Everybody will die one day....

Since the days of Ponce de León, if not before, people have been seeking the elusive Fountain of Youth. Until recently, such pursuits were the realm of quacks and charlatans. And there are still plenty of snake-oil salesmen out there on the Internet and in so-called anti-aging clinics, hawking everything from longevity-bestowing Ecuadoran waters (which are probably harmless) to growth hormones (which could be downright dangerous for adults). But serious scientists are now bringing respectability to the field, unraveling the secrets of aging on a cellular level and looking for ways to slow it down. And while the science is still young (so to speak), legitimate longevity-boosting treatments could be available in 10 to 15 years—although the gains would be more modest than in Kenyon's worms.

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Gay marriage

A number of factors seem to play a role in swaying people one way or the other. For instance, 62 percent of Americans say religious beliefs play an important role in shaping their views on gay marriage. According to the survey, two-thirds of those who see marriage as primarily a legal matter support gay marriage. On the other hand, two-thirds of those who see it as mostly a religious matter (or equal parts religious and legal) oppose gay marriage. 

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The poor Bush administration

It took a while to discern the guiding ideology behind the Bush administration's poisonous science policies. The real problem wasn't tax cuts and war spending, even though the combination did strangle domestic programs so severely that scientists at the nation's premier physics lab were ordered to take unpaid leave, and the government is allocating 13 percent less to biomedical research in 2009 than it did in 2004. Nor was the culprit the sop that Bush offered the religious right in 2001 by banning the use of federal money for research on new lines of human embryonic stem cells, paralyzing the field for eight years and sending some of the nation's most promising young biologists overseas.

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Fat, fat, thin

About six years ago, Diane and Jim McConnell and their son, James Jr., 11, embarked on a dramatic diet change. They decided to give up foods containing gluten, a protein found in wheat, rye and barley. Sticking to the regimen is no easy feat—gluten is ubiquitous in the American diet, as well as in other nonfood products. Not only is it in almost every kind of commercially baked good and pasta, it's even in medications, lipsticks and Play-Doh.

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Who do you think deserve this honor?

In the past couple of years, the entire global lending industry has covered itself in shame. Virtually every banker was suckered by the credit and housing bubble. But who made the sorriest choices? Who forced shareholders and the public to bear the highest financial cost? Who, in short, is the Worst Banker in the World?

Bigfoot?

These are hard times for Bigfoot believers, a human subspecies that includes a fairly hairy collection of fantasists, charlatans, grifters and fools. But there is also a small coterie of serious scientists interested in the possibility—as they see it, the likelihood—that somewhere in the deep woods of North America enormous ape-men really are alive and well and just barely eluding detection.

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Hey!

There is no better way to attract reports of the paranormal than to write a story casting doubt on it, and attract them I did. Besides the usual ghost sightings, my favorite was from a nice man in Florida who told me about his wonderful typewriter (note: not a word processor): he would type a few letters of a word and the machine would fill in the rest, apparently having read his thoughts.

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I think I'm going into a diet

A Web page labeled "Ana Boot Camp" recently offered its members a seemingly irresistible proposition: a 30-day regimen designed to help them drop some serious pounds, no exercise needed. The catch was that the group's members were to vary their daily caloric intake from 500 (less than half the daily minimum requirement for women recommended by the American College of Sports Medicine) to zero. They were supposed to track their progress, fast to make up for the days they accidentally "overate" and support each other as they worked toward their common goal of radical weight loss.

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The true face of the Muslim

The attacks targeted the heart of India's financial district, but the shock waves were felt around the globe. On Wednesday, a group of heavily armed assailants carried out a series of coordinated strikes in Mumbai —killing at least 80, wounding hundreds more, and claiming an indeterminate number of hostages. A group calling themselves the Deccan Mujahedeen claimed responsibility for the mayhem, but their identity could not be immediately confirmed, and many terrorism  specialists said they were unfamiliar with the name. Whoever did it took aim at Western passport-holders and prominent targets; among the locations hit were two major hotels, a train station and a hospital. Several top Indian security officials were among the casualties.

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There is a movie, right?

"The butterfly effect" is a phrase that came to Hollywood and our culture from chaos theory and the abstract mathematical models of Edward Lorenz. The idea is that even the smallest alteration of the first cause in a series can produce a vast change in the final result. So in theory the slight alteration of the tiny breeze caused by a butterfly's wing could eventually change the course of a great hurricane. That is the theory. It always sounded ridiculous to me, until now.

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Now, this is interesting:

It's a question that Genevieve Hartman  has been rolling over in her mind for some time now. The 28-year-old vegetarian will be spending Thanksgiving at her boyfriend's professor's house in New York City. Thanksgiving used to be one of Hartman's favorite holidays , when she celebrated it with her vegetarian family in San Francisco. But ever since she moved to New York five years ago and began spending the holiday with relatives or friends, it's been a source of anxiety. Take the tofu dilemma: on the one hand, she doesn't want to get stranded at a turkey-heavy table without anything to eat, which might make her hosts feel bad. But she also doesn't want to bring attention to herself as needing "special foods," increasing the likelihood that she'll have to field questions about why she's skipping the turkey.

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Would you apply to this job?

There's an e-mail making the rounds with a job description attached. If you apply, be warned: you will be burdened with "challenging" tasks "in an often chaotic environment" with "variable hours, which will include evenings and weekends and frequent 24-hour shifts on call." You must be "willing to be hated, at least temporarily." Oh, and you'd better love kids, because that's who you'll be working with all day. The job, of course, is "parent"—but it might as well be "pediatrician," which requires a lot of the same skills and then some. That's why lately I've been feeling sorry for pediatrics residents. They're often too busy wiping the noses and taking the temperatures of other people's kids to do likewise for their own.

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The future of electricity

Batteries still won't evolve as quickly as computer-based technologies. The reason: a battery is based on a chemical reaction, which is limited by the laws of physics and the periodic table. Since Italy's Alessandro Volta first came up with the idea in 1800, batteries have generated electricity using the same basic principle.

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Modern Pirates, can you believe in that?

It's a scene out of another century. On Tuesday night an Indian Navy vessel in the Gulf of Aden approached a ship thought to be manned by pirates operating from lawless Somalia . Although it was dark, Indian officers told news-agency reporters that they could see crew members on deck brandishing guns and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. Volleys were fired, fire broke out on one of the pirate ships, and it sank. The crew escaped in a speed boat, the Navy ship in hot pursuit .

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This gay marriage should be discussed a little more....

Fast-forward to Election Day 2008, and a flurry of state ballot propositions to outlaw gay marriage, all of which were successful. This is the latest wedge issue of the good-old-days crowd, supplanting abortion and immigration. They really put their backs into it this time around, galvanized by court decisions in three states ruling that it is discriminatory not to extend the right to marry to gay men and lesbians.

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don't ya think so?

We can view our choices in diet and lifestyle as austere sacrifice and deprivation—I can't eat this food or enjoy this indulgence—but it is so much more effective and sustainable to reframe our choices as good examples for our kids that are acts of love. For example, I'm not one of those people who love to exercise, even though I often write about its benefits. It takes effort for me to motivate myself to work out on a regular basis.

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The seek for knowledge

Why does someone spent all of his life reading books, taking part in conferences, debating with plenty of scholars, and at its end, the undergraduation studies seemed so lame. What for?

what is the point in having all the knowledge in the world and still a secure job is so distant?

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Michelle Obama says:

We'll be using every second of the transition time to work out timetables and timelines and all that good stuff. But the hope is that everybody settles in at the same time. So that we won't be transitioning portions of the family at different periods of time. But how, when and where—we don't know enough. At this stage, it's difficult to really have good conversations about schools and all that stuff because you don't want to measure the drapes.

What do you think about it, ya know?

Who do we are talking about?

Two thin men from rude beginnings, relatively new to Washington but wise to the world, bring the nation together to face a crisis. Both are superb rhetoricians, both geniuses at stagecraft and timing. Obama, like Lincoln and unlike most modern politicians, even writes his own speeches, or at least drafts the really important ones—by hand, on yellow legal paper—such as his remarkably honest speech on race during the Reverend Wright imbroglio last spring.

interesting, isn't?

The theory is almost too perfect to be true. Barack Obama , the son of politically progressive parents, was born Aug. 4, 1961—almost nine months to the day after John F. Kennedy was elected to the White House. Is it possible Obama was conceived on that historic night?

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