This is supposed to be my Spring Break. I wasn’t going anywhere warm and tropical, no, but I came home, and I was excited to spend the time just lazing around. I missed doing boring things, like laying around all day with my pets and watching music videos or Animal Planet. I missed staying up all night, talking with old friends, going to bed at four in the morning and waking up at two in the afternoon.

As you can imagine, a break filled with reading, writing, and research is not something I’m really enjoying.

It’s not horrendous, all things considered. I’ve had some time to just laze around, so that’s good. Still, at this point in the academic year, it’s pretty much impossible to have a whole week where I’m not doing anything. And don’t lie to me; I know that, regardless if you’re doing it or not, you have work to do too.

So, in light of the fact that none of us are going to have a very enjoyable next six or seven weeks (at least, I’m not), here are a few tips that’ll hopefully make things a little easier:

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I have been watching my weight for as long as I can remember and am always on the lookout for new products and ideas that will make eating healthy a little bit easier. I love perusing the recipes on foodnetwork.com, learning about fun new products on hungrygirl.com and reading new food research anywhere I can. My years of research have taught me how to maintain a healthy lifestyle every day.

Not that I had a choice. When I was still in school, living a healthy lifestyle was impossible. From the drinking, to the partying, to the daily late night pizza runs; my body was begging for something green. And growing larger and more icky every day. I can’t even believe I made it out alive…and that my blood didn’t turn into some sort of vodka marinara sauce.

But that’s beside the point.

Today I was playing around on Yahoo and saw the headline: “Healthy Dining: Eating Healthy on the Go.” I immediately clicked it. Eating out is one of the hardest things for me; I never know what is going into my food and how to stop myself before downing a giant family-sized portion. I was so excited to read some real tips that would help me make better choices at restaurants.

And then I read it. Read More »

Its science fiction time, friends!

A small lab in California claims to have cloned the embryos of two men, making it the “first documented demonstration that ordinary cells from an adult human can be used to make cloned embryos mature enough to produce stem cells”.

Although the lab says it destroyed the embryos after 5 days, they insist they have all their records and assure the public that the tests were performed numerous times. Experts have supposedly acted very “coolly” to this announcement, partly because of a clone hoax executed by Korean scientist Hwang Woo-suk a few years back, and partly because the creation of cloned embryos has happened before. The big announcement, researchers agree, would be if a new stem cell line has been created. Read More »

Bad news New Years Resolutionites: looks like all that work you are doing at the gym isn’t quite as impressive as you have been lead to believe. Nor will it lead to the extreme or quick results you have been counting on. A recent article in the New York Times is claiming that the calorie counters on your favorite machines – especially the cherished, Elliptical – are wrong. Sometimes way wrong.

This news isn’t a total shock to most people – I mean, unless you are slightly delusional or in denial, you should be able to tell that a 30 minute stint on the cross-trainer could not possibly burn 500 calories – but it is still a little disconcerting. What is the point of having calorie counters on machines if they are so off? And how many calories am I burning during my workout? Read More »

Making sure a guy wears a condom can sometimes be a bit of an uphill battle, but asking him to plug up his sperm and/or take a birth control pill might be just a tiny bit harder.

Although nothing like the aforementioned methods are on the market yet, scientists are busily researching ways to make men more active in pregnancy prevention.

At the second annual “Future of Male Contraception” conference held in Seattle this week (seriously, they have those?) sponsors such as the National Institute of Health and World Health Organization eagerly watched as new guy-based contraception inventions were unveiled.

Some of the new developments revealed were:

• The Intra Vas Device, “a set of removable plugs [which] block sperm in the vas deferens, the tube that’s cut in a vasectomy”.

Oh, I’m sure the guys will be lining up for this little procedure! Plugging up tubes in the body doesn’t sound comfortable, either. It kinda sounds like your balls would be constipated, no? Lovely, I’m sure.

• SARM (Selective Androgen receptor modulator), a “Testosterone-like pill” recently used as a muscle-wasting treatment that may also lower sperm count.

Awesome! So basically this is going to turn your man into a testicle-less non-man? Please tell me no. Read More »

We’ve all been there. It’s a little past 2am and you’re 3 paragraphs into a paper due in a few hours, on a subject you only vaguely understand, for a class you go to only when it’s on the way to happy hour.You’ve typed every word that relates to your paper topic into Google, and you’ve come up with nary a Wikipedia entry.

So what’s the problem? Well, besides your knack for procrastination and admirable laziness, it could be your research skills.

Before you give up and accept defeat (and an F), pour yourself a hot cup of coffee and check out these research sites that have saved me more than once:

Spark Notes: You may not have used this site since high school, but I assure you, it’s even more useful now. From novel summaries that you’ve been using since 7th grade English class to summary-style subject reviews, you can find help for almost anything here, from Shakespeare to physics. I’ve gotten A’s on papers on books I didn’t read because of this site, and it saved my butt when I was cramming for a psychology final and couldn’t for the life of me, understand a specific topic. Their review for specific subject are great at explaining something simply and thoroughly. Read More »

Okay, I know this post isn’t rife with sexual positions or homoerotic dudes, but it may just save your academic life.

Y’know how you always have to write paginated papers with a predetermined amount of scholarly sources? And y’know how you usually have to go to the library and rifle through all sorts of papers and studies to determine what is actually “scholarly” versus what “could be considered scholarly”?

Well, leave it to Google to save the freaking day again.

Google Scholar sorts exclusively through scholarly sources and links directly to the articles – oftentimes downloadable at the click of a button if you’re linking through an .edu server. It’s like having your very own Research Robot. Seriously, since discovering this gem of a search engine, I have swapped all-nighters for sweet, sweet sleep.

Now all we need is for Google to develop a program that actually writes the papers for us. They could call it Google Lazyass. Then we’ll be alllll set.