I've been trying (and so far succeeding) in spending less time on activities that don't really matter in the grand scheme of things, like reading the New York Times. Hence, these interesting articles postings will be much briefer in the future (as long as my resolve holds).
Plain water was most effective, removing 96 percent of Norwalk virus. Antibacterial soap was close behind, reducing viral counts by 88 percent. The alcohol-based hand gels reduced the virus by only about half.
-from Hand gels falter (Science News)
Although one supplement degraded all the oxalate [a mineral most kidney stones are composed of], the others degraded negligible amounts.
-from Can supplements nix kidney stones? (Science News)
In short, some products with purported health benefits do effectively nothing.
The study suggests that the calories that people and other animals take from foods could be directly related to which microbes have colonized their guts.
...
If the scientists' reasoning is correct, then manipulating intestinal flora might eventually be used to treat obesity, notes microbiologist Jeremy Nicholson of Imperial College London.
More details on the study that inspired this claim are available in the Science News article or in the source article: A humanized gnotobiotic mouse model of host-archaeal-bacterial mutualism (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences).
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7 comments:
"...activities that don't really matter in the grand scheme of things, like reading the New York Times"
Wow. So what qualifies as mattering? And what are you spending your newfound time on?
-BB
I'm not sure where my extra time has gone. But I feel slightly less overwhelmed now.
As for mattering, that's a deeper question, and one I have no good answer to. I have a rough order in my mind, and many things are ranked higher than a daily ingestion of The New York Times.
If you really find it unimportant, why do you have to work to not do it? Doesn't that imply that you want to read the nyt, and doesn't that make it important? Just curious.
I certainly have times where I wish I would stop procrastinating by reading articles on the web. But I really like knowing stuff.
-BB
As an aside, I notice that your comments show the time of posting, but not the date, which is a bit weird.
It's not unimportant. I enjoy knowing things. The problem is that once I start reading it, I end up reading more than I want. Some articles I spend ten minutes reading, finish them, and then think, why did I bother reading that? It's a judgment/willpower issue. If I could manage to only read the articles that I'd truly be glad I read after I read, I'd continue reading the NYT.
As another remark, if I don't read the NYT, likely, no one will notice or care. A few people will complain I ceased telling them about interesting articles, but most won't notice at all. And I get enough news with radio and elsewhere that stopping reading the NYT will not make me an uninformed citizen.
Fixed the comment time stamp format so it now displays the date as well. Good suggestion.
Fair enough. I guess I thought of it more as giving up on the news, given that 75% of what you post always came from nyt, which clearlt was not correct. I'm all for diversity of news sources.
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