November 22, 2009
UTNE READER

Short Takes: News From All Over

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March 2007
Staff Utne.com 
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Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait
By Chris Jordan
The statistics that pepper the American media can be a dizzying array of numbers that confuse rather than convey meaningful information. To help the average person gain some perspective on some of these seemingly unfathomable statistics, artist Chris Jordan creates intricately detailed prints, like one of 2.3 million folded prison uniforms to represent the 2.3 million people incarcerated in 2005. The images are fashioned from thousands of smaller photos, creating in the prison uniform instance a mammoth 11 by 23-foot image filled with piles of bright orange uniforms. Other statistics undergoing Jordan's visual translation include the images of 29,569 handguns to represent the number of US gun-related deaths in 2004, 1.14 million brown paper supermarket bags showing the number used by Americans every hour, and 125,000 $100 bills depicting the amount of funds the US government spends on the Iraq war every hour. (Thanks, Chicago Reader's Daily Harold blog.) -- Jenna Fisher
http://www.chrisjordan.com/current_set2.php?id=7

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Genes Uncover Dairy Farming Origins
By Sara Wood and John Pickrell, Cosmos Magazine
Milk may do your body good, but it wasn't so great for early humans. In fact, before the spread of agriculture and dairy farming, humans couldn't even digest the stuff. New DNA analysis on human skeletons has found that 8,000 year ago, a genetic mutation occurred in Europeans and some Africans that enabled people to continue processing dairy into adulthood (most modern and central Europeans are direct descendents of those people). The study's lead author, Joachim Burger, told Cosmos Online that the research provided 'direct evidence that natural selection is working on human populations.' -- Mary O'Regan
http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/1067

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