“The medication’s going to be 50 percent of your journey, and the other 50 percent is still what you choose to eat and the exercise you’re going to put in.” — Obesity specialist Dr. Rocio Salas-Whalen Last week, I discussed the mechanism of GLP-1, a popular semaglutide sold under the brand names Ozempic, Wegovy and […]
Barry Evans
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Ozempic, the Wonder Drug? Part 1
“These drugs have the potential to change societies, not just individuals.” — Michael Le Page, New Scientist, March 29, 2025 Obesity is a chronic disease approaching crisis levels. Currently, about 42 percent of Americans are obese, having a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 30 or more, with a predicted rise to 50 percent of the […]
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Midsummer Puzzles ANSWERS
1. Syzygy. (Astronomically, a syzygy is when three bodies align, for instance the sun, Earth and moon during eclipses.) 2. French. You’re in Île de l’Est, one of the French Crozet Islands. (If you want to be pedantic, since the island is uninhabited, the correct answer is none.) 3. Letter F: 4. Toss your quarter, […]
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Midsummer Puzzles
OK, its not quite Midsummer, which (for obscure reasons) is the name given to the start of summer, i.e. the Summer Solstice, this year Friday, June 20, 7:42 p.m. PDT. So it’s time for our annual puzzle edition. (You can find the answers on page 37.) 1. What’s a six-letter word containing three Y’s? 2. […]
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You Say Aluminum, I Say Aluminium
My wife, Louisa, and I recently found ourselves looking up at a statue comprised of 7,400 welded aluminum plates, the Winged Virgin of Panecillo Hill in Quito, Ecuador. It’s the tallest aluminum statue in the world with a total height of 135 feet. Based on a 48-inch-tall wooden sculpture created in 1734, the Virgin was […]
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The Flammarion Engraving
“That good anchorite, who boasted of having been as far as the end of the world, said likewise, that he had been obliged to stoop low, on account of the joining of the sky and earth in that distant region.” — Francois de la Mothe Le Vayer, 1662 The lovely engraving of a pilgrim — […]
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Aspirin: The World’s Most Popular Drug
About 2,400 years ago, Hippocrates, the so-called Father of Medicine, wrote about the curative and pain-killing properties of willow leaves. In particular, he recommended willow leaf tea to relieve the pain of women in childbirth. He was following a long tradition: Ancient Sumerian tablets had recommended willow leaves to treat rheumatoid arthritis, while the Egyptian […]
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Milankovitch Cycles and Climate Deniers
Talk to a climate denier — someone who believes global warming has purely natural causes — and chances are you’ll soon hear the phrase “Milankovitch cycles.” These, not humans, are responsible for climate change, they’ll say. Actually, this is what your regular climate denier will claim. In the extreme version, some of these benighted souls deny […]
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Axis of Evil
Don’t blame me for the clickbait heading. Capitalizing on Dubya Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address in which he singled out Iraq, Iran and North Korea as Earth’s baddies, cosmologists Kate Land and João Magueijo employed the same phrase three years later for the title of their scientificxpaper. In it, they described a spooky […]
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Nature Red in Tooth and Claw
Following the death of his great friend Arthur Henry Hallam in 1833, the poet Alfred Tennyson began writing In Memoriam AHH, perhaps the greatest elegy in the English language. It would take him 17 years of composing, writing and editing until he finally published it — anonymously — in 1850. While the long (2,916 lines […]
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30 Minutes that Made All the Difference
Thirty minutes. That’s all it took, 66 million years ago, to put the future on track for you to be reading this. Had the Manhattan-Island-size asteroid that crashed into the Gulf of Mexico arrived 30 minutes earlier or later, we wouldn’t be around to unravel the consequences of that mighty collision. We know very little […]
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AMOC and the Inevitable Climate Threat
Like other acronyms that slowly seeped into our consciousness — think COVID — I predict that you’ll soon be familiar with AMOC, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. We and our children may — with a great deal of luck and statesmanship — dodge such potential global catastrophes as another pandemic (thanks to the magic of […]