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November 1, 2016 by Michael Behar

THE NEW YORK TIMES | OCTOBER 22, 2016

weather-thumbnailThe Forecast is Cloudy Download PDF

Hurricanes like Matthew have laid bare the dirty secret of the National Weather Service: its technologies and methods are woefully behind the times. 

At 11 o’clock on the night of Sept. 29, the National Hurricane Center in Miami posted an updated prediction for Hurricane Matthew. Using the latest data from a reconnaissance aircraft, the center’s computerized models led meteorologists there to conclude, in a post on the center’s website, that “only a slight strengthening is forecast during the next 12 to 24 hours.” Their prediction proved to be astonishingly amiss: The following day, Matthew exploded from a Category 1 into a Category 5 hurricane, with winds gusting to 160 miles per hour, strong enough to flatten even the sturdiest homes. Continue reading →

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August 28, 2016 by Michael Behar

Air & Space | September 2016

Drones SpreadDrones in a Busy Sky Download PDF

Can technology protect airplanes from the new threat? 

 

It’s exactly 3:45 A.M. on a blustery and unseasonably cold Tuesday morning in May when an armed military guard wearing a bulletproof vest waves me through the west entrance of Edwards Air Force Base. On a typical weekday at this hour, almost everyone here would be asleep. But this isn’t a typical weekday. I’m in a briefing room with some two dozen researchers—mostly aerospace and computer software engineers, along with three Air Force pilots certified to fly drones—at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center, which is located on this Southern California military base. We’re guzzling coffee and chomping doughnuts while Dan Sternberg, a NASA operations engineer and former F/A-18 Hornet test pilot, leads the meeting, ticking through the day’s flight plan. Continue reading →

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February 17, 2016 by Michael Behar

Men’s Fitness | March 2016

Protein ThumbnailYou’re Not Eating Nearly Enough Protein. Period. Download PDF

We all know protein is the single most important building block of muscle growth. But, amazingly, science is only now discovering exactly how much protein we should be getting and—just as important—when we should be getting it.

A small plastic pouch filled with dark brown, organic matter arrived at my doorstep today. No, I didn’t immediately bolt down the stairs in hot pursuit of some teenagers. Instead, I took a closer look and found that the bag actually contained something else entirely: dead crickets. Continue reading →

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February 17, 2016 by Michael Behar

Men’s Fitness | December 2015

Killer in KitchenKiller in the Kitchen? Download PDF

Meat causes cancer, at least according to a shocking report from the World Health Organization. But there’s one big problem with that—our muscles argue otherwise. 

The founding father of modern dietary science was a German chemist named Carl von Voit who loved to dispense advice on how to build big muscles. His favorite maxim: “Flesh makes flesh.” In the mid-1800s, physician von Voit made discoveries that led to what every bodybuilder now knows: Consume animal protein, or “flesh,” and your muscles grow. To the recent World Health Organization (WHO) report villainizing red meat, von Voit would have declared bullshit. (That’s quatsch in German.) And his outrage would’ve been justified.  Continue reading →