Health Benefits of Nostalgia

When people walk into Keri Piehl’s retro toy store in Albuquerque, N.M., their eyes light up. Wooden spinning tops, Yo-Yos, Trolls, rainbow lava lamps, scratch-and-sniff stickers—it’s like time travel, unlocked.

Some visitors make a beeline for the games and puzzles, eager to relive their glory days. “I sell a ton of jacks to grandparents,” Piehl says. “I always joke that I sh…

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The Scientist Leading the Push to Bring Lab-Grown Seafood to Your Plate

Sandhya Sriram is impatient. The stem-cell scientist wanted to put her knowledge to use developing cultivated seafood, but no one was doing that in Singapore. So four years ago, she set up a company to create lab-grown crustacean meat. Eagerly, she registered her company, Shiok Meats, at 3 a.m. in August 2018. “Nobody was doing crustaceans,” says Sriram, Shiok’s Group CEO and …

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U.S. Health Agencies Recommend First Omicron Booster Shot

In two votes, each 13-1, the immunization committee of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended that Americans receive an Omicron-specific booster dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. Following a day-long discussion of the available data on Sept. 1, the panel recommended boosters from two manufacturers—Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, both of whom make mRNA-based vaccine…

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The Woman Behind Climate Activists Throwing Food at Art

The plan was to do something illegal, but no one among the two-dozen climate protesters assembled in a courtyard in Midtown Manhattan would tell me exactly what. Extinction Rebellion organizers were coming through the small crowd, asking who was “red role,” meaning that they were willing to be arrested. Someone else handed out cookies. Protesters soon started slipping off in twos an…

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The Untapped Solar Power Potential of Big Box Stores

Solar energy offers a cheap, renewable source of electricity that could reduce and, eventually, eliminate our need for greenhouse gas-emitting power generation plants. But solar farms as they are currently envisioned come at a cost: acres and acres of land that could otherwise be used for food production or rewilding, creating biodiverse wildernesses that preserve nature and function as carbon …

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