James' World 2

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If you’re like most Americans, you eat more sugar than is good for you. But it’s entirely possible to eat less sugar without sacrificing much — if any — of the pleasures of eating. Surprising as it may sound, many people who have cut back on sugar say they find their new eating habits more pleasurable than their old ones. This guide will walk you through why sugar matters, how you can make smart food choices to reduce sugar consumption, and how you can keep your life sweet, even without so many sweets.

The first thing to know: Added sugars, of one kind or another, are almost everywhere in the modern diet. They’re in sandwich bread, chicken stock, pickles, salad dressing, crackers, yogurt, and cereal, as well as in the obvious foods and drinks, like soda and desserts.

The biggest problem with added sweeteners is that they make it easy to overeat. They’re tasty and highly caloric, but they often don’t make you feel full. Instead, they can trick you into wanting even more food. Because we’re surrounded by added sweeteners — in our kitchens, in restaurants, at schools, and offices — most of us will eat too much of them unless we consciously set out to do otherwise.

How Did We Get Here?

It’s not an accident. The sugar industry has conducted an aggressive, decades-long campaign to blame the obesity epidemic on fats, not sugars. Fats, after all, seem as if they should cause obesity. Thanks partly to that campaign, sugar consumption soared in the United States even as people were trying to lose weight. But research increasingly indicates that an overabundance of simple carbohydrates, and sugar in particular, is the No. 1 problem in modern diets. Sugar is the driving force behind the diabetes and obesity epidemics. Fortunately, more people are realizing the harms of sugar and cutting back.

What to Cut

Health experts recommend that you focus on reducing added sweeteners — like granulated sugar, high fructose corn syrup, honey, maple syrup, stevia, and molasses. You don’t need to worry so much about the sugars that are a natural part of fruit, vegetables, and dairy products. Most people don’t overeat naturally occurring sugars, as Marion Nestle of New York University says. The fiber, vitamins, and minerals that surround them fill you up.

A typical adult should not eat more than 50 grams (or about 12 teaspoons) of added sugars per day, and closer to 25 is healthier. The average American would need to reduce added-sweetener consumption by about 40 percent to get down to even the 50-gram threshold. Here’s how you can do it — without spending more money on food than you already do.

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Originally published on Mar. 9, 2018

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Protesters in Dearborn, Mich., earlier this month. Credit… Nick Hagen for The New York Times

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Scientists in Scotland have revealed a remarkable discovery of a “very strange” 240 million-year-old “Chinese dragon” fossil.

The international team from National Museums Scotland revealed their discovery — found in Guizhou Province in southern China — of the Dinocephalosaurus orientalis, a 5-meter-long aquatic reptile from the Triassic period dating back an estimated 240 million years.

“With 32 separate neck vertebrae Dinocephalosaurus orientalis had an extraordinarily long neck that draws comparison with that of Tanystropheus hydroides, another strange marine reptile from the Middle Triassic of both Europe and China,” scientists said announcing the discovery.

“Both reptiles were of similar size and have several features of the skull in common, including a fish-trap type of dentition,” officials continued. “However, Dinocephalosaurus is unique in possessing many more vertebrae both in the neck and in the torso, giving the animal a much more snake-like appearance.”

Scientists say the reptile was “clearly very well adapted to an oceanic lifestyle,” as indicated by the flippered limbs and “exquisitely preserved” fishes in its stomach region.

“Despite superficial similarities, Dinocephalosaurus was not closely related to the famous long-necked plesiosaurs that only evolved around 40 million years later and which inspired the myth of the Loch Ness Monster.”

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Scientists in Scotland have revealed a remarkable discovery of a “very strange” 240 million-year-old “Chinese dragon” fossil.

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Here’s an inexpensive, concrete thing you can do to cut your personal carbon contribution: Stop eating meat—or cut down dramatically. Right now.

This is 100 percent not as easy as this blasé, sanctimonious pronouncement makes it sound. There are countless personal, cultural, and economic factors that put this protein at the center of so many diets and lives. And yet, if you can swing it, it’s hard to find an easier way to reduce your individual emissions contribution. That’s not just limited to food. For most of us, it’s easier to stop eating meat than it is to swap out your gas-powered car for an EV, change how you heat your home, or get your utility to generate electricity from cleaner sources. 

It makes a huge difference. According to the University of Colorado, cutting meat out of your diet for one day a week can save more than 20,000 gallons of water and reduce your personal carbon contribution by more than 400 pounds per year. Imagine these numbers at scale. What does a million people practicing Meatless Mondays for a year look like? It looks like taking 348,000,000 car-miles worth of emissions out of the atmosphere, which is huge. What if those million people added another day? What if they didn’t eat meat at all? (696,000,000 car-miles and 2.4 billion car-miles, respectively. Also huge. In fact, huger.)  

Humans will create emissions no matter what we eat, so we can’t fixate on perfection. Farmed vegetables still need to be farmed, which means tractors and trucks burning fossil fuels. Even the act of tilling soil releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and while advances in agriculture can reduce our impact, all of it incurs environmental costs. Our civilization relies on food that we don’t have to forage. Go ahead and @ me, if you disagree — then head out to your trap line and see how many squirrels you’ve got for dinner.

Squirrels notwithstanding, we should all start questioning whether we need meat with every meal. This small, personal moment, that occurs only in our own heads, is a beginning. We’ve been taught that no dinner is complete without animal protein, but that’s dangerous misinformation for so many reasons.

Consider: Raising any kind of meat is incredibly land-intensive. In addition to the physical space the animal occupies, you also need to grow its food, which takes up its own acreage. You have to process that feed, which incurs emissions as you harvest the crop and prepare it.

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I’ve been reluctant to jump into the Sonos game because I know just how addictive it can be once you’ve crossed over — like Pringles, I know I won’t stop at just one. It’s hard to keep resisting deals like the one we’re seeing at Woot today, though. Now through February 29th (or while supplies last), you can buy a two-pack of Sonos Era 100 speakers with a 90-day warranty for $409.99, which is about $90 off the price if you were to buy two speakers separately.

I’m eying the Era 100s as starters for building out my dream home theater, which I intend to pair with something like the Sonos Arc and Sonos Sub. Each Era 100 features two tweeters and a built-in woofer for drivers, which makes it a powerful speaker on its own. While the allure of Sonos is wireless audio, each Era 100 also supports line-in through an optional $19 USB-C dongle for devices that can’t connect over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. They don’t support the Era 300’s spatial audio, but for the money, they sound great by themselves or in stereo, and they remain our favorite starting point in the Sonos lineup for music around the house.

The LG C3 OLED is one of the best TVs you can buy no matter your viewing needs, and thanks to eBay’s ongoing Presidents Day promo, you can currently buy one cheaper than ever. Now through February 19th, you can grab a 48-inch C3 for $817.59 ($200 off) or a 65-inch model for $1,309.59 ($330 off) via Electronic Express when you use promo code PRESIDENT20 for 20 percent off.

It’s hard to go back once you’ve experienced the deep contrast, satisfying color, brightness uniformity, and wide viewing angles afforded by modern OLED TVs. I started with the LG B1 and upgraded to the LG C2 a couple of years ago. The C3 has visuals similar to the latter (only it’s a bit brighter), and I can say without a doubt that most people would be happy with it.

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Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity have been proven to be true time and again in the more than 100 years following their publication.

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But this is no dream device. According to a research paper just published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Optica, these lenses are very real. They are the invention of Laurent Galinier, an optometrist who developed an acuity measurement system that he sold to the international optical giant Essilor in 2000. Galinier got into a series of ventures after that and, while working on contact lenses for patients with corneal pathologies, his intuition made him stumble upon this extraordinary discovery.

“Remarkably, he observed that certain deformations brought about specific focusing characteristics,” Bertrand Simon, one of the paper’s coauthors, explains over email. “This led him to devise spiraling the diopter [the measurement that represents the optical strength of a lens] of the lenses to achieve multi-focusing.”

Translated: Galinier developed a spiraling contact lens that could replace progressive lenses.

How the spiral magic works

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[Photo: Laurent Galinier]

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On November 10, 2023, Kristín Jónsdóttir, head of the Icelandic Meteorological Office’s department of volcano research, was having a rare day off. “It was my 50th birthday,” she said. Then everything began to shake. She would spend the day staring at her phone, watching the earthquakes bloom across maps of Iceland’s Reykjanes Peninsula.

The peninsula experiences fissure eruptions, where the ground splits open and lava pours out. Since late October, attention had been focused on the peninsula’s Svartsengi region — home to the popular Blue Lagoon spa, a geothermal power plant, and the coastal town of Grindavík. The peninsula’s last three fissure eruptions had flooded isolated valleys with fire. Now, though, the town was under threat.

The maelstrom of temblors on November 10 revealed that a buried magmatic river had snaked its way toward Grindavík and its 3,600 inhabitants. More distressingly, a dike — a vertical magma body akin to a curtain of liquid fire — had fountained up from that subterranean river, stopping just shy of the surface.

Quickly, the authorities evacuated the town. And then everyone waited.

On December 18, a volcanic fissure cleaved the ground to the town’s northeast and painted the wintry soil with molten rock. The intense eruption lasted a few days and stayed outside Grindavík.

Then at 3 a.m. on January 14, the few residents who had returned to their homes were awakened by klaxons and text messages telling them to flee. Another eruption had invaded the town. By the time it ended 60 or so hours later, several houses had been engulfed, but no one had died.

Grindavík’s residents owe their lives to proactive local authorities, emergency managers, and the study of Earth’s interior. Scientists had been tracking the movement of magma by decoding seismic waves and distortions in the planet’s crust. By mapping the peninsula’s volcanic plumbing, they’re building a better understanding of how volcanism works in general, while also aiming to provide even more precise local forecasts in the future.

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A 3-kilometer-long fissure opened up and sent a river of lava flowing over a road in southwest Iceland on February 8, 2024 — right on schedule. Hilmar Bragi Bárðarson

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Another replacement: ‘Oh my gosh’, rather than ‘Oh my G-D’!

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Swearing is awfully good fun, and in some ways, it’s even good for you. However, it’s not always proper in the presence of polite company, and as we all know, too much of a good thing can be a bad thing. So if you’re trying to cut back on cussing, here are a few tactics you can try.

1. Ask a friend for help.

We’re often blind to our own bad habits, so you may want to enlist a friend, spouse, or family member to hold you accountable. Any time you let a curse word fly, have them point it out to you. They could clap, call out a code word, or make a sound any time you utter a profanity. The more you start to recognize your patterns of speech, the easier it will be to change them.

2. Find some replacement words.

Consider this a fun challenge to boost your vocabulary. Sure, you could say “fudge” or “frick” instead of the other f-word, but you don’t have to limit your speech to such unimaginative niceties. Try on some of these old-fashioned swears for size, like “Well, dad-sizzle it,” “What in thunderation,” and “Great horn spoon!” You’ll sound like Ron Burgundy from Anchorman and might even get a few laughs in the process. Plus, the more ridiculous you sound, the more incentive you’ll have for nixing your need to swear altogether.

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iStock.com/sdominick / iStock.com/sdominick

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