I’ve got bad news. It seems Jack Horkheimer, long time host of PBS’s Star Hustler has passed away.

Jack passed away at age 72 from respiratory disease. This is a great loss. The dude will surely be missed. If his name isn’t familiar to you, maybe you’ll recognize the style.

Jack was an amazing man, a true [...]]]> by Richard

I’ve got bad news. It seems Jack Horkheimer, long time host of PBS’s Star Hustler has passed away.

Jack passed away at age 72 from respiratory disease. This is a great loss. The dude will surely be missed. If his name isn’t familiar to you, maybe you’ll recognize the style.

Jack was an amazing man, a true presence on screen. I remember watching him during the college years and enjoying his hokey, but always enthusiastic, take on astronomy and the stars.

I’ll keep looking up.

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It looks like those year eating Ding Dongs and quaffing beers might have been a poor life choice after all. According to recent research, it turns out that bulging bellies can be deadly for older adults (hi!) even if they are not overweight or obese.

In one of the largest studies to look at the dangers [...]]]> by Richard

It looks like those year eating Ding Dongs and quaffing beers might have been a poor life choice after all. According to recent research, it turns out that bulging bellies can be deadly for older adults (hi!) even if they are not overweight or obese.

In one of the largest studies to look at the dangers associated with abdominal fat, researchers found that men and women with bigger bellies have twice the risk of dying over a decade when compared to those with smaller stomachs.

Bigger waists carry a greater risk of death even for people whose weight is “normal” by the body mass index, or BMI, a standard measure based on weight and height.

“Even if you haven’t had a noticeable weight gain, if you notice your waist size increasing that’s an important sign,” said lead author Eric Jacobs of the American Cancer Society, which funded the study. “It’s time to eat better and start exercising more.”

Even better, other research has linked a larger waist size to asthma, breast cancer, heart disease and dementia. Hey, that’s a great slogan: Eat a Ding Dong and die! Or, you know, maybe not.

This is not an isolated problem, dudes. It’s thought that more than half of all older men and more than 70 percent of older women have larger bellies than are good for them. It’s a (you should pardon the pun) growing problem in that waistlines have been expanding by about an inch per decade since the 1960′s.

Four extra inches around the waist increased the risk of dying from between 15 percent to 25 percent. Oddly, the strongest link — 25 percent — was in women with normal BMI. Removing belly fat surgically doesn’t lead to health improvements. That may mean it’s simply a stand-in for some other culprit that is causing both belly fat and poor health.

So, the big question: Is your waist too big? Here’s how you check.

Wrap a tape measure around your waist at the level of your belly button. Don’t even think about sucking it in, either, lard dude. Men should have a waist circumference no larger than 40 inches while women shouldn’t have bellies bigger than 35 inches. Pregnancy excepted, of course.

For all you dudes out there hanging your heads in despair, what do you do about it? Well, that’s something I’ll come back to tomorrow.

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Just like almost every other little dude, I loved dinosaurs. I mean, really, really loved them. I had the little toys and knew just about everything a non-professional could know. Heck, I even understood (and corrected many long-suffering teachers) that brontosaurus was really called apatosaurus. Now science brings more bad news.

Triceratops never existed. Sad, but [...]]]> by Richard

Just like almost every other little dude, I loved dinosaurs. I mean, really, really loved them. I had the little toys and knew just about everything a non-professional could know. Heck, I even understood (and corrected many long-suffering teachers) that brontosaurus was really called apatosaurus. Now science brings more bad news.

Triceratops never existed. Sad, but true.

According to recent research, the triceratops was never an actual species, only the juvenile form of another (thought related) species called torosaurus.

Scientists claim it was a younger version of the torosaurus dinosaur. Triceratops were never on earth because they didn’t have its own distinct species.

John Scannella and Jack Horner have discovered that the triceratops may never have been its own distinct species, but rather the juvenile form of another dinosaur, the torosaurus. “Triceratops had three facial horns and a short, thick neck-frill with a saw-toothed edge. Torosaurus also had three horns, though at different angles, and a much longer, thinner, smooth-edged frill with two large holes in it,” the recent report stated.

Here’s a look at the torosaurus.

So, yeah, it’s pretty easy to see why the dude who discovered both triceratops and torosaurus back in the late 1800s, Othniel Marsh, thought they were two different species. Related, but different.

According to the report’s authors, they’ve found clear changes in older triceratops’ skulls which show it slowly growing into and changing into the form known as torosaurus.

This is killing me. It’s almost as bad as kicking Pluto out of the solar planet club.

Of course, it now gives me another useless fact nugget to drop, so that’s a plus.

Yes, more shallow than you suspected.

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