ShareThisFor more than a decade, House and Senate proponents of a National Women's History Museum have introduced legislation that would give backers permission to buy a federally owned building in Washington to serve as the site.
Each time, the bills have fallen short. But this year may be different.
The combination of a woman House speaker, a friendly White House and the identification of a piece of property not far from the National Mall have supporters more confident then ever before.
Introduced Wednesday, the House measure would authorize the General Services Administration to sell the museum organizers a vacant parcel on Independence Avenue that once was slated for a national health museum. A companion Senate version is expected soon.
The museum would be built and run entirely with private-sector contributions from individuals and corporations. Estimated money to be raised: $250 million to $300 million.
The Army is cutting its use of a controversial drug soldiers had been taking for years for protection against malaria, citing the risk it could pose to those with brain injuries or suffering from anxiety or depression.
The civilian publication Army Times reports that Army Surgeon General Lt. Gen. Eric Schoomaker said Lariam, the brand name for mefloquine, will be replaced by doxycycline, a generic antibiotic, wherever it is deemed as effective as Lariam.
Lariam has been cited by researchers as contributing to suicidal tendencies, anxiety, depression, even paranoia. Hundreds of thousands of troops have taken the drug since the Persian Gulf War, and many instances of severe side effects have been reported.
But the replacement, doxycycline, comes with its own shortcomings. Unlike Lariam, which is taken just once a week, doxycycline must be taken daily. And malaria bugs in certain parts of the world have grown resistant to doxycycline.
Enlisted in the fight against terrorism, mathematicians have been using complex formulas to try to detect common patterns, behavior and connections in order to better predict and foil attacks. At an American Association for the Advancement of Science conference this month, one of the more intriguing studies looked at how many terrorists it takes to "spoil the plot."
Gordon Woo, an expert on the mathematics of natural catastrophes who is with Risk Management Solutions based in the United Kingdom, put an analytic method called "clique percolation" to work. His conclusion: 50 is the maximum number of conspirators who can be actively involved in planning an attack without someone spilling the beans or an intelligence agency detecting the plot.
For all the fuss and expense about making calorie and nutritional information available in fast-food spots, a new study finds that almost no one seems to use the info.
Researchers at Yale camped in McDonald's, Burger King, Starbucks and Au Bon Pain outlets in both urban and suburban settings and tracked the behavior of more than 4,300 patrons, watching to see who read the posters, pamphlets or computer screens containing the nutritional tidbits.
Six people did. The researchers say more might pay attention if the info was included on menus rather than listed separately.
The U.S. Geological Survey and affiliated groups want you to become a volunteer scout for a climate-change observation force.
In an unusual collaboration of government and academic scientists, the USGS and other outfits want to build a network of "citizen scientists" who will regularly observe and record such things as when and where plants sprout, flower and fruit, and animals reproduce, migrate and hibernate.
The idea is to amass mountains of data from tens of thousands of observers that can be plumbed by scientists studying changes in the seasonal cycles of plants and animals that could be evidence of climate change or other factors.
Anyone interested in participating in the USA-National Phenology Network can sign up at www.usanpn.org.
(Scripps Howard News Service correspondent Lee Bowman contributed to this column. E-mail Lisa Hoffman at hoffmanl(at)shns.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
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