Word: effected
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Gossip is unavoidable. Wherever you go, rumors flow. Entire careers, in fact, have been dedicated to creating it, spreading it, quashing it and corralling it. In his new book, The Watercooler Effect, Nicholas DiFonzo, a professor of psychology at the Rochester Institute of Technology, examines the gossip that buzzes through every community, explaining why people feel so compelled to devour and perpetuate rumors, and what effect that has on society at large. DiFonzo spoke with TIME's Jeremy Caplan about some of history's worst rumors, the peculiarities of Web gossip, why "no comment" is the wrong answer...
...seems that the weediest species seem to thrive disproportionately in high CO2 environments. The wave of urbanization in America and much of the world doesn't help - the urban environment, often hotter and with more CO2 than rural areas, is ragweed heaven. "Urban places, because of the baking effect of that increased concrete, definitely pollinate more," says Ratner. It doesn't help that warming will also increase the production of ground-level ozone, a respiratory irritant that worsens asthma...
...showing that, for example, increasingly early pollination of the European olive in Spain led to higher overall pollen counts, similar to what is found in warmer parts of the Mediterranean; comparable outcomes can be expected in other temperate parts of the world as climate change kicks in. A similar effect will also be felt in the northward shift of what is known as the hardiness zones - meaning that northern countries where allergies were once rare may no longer be as safe. "Those borderline northern regions will definitely feel changes," says Ratner...
...years, a small but growing band of scientists has been raising concerns about the impact on human health of bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical used in plastic that mimics the effect of the hormone estrogen. BPA can be found in a wide variety of products, including some plastic bottles and the lining of aluminum cans, and it can migrate fairly easily into the human bloodstream. That means few of us escape exposure, if in small doses - in one survey, 93% of Americans tested positive for the chemicals. Concerned researchers point to animal studies that indicate that even low-dose exposure...
...cardiovascular disease or diabetes. But the study's authors take pains to point out that their research does not prove that BPA can cause these ills, but merely indicates that these disorders seem to occur more often in people with higher levels of the disease. To prove a cause-effect relation would require longitudinal studies that compare the effects of BPA in one group to a control group unexposed to the chemical - hard to do, given BPA's ubiquity. But the JAMA study is worrying enough. "The article says that the more of this chemical you have, the greater...