If someone had told NASA a decade ago that SpaceX would build a new ride for astronauts to get to the International Space Station before Boeing, the space agency might have laughed that person out of the room. NASA contracted both companies in 2014 to make spaceships. SpaceX, considered a startup at the time, not only got its passenger spaceship to the finish line first, it has carried 50 people to orbit, while Boeing has continued toiling with Starliner, the company’s competing project that has yet to reach certification. Since SpaceX’s Crew Dragon went into service in 2020, Boeing has…
Author: insighter
Read More
Angela Fitch’s family history of obesity caught up to her at age 40, when she was pregnant with her first child. As a physician and obesity medicine specialist, Dr. Fitch knew the lifestyle levers to pull—and she had the financial means to yank them hard. After giving birth, she lifted weights with a trainer twice a week. She sweated through one Peloton workout after another and tracked her food intake on MyFitnessPal. Nevertheless, for the next decade, Dr. Fitch lost (and regained) the same five to ten pounds. Her blood pressure crept upward. Then came a sleep apnea diagnosis. As…
Abu Abbas knew more about the Iraqi Marshes than most, having lived there his entire life. So when the Iraqi government of former dictator Saddam Hussein drained the wetlands of southern Iraq in the early 1990s, Abu Abbas witnessed the devastation. Then a decade later, as young men with picks and small water pumps began knocking down the embankments that kept water out of the former wetlands after Hussein’s fall, he was among those who watched water re-enter the marshes. It has not been plain sailing since. The marshes are struggling as a result of climate change and mismanagement. And…
Since Russia launched its full-scale war on Ukraine more than two years ago, the West has desperately sought ways to punish Russia without harming…
The U.K. economy is running out of places to look for a good news story as its economy continues to deal with inflation while its neighbors in Europe leave rising prices in the rearview. Now it’s likely to impact the country’s growth prospects. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released its latest forecast for developed nations Thursday, and it didn’t make pleasant reading for the U.K. The country was one of only a few nations to have its outlook downgraded by the organization, now expected to grow at 0.4% instead of 0.7% previously. While its economy is still…
People in the last major holdout of the army in the west of Sudan nervously await an assault.
A couple years ago the journalist Matt Taibbi came up with a telling new term for the way the media works in our time: bombholing. Bombholing is the practice of publishing wild and unsubstantiated stories in the press, then sending those same stories down the memory hole when they turn out to be false. Then the media hits viewers with a new "bombshell," which makes people forget the old "bombshell." Viewers are led "from mania to mania."
At the R1’s launch event in New York City, Lyu demoed an example of having the R1 look at a paper with a printed spreadsheet on it. He asked the R1 to swap two columns, and then send the result to his email. I didn’t have a spreadsheet on paper, but I did have an auto-inspection report that I wanted to send to my email. I asked the R1 and … it said it didn’t have my email address. (I set up my Rabbit account with my email information.) I asked the company about this, and I was told the…
Reviewed by Brian St. Pierre, MS, RD “Cargo pants are back.” This was the news that Brian St. Pierre, PN’s director of nutrition, broke when we met. (St. Pierre, a father, found this out via his 12-year-old daughter.) Why does this matter? Apparently, a certain type of exercise is running a parallel cycle: An old trend resurfacing as a new “it” thing. Cardio’s back, baby. Specifically, zone 2 cardio—also known as steady state cardio, low intensity steady state cardio (LISS), or what your treadmill may call the “fat burning zone” (more on this term later). When I got into the…
Safety lapses at the Oregon State Hospital contributed to recent patient-on-patient assaults, a federal report on the state’s most secure inpatient psychiatric facility has found. The investigation by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services found that staff didn’t always adequately supervise their patients and that the hospital didn’t fully investigate acts of aggression, Oregon Public Broadcasting reported. The federal agency opened the probe after receiving four complaints. Its findings were published following an unannounced, onsite survey conducted at the Salem hospital earlier this year. A major incident detailed in the report occurred on Feb. 10, when a patient placed another…
The deaths were recorded out of nearly 200 suspected measles cases in the state of Adamawa, official says. At least 42 people have died from a measles outbreak in a little more than a week in Nigeria’s northeastern state of Adamawa, the state’s health commissioner says. Felix Tangwami said on Friday that the measles outbreak had mostly affected two local government areas where nearly 200 suspected cases were identified. “Measles vaccines have been released to those areas and our field teams are containing the situation,” he said at a media briefing. Measles is a highly contagious, airborne virus that mostly…
Today is the 30th annual World Press Freedom Day, and it comes at a precipitous time.