James' World 2

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Runners were some of the first people to embrace smartwatches. I remember back when a “running watch” was a brick-like GPS device strapped to your wrist, and it was a game-changer when those bricks started tracking heart rate as well.

These days, every smartwatch can track your heart rate, not to mention your location and potentially a half-dozen other things. So what makes a running watch special? Tons of extra fitness-centric features—and some critical small details, like physical buttons. Read on for my picks.

What to look for in a running watch

It’s easy to get lost in spec sheets and marketing claims, but at the end of the day what matters in a watch is whether it can do what you want a watch to do. Think of it like hiring an employee: you don’t want the person who can do the most things, you want the person who can do the job that you need done. 

So here are some things to think about when crafting the “job description” for your running watch. Some might be critical to you; some might be irrelevant. 

Does it have physical buttons? 

For most everyday functions, it may not matter if you’re clicking a physical button or booping an icon on a screen. But when you’re running laps at the track, your shaky, sweaty fingers are going to have a hard time with a touchscreen. For that reason, runners often prefer a watch with real buttons. All of our picks below have physical buttons. 

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Credit: Composite / Alisa Stern; Shutterstock / PeopleImages.com – Yuri A

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On the day that I was born—winter solstice, 1959—a headline in Life magazine proclaimed “Target Venus: There May be Life There!” It told of how scientists rode a balloon to an altitude of 80,000 feet to make telescope observations of Venus’s atmosphere, and how their discovery of water raised hopes that there could be living things there. As a kid, I thrilled to tales of undersea adventure with telepathic Venusian frogs in Isaac Asimov’s juvenile science-fiction novel Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus. In 1975, when I was 15, a family friend—a planetary scientist—gave me a picture of the first-ever photograph taken from the surface of another planet: Venus. The Soviet Venera 9 probe had sent back a black-and-white image of a landscape with angular rocks and fine-grained dirt. A bright patch of sky made it seem much less unearthly than the Apollo moon shots I had obsessed over, and more like a strange, overcast desert land that you might hope to visit someday.

For many of my peers, though, Venus quickly lost its romance. The very first thing that scientists discovered with a mission to another planet was that Venus was not at all the Earthly paradise that fiction and speculative science had portrayed. It is nearly identical to our own planet in bulk properties such as mass, density, and size. But its surface has been cooked and desiccated by a suffocating ocean of carbon dioxide. Trapped in the scorching death-grip of a runaway greenhouse effect, Venus has long been held up as a cautionary tale for everything that could go wrong on a planet like Earth. As a possible home for alien life, it has been voted the planet least likely to succeed.

But I have refused to give up on Venus, and over the years my stubborn loyalty has been vindicated. The rocky vistas glimpsed by Venera 9 and other Russian landers suggested a tortured volcanic history. That was confirmed in the early 1990s by the American Magellan orbiter, which used radar to peer through the planet’s thick clouds and map out a rich, varied, and dynamic surface. To judge from the paucity of impact craters, the surface formed mostly in the last billion years, which makes it fresher and more recently active than any rocky planet other than Earth. Russian and American spacecraft also found hints that the primordial climate might have been wetter, cooler, and possibly even friendly to life. Measurements of density and composition imply that Venus originally formed out of basically the same stuff as Earth. That presumably included much more water than the trace equivalent to one thousandth of 1 percent of Earth’s oceans that we find wafting in the thick air today.

Confirmation comes from the measured ratio of deuterium (heavy hydrogen) to normal hydrogen. Venus’s atmosphere has proportionately much more deuterium than Earth’s does. This skew is a sign that the planet’s hydrogen has gradually escaped to space; deuterium, being heavier, leaks out more slowly than its lighter cousin, so that a difference builds up over time. Winding the clock backward, Venus must once have had much more hydrogen, which is to say, much more water.

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Venus

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San Francisco-born Orenthal James Simpson rose to fame in college before playing in the NFL.

In 1995, he was acquitted of the murder of his former wife Nicole Brown and her friend in a trial that gripped America.

In 2008, he was sentenced to 33 years’ imprisonment on unrelated charges of armed robbery. He was released in 2017.

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Around the world, children are far more likely than ever before to develop food allergies.

Inquiries into the deaths of British teenagers after eating buttermilk, sesame, and peanuts have highlighted the sometimes tragic consequences. In 2018, a six-year-old girl in Western Australia died as the result of a dairy allergy.

The rise in allergies in recent decades has been particularly noticeable in the West. Food allergy now affects about 7% of children in the UK and 9% of those in Australia, for example. Across Europe, 2% of adults have food allergies.

Life-threatening reactions can be prompted even by traces of the trigger foods, meaning patients and families live with fear and anxiety. The dietary restrictions which follow can become a burden to social and family lives.

While we can’t say for sure why allergy rates are increasing, researchers around the world are working hard to find ways to combat this phenomenon.

What Causes an Allergy?

An allergy is caused by the immune system fighting substances in the environment that it should see as harmless, known as allergens.

These innocent substances become targets, leading to allergic reactions.

Symptoms range from skin redness, hives, and swelling to – in the most severe cases – vomiting, diarrhea, difficulty breathing, and anaphylactic shock.

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This is tricky, click each title 1 through 5 for the long read desired, and close the new tab when you’re finished, then choose the next title. Enjoy!

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In this week’s edition:

• How Israel uses AI for assassination in the Gaza War.
• A father reflects on his son’s development.
• The rise of the term, “gaslighting.”
• Toni Morrison’s expansive rejection letters.
• The history of PostSecret.

1. ‘Lavender’: The AI Machine Directing Israel’s Bombing Spree in Gaza

Yuval Abraham | +972 and Local Call | April 3, 2024 | 8,066 words

The biggest news out of Gaza this week was the deaths of seven aid workers affiliated with the non-profit organization World Central Kitchen. The incident was nothing short of perverse: Israel targeted and killed people trying to make a dent in the imminent famine that Israel itself has engineered as part of its strategy to demoralize and destroy, in whole or in part*, the Palestinian population. etc, etc,etc —SD

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Illustration by Krista. Image by Getty.

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Click the link below for the five articles:

https://longreads.com

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