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Amid intensifying concern over surging obesity rates, the chain has distanced itself from its fast-food origins, adding café-friendly items such as fruit smoothies and dolling up restaurants with free WiFi and padded seats. While the shift helped to revive sales growth last year -- McDonald’s has credited McCafe coffee for revenue growth in six of the past seven quarters -- the new adults-only ambiance leaves little room for Ronald.

“He kind of represents the old McDonald’s, with the high- fat content foods that are kind of falling out of favor,” said Bob Dorfman, the executive creative director at Baker Street Advertising in San Francisco. “It’s clear that McDonald’s is advertising coffee, they’re not advertising burgers.”

Freshman Lyndon Baty’s immune system is so fragile he can’t risk being surrounded by people his own age, yet he attends classes at his high school in Knox City, Texas every day. All thanks to a robot. The Vgo telepresence platform is a four foot tall bot on wheels with a small screen, camera, speakers and microphone at the top. Baty logs into the robot remotely from his home, using his PC and a webcam to teleconference into his classes. Baty can drive Vgo around his school, switching between classes just like regular students. For a boy that has spent much of his life sick and isolated from his peers, Vgo not only represents a chance at a better education, it’s also an opportunity for freedom and comradery.

Design studio TO-GENKYO proposes a new method of tracking a foods expiration date by using a universally recognizable visual. Over the last year or so Japan had been struck by a number of scandals involving food companies tampering with expiration dates. The new design keeps people honest by changing colors based on the level of ammonia the food emits as it ages. After it has passed its expiration date the barcode is no longer readable, making it impossible to sell.

The problem of isolation goes beyond ordinary loneliness, however. Consider what we’ve learned from hostages who have been held in solitary confinement—from the journalist Terry Anderson, for example, whose extraordinary memoir, “Den of Lions,” recounts his seven years as a hostage of Hezbollah in Lebanon.

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He missed people terribly, especially his fiancée and his family. He was despondent and depressed. Then, with time, he began to feel something more. He felt himself disintegrating. It was as if his brain were grinding down. A month into his confinement, he recalled in his memoir, “The mind is a blank. Jesus, I always thought I was smart. Where are all the things I learned, the books I read, the poems I memorized? There’s nothing there, just a formless, gray-black misery. My mind’s gone dead. God, help me.”

Jag bestämmer mig för att säga till henne och alla andra i väntrummet precis som det är. Att vi just fått in en tonårspojke som ser ut som ett plockepinn invärtes och att läkarna opererar honom. [...] Dör han på operationsbordet kan det gå snabbt. Överlever han rör det sig om åtskilliga timmar.

En efter en av de som aldrig borde sökt vård på en akutmottagning kom nästan lite skamset och bad att få tillbaka pengar och patientbricka och sa att det nog var bättre att de vände sig till vårdcentralen på måndag.

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Kristdemokraterna vill locka väljare med en akutgaranti. Ingen, menar partiet, ska behöva vänta mer än fyra timmar på en akutmottagning för att få träffa en läkare. Men om man kan vänta fyra timmar på en akutmottagning, och det inte beror på något slags felbedömning, så är man sannolikt på fel ställe från början. Medicinskt är en akutgaranti ett ungefär lika angeläget vallöfte som en intensivvårdsgaranti för förkylda.

Caffeine is the most widely used stimulant in the world, but few use it to maximal advantage. Get optimally wired with these tips.

How did this captain know, from fifty feet away, what the father couldn’t recognize from just ten? Drowning is not the violent, splashing, call for help that most people expect. The captain was trained to recognize drowning by experts and years of experience. The father, on the other hand, had learned what drowning looks like by watching television. [...]

The Instinctive Drowning Response – so named by Francesco A. Pia, Ph.D.,

is what people do to avoid actual or perceived suffocation in the water.

And it does not look like most people expect.

There is very little splashing, no waving, and no yelling or calls for help of any kind.

Scientists say juggling e-mail, phone calls and other incoming information can change how people think and behave. They say our ability to focus is being undermined by bursts of information.

Americans don't have the guts for sushi. At least that's the implication of a new study, which finds that Japanese people harbor enzymes in their intestinal bacteria that help them digest seaweed--enzymes that North Americans lack. What's more, Japanese may have first acquired these enzymes by eating bacteria that thrive on seaweed in the open ocean.

After long-term exposure to electromagnetic waves such as those used in cell phones, mice genetically altered to develop Alzheimer's performed as well on memory and thinking skill tests as healthy mice, the researchers wrote in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease.

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