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# 1. Bad times = good health?
A study that appeared in the American Journal of Epidemiology was covered in the Guardian.

While the study first appeared in December of this year, its findings have become newly relevant as a spike in food and fuel prices have put similar pressures on developing countries all over the world. The New York Times has an excellent series on the subject.

Naturally, Scientific American has covered potential solutions to this crisis, including a second "green revolution" in Africa, addressed in a recent Jeffrey Sachs column and a news item by our environment correspondent, David Biello (and again here).

#2. iScience: news you can use!
IBM's recent breakthrough on a type of memory that could store 100 times as much information as current hard disks prompted a distressingly homogenous stream of news reports, all of which wondered what this might to do for the storage capacity of iPods. Considering that the press release upon which these stories were based made the same comparison, this seems like a classic case of churnalism.

To be fair, Scientific American itself has in the past been guilty of trying to hook readers with the gratuitous use of the word iPod in a headline.

#3. Hearing hominid speech
Reproducing neanderthal speech from little more than a model of its vocal tract is no mean feat, but the conclusion drawn by researcher Robert McCarthy, an anthropologist at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, is already sparking controversy: he claims that his reconstruction demonstrates that Neanderthal's would have had a hard time producing a certain class of sounds, and that this bodes ill for their being proficient with language.

2 Comments

1. 1. lpenguin 07:47 PM 4/25/08

   Maybe the higher price of food (especially corn) will make us all slimmer.

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2. 2. John_Toradze 11:28 PM 4/25/08

   I think there are quite a few dead who would disagree, but they don't get counted.
   At least 15 million children die from starvation and malnutrition each year worldwide under good conditions. That is about twice the entire population of New York City metro area.
   At least 500 million people live in dire poverty, where their survival is questionable.
   
   But, those who survive the cull are generally in good shape. And yes, periodic very short rations is good for people, combined with hard exercise.

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