Interesting Articles: October 17th-November 13th 2006

Health:
* Graveyard Shift: Prostate cancer linked to rotating work schedule (Science News). The title says it all: don't play with your body schedule too much.

Food and Health:
* Seafood not your health foe, studies say (San Jose Mercury News). The health benefits of omega-3s outweigh the risks from mercury and PCBs. Fish should be a regular part of your diet.

Food and Psychology:
* Seduced By Snacks? No, Not You (New York Times). Another article on how psychological and social factors affect how much someone eats.

Biology:
* Battle of the Hermaphrodites: Sexes clash even when sharing the same body (Science News). Includes many examples of strange, unusual, weird, or just plain disturbing relationships between the sexes in various species.

Politics and Marketing:
* Free candy in every pot (American Public Media's Marketplace). A hilarious parody of campaign ads for state proposition. Listen to it! (Reading it isn't as good.)

Business Organization/Management:
* How should organizations handle failures? (Stanford Engineering Newsroom). There are countless good quality articles and books written about success and failure, innovation, and incentives. I'm posting this article simply because it has handy quotes I may later want to reference.

Technology:
* Start your engines (Science News). A good example of people solving the wrong problem. Engineers have spent years improving catalytic converters. Meanwhile, "up to 95 percent of a vehicle's hydrocarbon emissions occur during the warm-up period." A change to the start-up fuel mixture "decreased the car's hydrocarbon emissions by 81 percent." The abstract of the source article, On-board generation of a highly volatile starting fuel to reduce automobile cold-start emissions (Environmental Science & Technology), is available.

Misc:
* The Ultimate Influence (New York Times). A pretty poor article about ultimate frisbee and academics. Posted only because it cites some facts that I hadn't previously seen and may want to reference.