like these devices are students, because you can use a computer "search" engine with them, instead of the old method of highlighting the parts of the text you want to remember with a yellow pen. But because of the way the brain works, scientists have discovered that studying on an electronic reader does not produce good test results, because they only engage one of the two parts of the brain that are involved in reading, meaning that it’s harder to REMEMBER things you’ve read this way.
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Methane is one of the most highly potent greenhouse gases–25-33 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. For reasons we don’t yet understand, occasionally huge amounts of methane are outgassed from places where they are stored on Earth (such as peat bogs and permafrost) and on the ocean floor, warming the atmosphere considerably. On Coast to Coast AM last week, Whitley told us what to look for when this process starts: Record high temperatures in the northern Arctic, beginning this summer.
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