Exploring a new venture
National Geographic is now in the footwear business, offering shoes for the everyday explorer.
James Rix, an engineer at Raytheon Aircraft, practices his violin during his lunch hour at Wichita State University in Wichita. Rix began playing the violin in the fifth-grade, he said, but stopped after college. He picked it up again last year when he began taking lessons during his Monday lunch hours.
The Expedition, Adventure and Travel styles all feature waterproof leather uppers, dual air-sock liners, polyurethane midsoles and high abrasion rubber outsoles.
The Expedition group ($100 to $220 a pair) includes low-, mid- and high-cut boots that are suited for mountaineering, backpacking and day hiking. The Adventure group ($70-$100) are all-purpose trail shoes for running, day hiking and fitness walking, and the Travel group ($100-$140) is for everyday use.
National Geographic Footwear is manufactured by Rugged Shark, and net proceeds from shoe sales support research, exploration and geography education. Luggage and clothing with the National Geographic label are planned for this year.
Left-brain laughter?
The types of jokes Dave and Jay tell on late-night television dictate which part of your brain gets a workout, a new study suggests.
In the latest issue of Nature Neuroscience, researchers from London and Toronto show that different parts of the brain kick into gear depending on whether a joke is a pun.
The researchers took brain scans of subjects presented with jokes like "What do engineers use for birth control? Their personalities" vs. puns such as "Why did the golfer wear two sets of pants? He got a hole in one."
Different parts of the brain were active for each type of joke. A separate region seemed to assess how funny the joke was.
Comedian Janeane Garofalo shows off her injured right index finger that she uses in her act these days, which included a recent stint at the 2001 U.S. Comedy Arts Festival March 3 in Aspen, Colo. Garofalo lost the tip of her finger to a piece of glass. Her finger required several dozen stitches to repair the wound.
Samson diagnosed as antisocial
Samson, the Israelite hero who was betrayed by Delilah, had almost all the symptoms of someone with a serious psychiatric disorder.
Samson met six out of seven criteria for a diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder (ASPD), according to Eric L. Altschuler of the University of California at San Diego and his colleagues. A person has to manifest only three of the seven criteria to get the diagnosis.
Samson was credited with incredible strength and exploits, such as slaying a lion and moving the gates of Gaza. But Samson also was apparently a bully, a thief and a liar, Altschuler and his colleagues wrote in the February issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry.
The researchers cite biblical descriptions of Samson's acts as evidence of his disorder, including his failure to conform to social norms by torching the fields of the Philistines and then refusing to be arrested; his repeated lying to his parents, including not telling them he had killed a lion; his impulsiveness, such as his burning of the fields; his repeated physical fights, bullying and cruelty to animals; his disregard for the safety of others; and his lack of remorse, as evidenced by his gloating after killing 1,000 men.
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