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City planners and citizens alike frequently push for better public transportation. They argue that it can lessen traffic and reduce emissions from cars. Now there’s a new reason to be gung-ho about public transit--it helps make people skinnier. That’s according to a study published in the August issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine . [John MacDonald et al., http://bit.ly/bdR7so ] [More]

Biologists in Canada are encouraged that critically endangered Vancouver Island marmots ( Marmota vancouverensis ) are once again learning how to be marmots--a tough task since the species's population had crashed so far that the animals almost lost the knowledge of how to exist as a society. [More]

State legislators have lined up a bill aimed at preventing the University of California, Berkeley, from executing a controversial program that asks new students to participate in genetic testing as part of a fall semester orientation program . But even if the bill becomes law, it will likely be too late to halt DNA collection because campus officials began mailing saliva sampling kits to about 5,500 incoming freshmen and transfer students this week and the bill cannot come up for a vote before August 2. Berkeley's fall semester begins on August 19, with welcome activities from August 23 to 27. Jasper Rine, the Berkeley biologist heading the genetic testing project, has scheduled an on-campus public lecture for September 13 to discuss the aggregated results of students' tests. [More]

Cathy Wolf read the report carefully. She had every right to be skeptical--in the 13 years since her amyotrophic lateral sclerosis diagnosis, she'd read dozens like it: Celebrex ; minocycline; vitamin D--you name it, it could slow the progress of ALS . That is until it was tested in a clinical trial. [More]

See What I’m Saying: The Extraordinary Powers of Our Five Senses by Lawrence D. Rosenblum. W. W. Norton, 2010

Bulletproof Feathers: How Science Uses Nature’s Secrets to Design Cutting-Edge Technology edited by Robert Allen. University of Chicago Press, 2010

Something has me mildly riled up, a ridiculous little scandal involving the silliest accusations of sexism and secretions. So permit me today a slight diversion from the usual. If you’ve ever wondered why some feminists have earned themselves such a bad name, and are at all curious about how some intriguing new experimental research demonstrates that this negative view of feminism is more than just my personal opinion and in fact runs very deep in the modern psyche, then read on.