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Outside of beverages, there are few clear trends. Experts who have examined the data say the reductions do not mean that Americans are flocking to farmer’s markets and abandoning fast food. Consumption of fruits and vegetables remains low; consumption of desserts remains high. Instead, people appear to be eating a little less of everything. Although consumption in nearly every category has been “cut some,” said Mr. Popkin, “the food part of our diet is horrendous and remains horrendous.”

The calorie reductions are seen across nearly every demographic group, but not equally. White families have reduced their calorie consumption more than black and Hispanic families. Most starkly, families with children have cut back more than households with adults living alone, further evidence, experts say, that the public health emphasis on childhood obesity is driving the changes.

Perhaps the biggest caveat to the trend is that it does not appear to extend to the very heaviest Americans. Among the most overweight people, weight and waist circumference have all continued rising in recent years.

fresh look at the way sea temperatures are measured has led government scientists to make a surprising claim: The puzzling apparent hiatus in global surface warming never really happened

Mainstream scientists have struggled to explain to the public how climate change can be getting worse if the warming of the planet's surface slowed at the turn of the century. Their various theories have chalked it up to dust and ash blasted into the sky by volcanic eruptions, a rare period of calm in the solar cycle, and heat absorption by the Pacific Ocean and other waters.

“I don't find this analysis at all convincing,” said Judith Curry, a climatologist at Georgia Tech who argues that natural variability in climate cycles dominates the impact of industrial emissions and other human actions. “While I'm sure this latest analysis from NOAA will be regarded as politically useful for the Obama administration, I don't regard it as a particularly useful contribution to our scientific understanding of what is going on.”

Actually fluoride is a natural mineral that, in the weak concentrations used in public drinking water systems, hardens tooth enamel and prevents tooth decay—a cheap and safe way to improve dental health for everyone, rich or poor, conscientious brusher or not. That’s the scientific and medical consensus.

when Galileo claimed that the Earth spins on its axis and orbits the sun, he wasn’t just rejecting church doctrine. He was asking people to believe something that defied common sense

all manner of scientific knowledge—from the safety of fluoride and vaccines to the reality of climate change—faces organized and often furious opposition.

“The truth is, relationships are the most valuable and value-creating resource of any society. They are our lifelines to survive, grow and thrive.”

There’s a mountain of evidence suggesting that the quality of our relationships has been in steady decline for decades.

In the 1980s, 20 percent of Americans said they were often lonely. Now it’s 40 percent.

To adopt post-truth thinking is to depart from Enlightenment ideas, dominant in the West since the 17th century, that value experience and expertise, the centrality of fact, humility in the face of complexity, the need for study and a respect for ideas.

the Trump campaign normalized lying to an unprecedented degree.

When pressed on specifics, the president has routinely denigrated those who questioned him, whether the “fake” media, “so called” judges, Washington insiders or the “deep state.” He has also condemned Obama-era intelligence officials as “political hacks.”

When I downloaded a copy of my Facebook data last week, I didn’t expect to see much. My profile is sparse, I rarely post anything on the site, and I seldom click on ads

With a few clicks, I learned that about 500 advertisers — many that I had never heard of, like Bad Dad, a motorcycle parts store, and Space Jesus, an electronica band — had my contact information

Facebook also had my entire phone book, including the number to ring my apartment buzzer. The social network had even kept a permanent record of the roughly 100 people I had deleted from my friends list over the last 14 years, including my exes.

She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”

The arrival of the smartphone has radically changed every aspect of teenagers’ lives, from the nature of their social interactions to their mental health. These changes have affected young people in every corner of the nation and in every type of household

Around 2012, I noticed abrupt shifts in teen behaviors and emotional states. The gentle slopes of the line graphs became steep mountains and sheer cliffs, and many of the distinctive characteristics of the Millennial generation began to disappear. In all my analyses of generational data—some reaching back to the 1930s—I had never seen anything like it.

Yes, Many of Us Are Stress-Eating and Gaining Weight in the Pandemic

A global study confirms that during the pandemic, many of us ate more junk food, exercised less, were more anxious and got less sleep.

Not long ago, Stephen Loy had a lot of healthy habits. He went to exercise classes three or four times a week, cooked nutritious dinners for his family, and snacked on healthy foods like hummus and bell peppers.

Over the past five years I’ve interviewed more than 300 successful people about their morning routines

while there isn’t one “best” morning routine that works for everyone, there are best practices that some of the most successful people I spoke with follow every day.

Your morning routine means nothing without a good night’s sleep behind it

A University of New Mexico research team conducted a data analysis that has found that as a larger portion of the population gets vaccinated against COVID-19, it becomes economically advantageous to start relaxing social distancing measures and open businesses.

The study looked at data from four metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) within the United States: Seattle, New York City, Los Angeles and Houston from January 21 to July 8, 2020. The four cities were chosen because they have had divergent trends with the virus (Seattle and New York City were early hotspots, while Los Angeles and Houston peaked in the summer).

"Our work is quantitative, so it can hopefully offer some evidence that shows the vaccines are going to allow us to loosen social distancing measures, including opening businesses," he said. "It provides a measure of hope as we go forward and increase the percentage of citizens who are vaccinated."

print dictionaries have embodied certain ideas about democracy and capitalism that seem especially American—specifically, the notion that “good” English can be packaged and sold, becoming accessible to anyone willing to work hard enough to learn it.

Massive social changes in the 1960s accompanied the appearance Webster’s Third, and a new era arose for dictionaries: one in which describing how people use language became more important than showing them how to do so properly. But that era might finally be coming to an end, thanks to the internet, the decline of print dictionaries, and the political consequences of an anything-goes approach to language.

The standard way of describing these two approaches in lexicography is to call them “descriptivist” and “prescriptivist.” Descriptivist lexicographers, steeped in linguistic theory, eschew value judgements about so-called correct English and instead describe how people are using the language. Prescriptivists, by contrast, inform readers which usage is “right” and which is “wrong.”

In chemistry, reactivity is a measure of how readily a substance undergoes a chemical reaction. The reaction can involve the substance on its own or with other atoms or compounds, generally accompanied by a release of energy. The most reactive elements and compounds may ignite spontaneously or explosively. They generally burn in water as well as the oxygen in air. Reactivity is dependent upon temperature.

Reactivity Trend in the Periodic TableThe organization of elements on the periodic table allows for predictions concerning reactivity. Both highly electropositive and highly electronegative elements have a strong tendency to react. These elements are located in the upper right and lower left corners of the periodic table and in certain element groups. The halogens, alkali metals, and alkaline earth metals are highly reactive.

How Reactivity WorksA substance reacts when the products formed from a chemical reaction have a lower energy (higher stability) than the reactants. The energy difference can be predicted using valence bond theory, atomic orbital theory, and molecular orbital theory. Basically, it boils down to the stability of electrons in their orbitals. Unpaired electrons with no electrons in comparable orbitals are the most likely to interact with orbitals from other atoms, forming chemical bonds. Unpaired electrons with degenerate orbitals that are half-filled are more stable, but still reactive. The least reactive atoms are those with a filled set of orbitals (octet).

magine this: When you leave the house, your air conditioner and lights turn off automatically. Then when a motion sensor detects a person in the house, like your house cleaner, it sends an alert to your phone. When you arrive home, a camera recognizes who you are and the door automatically unlocks.

Automated technologies like these will be at the forefront of CES, one of the world’s largest tech conventions, next week in Las Vegas. They underline one major trend: Increasingly, the innovations that are making their way into your personal technology aren’t physical electronics or gadgets at all.

he culmination of software, algorithms and sensors working together to make your everyday appliances smarter and more automated. It is

John Kenneth Galbraith assessed the trajectory of America’s increasingly “affluent society.” His outlook was not a happy one. The nation’s increasingly evident material prosperity was not making its citizens any more satisfied. Nor, at least in its existing form, was it likely to do so

One reason, Galbraith argued, was the glaring imbalance between the opulence in consumption of private goods and the poverty, often squalor, of public services like schools and parks

nother was that even the bountifully supplied private goods often satisfied no genuine need, or even desire; a vast advertising apparatus generated artificial demand for them, and satisfying this demand failed to provide meaningful or lasting satisfaction.

IMAGINE a future in which humanity’s accumulated wisdom about Earth — our vast experience with weather trends, fish spawning and migration patterns, plant pollination and much more — turns increasingly obsolete. As each decade passes, knowledge of Earth’s past becomes progressively less effective as a guide to the future. Civilization enters a dark age in its practical understanding of our planet.

as Earth warms, our historical understanding will turn obsolete faster than we can replace it with new knowledge. Some patterns will change significantly; others will be largely unaffected, though it will be difficult to say what will change, by how much, and when.

Until then, farmers will struggle to reliably predict new seasonal patterns and regularly plant the wrong crops. Early signs of major drought will go unrecognized, so costly irrigation will be built in the wrong places. Disruptive societal impacts will be widespread.

longer-term threats to democracy that are waiting around the corner. Perhaps the most serious is political artificial intelligence in the form of automated “chatbots,” which masquerade as humans and try to hijack the political process

Increasingly, they take the form of machine learning systems that are not painstakingly “taught” vocabulary, grammar and syntax but rather “learn” to respond appropriately using probabilistic inference from large data sets, together with some human guidance.

In the buildup to the midterms, for instance, an estimated 60 percent of the online chatter relating to “the caravan” of Central American migrants was initiated by chatbots.

Functional Medicine is the alternative medicine Bill Clinton credits with giving him his life back after his 2004 quadruple heart by-pass surgery. Its ideology is embraced by Oprah and regularly features on Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop.

Developed in 1990 by Dr Jeffrey Bland, who in 1991 set up the Institute of Functional Medicine with his wife Susan, today the field is spearheaded by US best-selling author Dr Mark Hyman, adviser to the Clintons and co-director of the controversial Cleveland Clinic for Functional Medicine.

"Functional Medicine is not about a test or a supplement or a particular protocol," he adds. "It's really a new paradigm of disease and how it arises and how to restore health. Within it there are many approaches that are effective, it's not exclusive, it doesn't exclude traditional medications, it includes all modalities depending on what's right for that patient."