26% of kids under 2 have their own TV! The same research also found that parents were not all that worried about excessive screen time. Walter F. Lambert, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Miami disagrees: "I have a very big issue with TVs in children's bedrooms, because it encourages children not to be part of the family unit." 45 percent of parents admit to sometimes us... posted on Nov 05 2003, 977 reads

If keeping track of your email seems overwhelming, consider the task of two UC Berkeley professors to count all the information the world produces. They estimated that the world produced five million million megabytes of data in 2002 alone; the number was so big they even invented a new unit of measurement: exabyte. With a world population of 6.3 billion, that's about 800 megabytes of recorded i... posted on Nov 01 2003, 964 reads

It's just the kind of dilemma that entrepreneurs like David Green love. The West has cutting-edge, high-tech medicine, but the poor of the world, who sorely need it, can't come close to affording it. To bridge that gap, Green, a quiet idealist, is doing something revolutionary: applying market forces to Third World health care. In the process he has driven the prices of medical devices such as hea... posted on Oct 31 2003, 2,375 reads

Three out of every five Americans are now overweight, and some researchers predict that today's children will be the first generation of Americans whose life expectancy will actually be shorter than that of their parents. The culprit, they say, is the plethora of health problems associated with obesity. Michael Pollan of NY Times suggests that the building block of the "fast food nation" is inexp... posted on Oct 30 2003, 1,015 reads

Open source. It's called that because the collaboration is open to all and the final product is freely shared. Open source harnesses the distributive powers of the Internet, parcels the work out to thousands, and uses their piecework to build a better whole. It works like an ant colony, where the collective intelligence of the network supersedes any single contributor. Open source is the magic b... posted on Oct 22 2003, 1,016 reads

Lonely hearts have spent millennia trying to capture the pain of rejection in painting, poetry and song. Now neuroscientists have seen it flickering in some remarkable brain images from college students suffering a social snub. The brain scans reveal that two of the same brain regions that are activated by physical pain are also activated by social exclusion. "This doesn't mean a broken arm hurts ... posted on Oct 11 2003, 1,051 reads

The heart pumps blood. But that's not it. Science is now showing that the heart is much more, that it is no coincidence that we feel positive emotional states in the heart! After extensive research, one of the early pioneers in neurocardiology, Dr. J. Andrew Armour, introduced the concept of a functional "heart brain" in 1991. His work revealed that the heart has a complex intrinsic nervous sys... posted on Oct 04 2003, 925 reads

English words are connected by just three degrees of separation! Word association can link just about any two common words in the English language using an average of three steps, says a team of scientists in Arizona. The semantic links between English words make the thesaurus a 'small world', much as the network of human social interactions connect us all by six degrees of separation.... posted on Oct 01 2003, 941 reads

In September, 1930, Native Americans from 14 different Plains tribes gathered at Browning, Montana for a US-sponsored conference. The plaque at the exhibit today explains that the Bureau of Indian Affairs tape recorded the entire proceedings, but because of different dialects, the various tribes all communicated by sign language.... posted on Sep 30 2003, 1,082 reads

Luxury spending in the United States has been growing four times faster than overall spending. In "Living it Up: Our Love Affair With Luxury", James Twitchell says that this necessary consumption of unnecessary items and services is going on at all but the lowest layers of society: J.C. Penney now offers day spa treatments; Kmart sells cashmere bedspreads. He even finds ways to compare hotels to... posted on Sep 10 2003, 1,147 reads