Zitat des Tages von Michael Specter:
For decades, Barbara Walters has been described as a broadcast pioneer - and with good reason. In 1974, Walters became the first female host of the 'Today' show. In 1976, she became the first woman to serve as a network-news anchor. In 1984, she moderated the first presidential debate between Walter Mondale and Ronald Reagan.
Throughout the United States, at the dawn of the Progressive era, dozens of laws and regulations were established to empower police officers, public-health officials, and even the armed forces to vaccinate at will, and, if necessary, at gunpoint.
Most people prepare for travels by reading about their destination; it always seemed an odd approach to me. I find it much easier and more pleasant to focus with the sights and smells of a place rattling around in my mind.
Lyme disease is the most commonly reported tick-borne illness in the United States, and the incidence is growing rapidly. In 2009, the C.D.C. reported thirty-eight thousand cases, three times more than in 1991. Most researchers agree that the true number of infections is five to ten times higher.
'Natural' is a word that has become unmoored by its meanings. If you go into a vitamin shop, things are natural, and people look at that, and they think it's good. It's no different than any other thing you swallow.
To suggest that organic vegetables, which cost far more than conventional produce, can feed billions of people in parts of the world without roads or proper irrigation may be a fantasy based on the finest intentions. But it is a cruel fantasy nonetheless.
Until the Nineteen-Eighties, when Deng Xiaoping designated the area as China's first special economic zone, Shenzhen had been a tiny fishing village. Suddenly, eleven million people appeared, seemingly out of nowhere; factories sprang up, often housed in hastily constructed tower blocks.
The Maldives, a string of islands off the coast of India whose highest point above sea level is eight feet, may be the first nation to drown. In Alaska, entire towns have begun to shift in the loosening permafrost.
Universal vaccination may well be the greatest success story in medical history.
There are people who could watch a hurricane like Sandy blow out of the Atlantic every other day and blame it on anything but human activity. They are like those who, having been diagnosed with diabetes, eat donuts for breakfast. There's not much to do about them.
When most members of a community are vaccinated, they protect those who are not by eliminating the viral reservoirs in the population. The effect is known as 'herd immunity.'
Newspapers and magazines have been valuable to us precisely because they apply filters to information, otherwise known as editing, and often the Internet seems valuable for exactly the opposite reason: You can get your news without a filter.
'Meat' is a vague term and can be used to refer to many parts of an animal, including internal organs and skin. For the most part, the meat we eat consists of muscle tissue taken from farm animals, whether it's a sirloin steak, which is cut from the rear of a cow, or a pork chop, taken from flesh near the spine of a pig.
Why do people refuse to vaccinate their children against measles or whooping cough? In many cases, because they have never seen measles and have no idea what it might do.
Industrial agriculture freed many people to pursue lives their parents and grandparents could never have. It made America modern.
Antioxidants are completely useless.
One morning every spring, for exactly two minutes, Israel comes to a stop. Pedestrians stand in place, drivers pull over to the side of the road, and nobody speaks, sings, eats, or drinks as the nation pays respect to the victims of the Nazi genocide. From the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea, the only sounds one hears are sirens.
I moved from Moscow to Rome with my family and two bicycles in 1998, and spent a lot of that year- and the next - obsessed, I am sorry to admit, with the bicycles. Italy, after all, was a place where thousands of middle-aged men felt perfectly comfortable spending many hours a week in brightly colored spandex.
The best way to deal with climate change has been obvious for years: cut greenhouse-gas emissions severely. We haven't done that. In 2010, for example, carbon emissions rose by six per cent - the largest such increase on record.
Consumers deserve the right to know what's in their food - and obviously, most people want that choice. It's hard to see how more knowledge about the products we eat every day can hurt us.
Humanity has nearly suffocated the globe with carbon dioxide, yet nuclear power plants that produce no such emissions are so mired in objections and obstruction that, despite renewed interest on every continent, it is unlikely another will be built in the United States.
By themselves, genetically engineered crops will not end hunger or improve health or bolster the economies of struggling countries. They won't save the sight of millions or fortify their bones. But they will certainly help.
There has never been a verified scientific report that chelation therapy, a gluten-free diet, or anything else can cure autism.
It doesn't seem to matter how often vaccines are proved safe or supplements are shown to offer nothing of value. When people don't like facts, they ignore them.
Just because you read a report in the 'New York Times,' the 'Economist,' or, yes, 'The New Yorker' doesn't make it true. But we do know that a few people have evaluated that story with what strikes me as fairly objective standards of reason.
If left untreated, Lyme disease can be crippling, yet it is a difficult illness to contract: a tick needs to attach itself to your body for at least twenty-four hours. Even then, two weeks worth of commonly prescribed antibiotics will kill the bacterium.
The history of agriculture is the history of humans breeding seeds and animals to produce traits we want in our crops and livestock.
If people want to believe that our ancestors were riding around on dinosaurs or that the protracted, increasing, and devastating warming of the Earth is just nature doing its thing - I guess I feel I have more useful battles to fight.
Much of modern molecular biology and microbiology has been based on the effort to decipher the basic code of life, which is made up of four nucleotides: adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine.
