Clipmarks | debbyski's clips

Comfort Foods

Tue, 20 May 2008 13:43:51 GMT

clipped by: debbyski
clipper's remarks: Humans are not as lucky as monkeys in one way. Female humans report they eat high calorie foods to make themselves feel better when stressed but they don't actually feel better after eating them. Instead, because they are restrained eaters, they feel guilt and actually feel worse. Female monkeys don't have that cognative baggage. Only monkeys, it seems, find comfort in comfort foods."

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

The ladies who lunch do not obsess about their weight in the rhesus monkey compound at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta. Food is freely available, and the high-status females do not pride themselves on passing it up. They don’t seem to stigmatize obesity — there is no equivalent of a Kirstie Alley joke — and they certainly don’t turn themselves into Social X-Rays.

In fact, the dominant females ordinarily eat a little more than the subordinates.

But suppose you tempted them with the equivalent of chocolate and potato chips and ice cream?

Once these foods were available, the low-status monkeys promptly developed an appetite. They began eating significantly more calories than their social superiors. While the dominant monkeys dabbled in the sweet, fatty pellets just during the daytime, the subordinate monkeys kept scarfing them down after dark.

Lovable Lumps

Tue, 20 May 2008 13:35:22 GMT

clipped by: debbyski

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

I was about to meet a walrus for the first time in my life, and I felt fabulous. After all, Ronald J. Schusterman of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who has studied them for years, had assured me over the phone that to meet a walrus was to fall in love with walruses — the mammals were that smart, friendly and playful. “They’re pussycats!” he said.

“Just push back on the snout with the palm of your hand and blow in its face,” Dr. Schusterman instructed. “A walrus really likes to be blown in the face.”

“I’ve worked with marine mammals for a long time, and with many different species of pinniped, but I’ve never experienced anything like walruses,” said Colleen Reichmuth of the Long Marine Laboratory at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “They are fantastic.”

Yet she and her colleagues despair for the walrus’s future.

it is particularly vulnerable to the warming of the earth’s climate and the retreat of the ice.

War Takes It's Toll

Tue, 20 May 2008 13:31:59 GMT

clipped by: debbyski

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

BAGHDAD — In a different time, in another country, where violence and terror did not stalk the streets, Dr. Amir Hussain could practice psychiatry the way he once hoped to.

He cares for patients whose illnesses are often set off or worsened by the mayhem around them, who crowd into his tiny office at Ibn Rushid psychiatric hospital in central Baghdad, accompanied by their mothers and aunts, wives and brothers.

The litany of death and misery they recite no longer shocks him.

“We are used to hearing it, and I think our emotions are frozen,” he says.

Besides, his own experiences are not that different. Like many other Iraqis, he suffers from some symptoms of traumatic stress: insomnia, anxiety, a tendency to start at loud noises.

He tries when he can to listen to relaxing music. The trips to the countryside he once enjoyed are no longer an option. The roads are too perilous.

Nevertheless, he does his best to help his patients

It's Still A Man's World

Tue, 20 May 2008 13:24:55 GMT

clipped by: debbyski

Clip Source: www.latimes.com

It's true -- the media have obsessed over Clinton's pantsuits, her laugh, her steely demeanor, her eyes misting over in New Hampshire, things that you'd hardly imagine meriting a story if the candidate were Sen. Harry Reid. But if you think Clinton has been bedeviled by a double standard, wait till you see what women directors are up against in Hollywood.

What really puts female directors behind the eight ball is that the film genres studios are most eager to make -- rowdy guy comedies, horror and superhero films -- are rarely of interest to women.

f a woman director gets a reputation as being difficult or has a flop, she's always going to be in worse shape, career-wise, than a Michael Mann or David Fincher.

Still, that pathetic 6% figure sticks in your craw