This song from the Monty Python film The Meaning of Life is an extraordinarily good one, inviting us to marvel at the wonder and vastness of the universe and putting into perspective our place in it.

I knew that the facts in the song were roughly correct but Bill Andrews has done a detailed, line-by-line, fact check and finds that it is remarkably accurate except for two or three items. Pretty good, Eric!

Frans de Waal is a well-known primatologist who has written many books on the behaviors of apes and what we have learned about them and from them. In an excerpt from his 2016 book Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, he discusses the relationship between thought and words. He does not share the enthusiasm of many of his fellow scientists to talk with animals to find out what the think, largely because what even humans say may not be accurate reflections of what they are thinking, so why would we place any more credence on what other animal species may tell us?
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Running a red light is a very dangerous thing to do. Red light cameras that photograph cars that do this are proliferating in many areas. They take a photo of offenders who are then cited and fined. But one study done in Houston finds that while they do reduce the number of people running red lights, they do not necessarily reduce the number of accidents.

During the past decade, over 438 U.S. municipalities, including 36 of the 50 most populous cities, have employed electronic monitoring programs in order to reduce the number of accidents. Red light camera programs specifically target drivers that run red lights.
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Evidence clearly shows that camera programs are effective at decreasing the number of vehicles running red lights. In one study in Virginia, red light cameras reduced the number of total drivers running red lights by 67 percent.
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I grew up in Sri Lanka, a tropical country where it was pretty hot during the day and we perspired a lot. But we did not pay too much attention to staying hydrated by drinking water all the time. Furthermore, in middle class homes like mine, there was the belief that tap water was not pure enough to drink and could contain dangerous bacteria and so in our home water was first boiled and then cooled in the refrigerator. We did not drink water outside the home unless we were in another middle-class home that followed the same practice. We drank water with meals and two or three cups of tea and/or coffee during the day. As younger schoolboys we would take a little canteen of water with us to school but as we got older, we stopped doing that and simply did not drink water until we got home. If we got thirsty drank hot tea or coffee or bought a bottled drink, bottled water not being a thing then. When we played sports as children during the blazing hot days, we would of course get thirsty and would drink water when we felt the need.
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Plutonium is a major component of nuclear weapons. You would think that the US government would be very careful about monitoring the supply. According to this report from the Center for Public Integrity, you would be wrong.

Two security experts from the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory drove to San Antonio, Texas, in March 2017 with a sensitive mission: to retrieve dangerous nuclear materials from a nonprofit research lab there.

Their task, according to documents and interviews, was to ensure that the radioactive materials did not fall into the wrong hands on the way back to Idaho, where the government maintains a stockpile of nuclear explosive materials for the military and others.

To ensure they got the right items, the specialists from Idaho brought radiation detectors and small samples of dangerous materials to calibrate them: specifically, a plastic-covered disk of plutonium, a material that can be used to fuel nuclear weapons, and another of cesium, a highly radioactive isotope that could potentially be used in a so-called “dirty” radioactive bomb.

But when they stopped at a Marriott hotel just off Highway 410, in a high-crime neighborhood filled with temp agencies and ranch homes, they left those sensors on the back seat of their rented Ford Expedition. When they awoke the next morning, the window had been smashed and the special valises holding these sensors and nuclear materials had vanished.

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There is an old belief that when you smile, your spirits get lifted, as do the spirits of those around you. When you look in a mirror, do you smile? This is not something that people may do consciously and until I saw this video below about the invention of a mirror that shows the image only when people smile, I couldn’t recall whether I usually smiled or not. With this mirror, I would know.

The problem of plastic pollution has come to the fore, thanks to the work of environmental groups who have highlighted the toll it is taking on the oceans and marine life. Much of the damage comes from the sheer volume of plastic items that are used just once and then thrown away. This website by a company called SLOActive that markets sustainable, eco-friendly swimwear has data on the harm that plastics are doing and what we can do to mitigate the damage. The numbers are staggering. About 1.15 to 2.41 million tons of plastic are said to annually enter the world’s oceans via rivers.
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