An Age of Magic

Listen Mr Dinosaur – chew your food or else your neck will grow!

Gulping down food might have helped plant-eating dinosaurs grow into giants. If they had stopped to chew, they would have run out of eating time, scientists say. But guzzling let them get food into their stomachs quickly. This may explain why dinosaurs such as ‘argentinosaurus’, which weighed up to 100 tons, had very long necks and such tiny heads.

Animals that eat a lot and chew, such as elephants, need big heads to accommodate jaw muscles and molars. But a large head would not be needed if it did not chew. Long necks would also have helped big dinosaurs get to food without moving from a particular spot. While elephants need to spend 18 hours eating to satisfy their appetites, a giant dinosaur would have needed an impossible 30 hours a day.

This has been a puzzle for scientists wondering how gigantic plant-eating dinosaurs known as sauropods got to be so big. Well now we know!

Popularity: 23% [?]

Are women better leaders at work…?

Women in executive positions are perceived as better leaders than men, according to a new study. The prevailing stereotype that women in business are too sensitive or not as competent can stop them from advancing through the so-called ‘glass ceiling’. However, once a woman has shattered that barrier, these qualities actually work in her favour.

The research, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, found top women executives were credited with responsibility for their own success. They were viewed as both more competent and more relationship-oriented than men.

This led them to be perceived as more effective leaders than their male counterparts.

Popularity: 14% [?]

Diet pills – the legalities of online buying.

A lot of people assume that natural products are supposed to be okay to take but of course that is not always the case. Taking just one example, a considerable number of illegal/banned drugs are derived directly or indirectly from natural products and they are not always safe.

In the diet pill industry manufacturers are usually fighting to keep their products outside the remit of the FDA by classing them as diet supplements rather than diet pills. That battle has temporarily been lost which you will know if you try to order Phentermine which is currently off the market and won’t be available for a while yet. This is one battle of many being fought at the moment in what’s quite a competitive market. Clearly it would be a lot simpler to sell some of the products were they to be classed as drugs but that unfortunately brings with it both the burden of proof of effectiveness and a whole lot of proving that any side-effects are outweighed by the usefulness of the product which together add up to a lot of money to be spent on research that just ain’t there in the diet pill market right now.

Popularity: 13% [?]