Sleep!
Why do we sleep? To rejuvenate our energy stores? To clear the brain, kinda like a soft reboot? Just an opportunity to get over the stresses and strains of daily life?
Well, we have a better idea now.
In couple of studies published the other day in Science, scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, UCSD, and the Università Politecnica delle Marche, in Ancona, Italy, in one group, and researchers from Johns Hopkins in another, give us another hint: We
Freed!
FREED!
The other day something interesting happened within the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex where your humble blogger makes his abode.
It happened in a holding cell in the basement of Weatherford’s District Courts Building. Eight prisoners occupying that cell. A single guard outside, chatting with them.
Suddenly the guard slumps over unconscious—a heart attack!
Said inmate Nick Kelton:
He just fell over. Looked like an act. But he could have died right there.”
Kelton and
Read!
Last year, on National Book Lovers Day (August 9), there was some encouraging news: “A chapter a day doth keep the Grim Reaper away.”
That surprising bit of news was based on a study by researchers from Yale’s School of Public Health, published in Social Science and Medicine titled “A Chapter a Day: Association of Book Reading with Longevity.”
The French novelist, Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) once said:
The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in
Robot!
Robots may soon become “electronic persons”! Or so saith a European Parliament Committee on Legal Affairs that has voted (17 votes to 2; with 2 abstentions) to approve a draft report that seeks to grant legal status to robots!
The most sophisticated autonomous robots could be established as having the status of electronic persons with specific rights and obligations, including that of making good any damage they may cause.”
It was Luxembourg MEP Mady Delvaux’s idea.
Machiavellian!
Bird brains? Nope! Not chickens. They, apparently, take after Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (1469–1527), the Florentine renaissance politician and writer who has lent his name to unscrupulous and deceitful behavior.
Or so says the author of “Thinking Chickens: A Review of Cognition, Emotion, and Behavior in the Domestic Chicken.”
The solo researcher from The Someone Project [!] at The Kimmela Center for Animal Advocacy, published this in the peer-reviewed
Genesis 34:1−31
Enjoying God’s blessings calls for responsible maintenance of moral standards in the face of worldly evil.
This is a sordid story, with no heroes. Everyone is culpable (except the victims: Dinah, sexually violated and voiceless, and the people of Shechem, brutally slaughtered or kidnapped).
Shechem, the son of Hamor, the Hivite, rapes Dinah, the daughter of Jacob (34:2). But, he seems to show some good faith as he and his father enter into negotiations with Jacob
Abe Kuruvilla is the Carl E. Bates Professor of Christian Preaching at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (Louisville, KY), and a dermatologist in private practice. His passion is to explore, explain, and exemplify preaching.