Rachel Durfee

There was a time when carting a plastic lunchbox to your high school cafeteria was a popularity death knell. The ubiquitous paper bag was more fashionable, but in our new, green-conscious era, maybe it’s time for the lunchbox to make a comeback. Though schools probably can’t impose outright bans on paper bags, they can make efforts at generating less waste. Without the resources to rebuild every school out there with the most sophisticated green technology, however, the pertinent question is: How can pre-existing school buildings become more environmentally friendly?

We all know the deal: Fat is evil, right? Buy low-fat, no-fat, fake-fat--anything that keeps you far, far away from the (other) F word. But recent research has some people saying fat's gotten the short end of the stick. Researchers at UC Irvine are rising to fat's defense in a new study that says fat could trigger long-term memory foundation.

By the time they are two years old, most children from middle and upper-income families have been vaccinated against polio, mumps, measles, rubella and tetanus. But many low-income children--too many, according to the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the Vaccines for Children Program-- have not. A new study examining the results of the U.S. National Immunization Survey carried out between 1995 and 2007 showed "significant disparities in timely vaccination coverage...

It seems like every couple of years there are some new baby rules. Don’t lay them down on their stomachs. Don’t lay them down on their backs. Do yoga while pregnant. Don’t do yoga while pregnant. Breast feed. Don’t breast feed. In light of a new study, the latest piece of baby advice you might hear from your doctor may be “don’t conceive in the spring or summer.”

We’ve all heard the news: We’re getting fat. Americans are inactive, McDonald’s-eating smokers with diabetes, right? That’s certainly a generalization, but you know what they say. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Tons of research dollars have been poured into studying this historic obesity epidemic. While some may imagine that obesity begins once a child is tall enough to reach the top shelf where mom and dad keep the cookies, a new study points to an even earlier age that jump starts obesity: infancy.

The cliche goes that women spend hours, weeks, years, even entire lifetimes trying to figure out how to land a man. Well, there's one item every lady looking to impress a fellow can cross off her list: Drinking. As drinking becomes the pastime of choice across college campuses, many women have started trying to match their male counterparts drink for drink in an effort to make an impression. An impression she might make, but a new study shows it isn't a good one.

Biofuel is one of today's ecoconscious buzzwords. Recently, however, the most popular biofuels, like corn-based ethanol, are starting to cause their own set of problems. For example, more and more crop land is being devoted to growing corn for fuel instead of food. This has led to a spike in food prices that is being felt around the world. Palm oil, another popular biodiesel fuel, is extracted from palm trees that grow well in places like Brazil.

Overall, how would you say things are these days? Would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?

This is the question participants in the University of Chicago's General Social Survey have been answering since 1972. Recently, University of Pennsylvania economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers took this survey's data from 1972 through 2006 to see if people had gotten happier since the decade of bell bottoms and disco.

The bright, pristine slopes are calling your name. You head up to the mountain at sunrise, strap on your skis, and hit the first run. Only, instead of the immaculate white snow you had been dreaming about, you find the snowpacks are not as bright white as they should be, and your run is accompanied by streams of melting snow following you down the side of the mountain. The culprit? Soot. This pollutant has been darkening and melting snow-covered mountains for awhile, but the first experiments to quantify how much soot contributes to snowpack melt were only carried out recently.