For many Americans, the Thanksgiving meal includes seasonal dishes such as roast turkey with stuffing, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie. The holiday feast dates back to November 1621, when the newly arrived Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians gathered at Plymouth for an autumn harvest celebration, an event regarded as America’s “first Thanksgiving.” But what was really on the menu at the famous banquet, and which of today’s time-honored favorites didn’t earn a place at the table until later in the holiday’s 400-year history?

TURKEY

By James McClure

When you hear the word "prohibition," alcohol and marijuana likely come to mind. But America has banned a number of other vices and recreations over the years - including, of all things, pinball.

The modern, coin-operated version of pinball was invented in Chicago in the 1920s, where it was seen as another game of chance that people could bet on at speakeasies and other nefarious joints during alcohol prohibition. As a result, it quickly became associated with gangsters and the rest of the city's criminal underworld.

The criminal association quickly led to pinball being seen as a gateway for harder vices (sound familiar?).

"Pinball machines are a harmful influence because of their strong tendency to instil desire for gambling in immature young people," said Lewis Valentine, who was New York City's police commissioner from 1934-1945.

New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia agreed. In the early 1940s, he launched a moral crusade against pinball, which he called an "evil" that robbed the public through the "pockets of schoolchildren in the form of nickels and dimes given them as lunch money." The campaign resulted in New York becoming the first major American city to ban the game in 1942.

Other cities, including Los Angeles, Philadelphia and even Chicago, followed suit. But few enforced the ban with as much fervor as New York under Mayor LaGuardia, who orchestrated prohibition-style raids involving police smashing thousands of pinball machines with sledgehammers and axes before dumping them in the city's rivers.

Saved by the flipper

Like so many rounds of pinball, the machine itself was saved by the flipper. The iconic piece of today's game wasn't invented until 1947. Before then, players had to to shake and tilt the table to maneuver the ball, making pinball a game of chance like gambling on slot machines. But the flipper allowed the game's backers to argue that pinball was actually based on skill.

That's the case they made in 1976, when pinball had its day in court. In April of that year, Roger Sharpe - a writer for the New York Times and GQ, who also happened to be a savvy pinballer - was called as a star witnessof New York's Music and Amusement Association (MAA). Sharpe was asked to play rounds of pinball in a Manhattan courtroom to demonstrate that pinball was a game of skill, not chance. Sharpe did just that when he amazed legislators by calling his shot like a billiard player.

Thus New York overturned pinball prohibition, other cities soon followed and Sharpe became known as the Babe Ruth of pinball.

By Christopher Klein

In an era when women couldn’t vote and Native Americans were denied citizenship, Susan La Flesche shattered not just one barrier, but two, to become the first Native American woman doctor in the United States. A new book details how the 19th-century trailblazer overcame racial and gender biases in a white patriarchal world to graduate at the top of her medical school class, care for an entire reservation and raise children while pursuing a full-time career.

Eight-year-old Susan La Flesche sat at the bedside of an elderly woman, puzzled as to why the doctor had yet to arrive. After all, he had been summoned four times, and four times he had promised to come straight away. As the night grew longer, the sick woman’s breathing grew fainter until she died in agony before the break of dawn. Even to a young girl, the message delivered by the doctor’s absence was painfully clear: “It was only an Indian.”

That searing moment stoked the fire inside Susan to one day heal the fellow members of her Omaha tribe. “It has always been a desire of mine to study medicine ever since I was a small girl,” she wrote years later, “for even then I saw the need of my people for a good physician.”

Born in a buckskin teepee on the Omaha Indian Reservation in northeast Nebraska on June 17, 1865, Susan was never given a traditional Omaha name by her mixed-race parents. Her father, Chief Joseph La Flesche (also known as “Iron Eye”), believed his children as well as his tribe were now living in a white man’s world in which change would be the only constant. “As the chief guardian of welfare, he realized they would have to adapt to white ways or simply cease to survive,” says Joe Starita, author of “A Warrior of the People: How Susan La Flesche Overcame Racial and Gender Inequality to Become America’s First Indian Doctor.” “He began an almost intense indoctrination of his four daughters. They would have to speak English and go to white schools.”

While Iron Eye insisted that Susan learn the tribe’s traditional songs, beliefs, customs and language in order to retain her Omaha identity, he also sent her to a Presbyterian mission school on the reservation where she learned English and became a devout Christian. At the age of 14, she was sent east to attend a girls’ school in Elizabeth, New Jersey, followed by time at Virginia’s Hampton Institute, where she took classes with the children of former slaves and other Native Americans.

Female physicians, late 19th century. Susan LaFlesche is in the second row from the back, fourth woman from the right. (Credit: Legacy Center, Drexel University College of Medicine)

Omaha means “against the current,” and few members of the tribe embodied the name better than La Flesche, as she proved by enrolling in the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania at a time when even the most privileged of white women faced severe discrimination. Starita points to articles published in journals such as Popular Science Monthly that argued that women faced an intellectual disadvantage because their brains were smaller than those of men or that their menstrual cycles made them unfit for scientific pursuits. A Harvard doctor even wrote a 300-page thesis asserting that women should be barred from attending college because the stress would harm their reproductive organs. “When you read these theories in scientific journals, you realize what all women were facing,”

Still, La Flesche persevered and graduated in 1889 at the top of her 36-woman class to make history by becoming the first Native American woman doctor. Although prodded to remain on the East Coast where she could have lived a very comfortable existence, the 24-year-old La Flesche returned to the reservation to fulfill her destiny.

She became the sole doctor for 1,244 patients spread over a massive territory of 1,350 square miles. House calls were arduous. Long portions of her 20-hour workdays were spent wrapped in a buffalo robe driving her buggy through blankets of snow and biting subzero winds with her mares, Pat and Pudge, her only companions. When she returned home, the woman known as “Dr. Sue” often found a line of wheezing and coughing patients awaiting her. La Flesche’s office hours never ended. While she slept, the lantern lit in her window remained a beacon for anyone in need of help.

La Flesche preached hygiene and prevention along with the healing power of fresh air and sunshine. She also spoke out against the white whiskey peddlers who preyed on the tribe members, continuing her father’s work as a passionate prohibitionis.

As difficult as it may have been to straddle two civilizations, La Flesche “managed to thread the delicate bicultural needle,” according to Starita. “Those with no trust of white doctors flocked to Susan,” he says. “The people trusted her because she spoke their language and knew their customs.”

La Flesche again shattered stereotypes by continuing to work after her 1894 marriage to Henry Picotte, a Sioux from South Dakota, and the birth of their two boys at a time when women were expected to be full-time mothers and home makers. “If you are looking for someone who was ‘leaning in’ a century before that term was coined, you need look no further than Susan La Flesche,” Starita says. “She faced a constant struggle to serve her people and serve her husband and children. She was haunted that she was spreading herself so thin that she wasn’t the doctor, mother and wife she should be. The very fears haunting her as a woman in the closing years of the 19th century are those still haunting women in the opening years of the 21st century.”

The evils of alcohol that La Flesche railed against came into her home as her husband struggled with the bottle. He contracted tuberculosis, exacerbated by his alcoholism, and died in 1905, leaving La Flesche a widow with two small boys. By this point, the physician needed some healing herself, as her long hours led to chronic pain and respiratory issues. She pressed on, however, and in 1913 opened a hospital near Walthill, Nebraska, the first such facility to be built on reservation land without any support from the federal government. Her hospital was open to anyone who was ill—no matter their age, gender or skin color.

Starita believes that La Flesche, who passed away at the age of 50 on September 18, 1915, faced greater discrimination as a woman than as a Native American. “When I got into the research, I was stunned by how deeply entrenched gender bias was in the Victorian era. White women were largely expected to just raise children and maintain a safe Christian home. One can only imagine where that bar was set for a Native American woman.”

As America stood on the brink of a Second World War, the push for aeronautical advancement grew ever greater, spurring an insatiable demand for mathematicians. Women were the solution. Ushered into the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in 1935 to shoulder the burden of number crunching, they acted as human computers, freeing the engineers of hand calculations in the decades before the digital age. Sharp and successful, the female population at Langley skyrocketed.

Many of these “computers” are finally getting their due, but conspicuously missing from this story of female achievement are the efforts contributed by courageous, African-American women. Called the West Computers, after the area to which they were relegated, they helped blaze a trail for mathematicians and engineers of all races and genders to follow.

“These women were both ordinary and they were extraordinary,” says Margot Lee Shetterly. Her new book Hidden Figures shines light on the inner details of these women’s lives and accomplishments. The book is being adapted into a movie that will receive a wide release release in January.

“We've had astronauts, we’ve had engineers—John Glenn, Gene Kranz, Chris Kraft,” she says. “Those guys have all told their stories.” Now it’s the women’s turn.

Growing up in Hampton, Virginia, in the 1970s, Shetterly lived just miles away from Langley. Built in 1917, this research complex was the headquarters for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) which was intended to turn the floundering flying gadgets of the day into war machines. The agency was dissolved in 1958, to be replaced by the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) as the space race gained speed.

The West Computers were at the heart of the center’s advancements. They worked through equations that described every function of the plane, running the numbers often with no sense of the greater mission of the project. They contributed to the ever-changing design of a menagerie of wartime flying machines, making them faster, safer, more aerodynamic. Eventually their stellar work allowed some to leave the computing pool for specific projects—Christine Darden worked to advance supersonic flight, Katherine Johnson calculated the trajectories for the Mercury and Apollo missions. NASA dissolved the remaining few human computers in the 1970s as the technological advances made their roles obsolete.

The first black computers didn’t set foot at Langley until the 1940s. Though the pressing needs of war were great, racial discrimination remained strong and few jobs existed for African-Americans, regardless of gender. That was until 1941 when A. Philip Randolph, pioneering civil rights activist, proposed a march on Washington, D.C., to draw attention to the continued injustices of racial discrimination. With the threat of 100,000 people swarming to the Capitol, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, preventing racial discrimination in hiring for federal and war-related work. This order also cleared the way for the black computers, slide rule in hand, to make their way into NACA history.

Exactly how many women computers worked at NACA (and later NASA) over the years is still unknown. One 1992 study estimated the total topped several hundred but other estimates, including Shetterly’s own intuition, says that number is in the thousands.

Johnson at NASA in 1966

As a child, Shetterly knew these brilliant mathematicians as her girl scout troop leaders, Sunday school teachers, next-door neighbors and as parents of schoolmates. Her father worked at Langley as well, starting in 1964 as an engineering intern and becoming a well-respected climate scientist. “They were just part of a vibrant community of people, and everybody had their jobs,” she says. “And those were their jobs. Working at NASA Langley.”

Surrounded by the West Computers and other academics, it took decades for Shetterly to realize the magnitude of the women’s work. “It wasn't until my husband, who was not from Hampton, was listening to my dad talk about some of these women and the things that they have done that I realized,” she says. “That way is not necessarily the norm”

The spark of curiosity ignited, Shetterly began researching these women. Unlike the male engineers, few of these women were acknowledged in academic publications or for their work on various projects. Even more problematic was that the careers of the West Computers were often more fleeting than those of the white men. Social customs of the era dictated that as soon as marriage or children arrived, these women would retire to become full-time homemakers, Shetterly explains. Many only remained at Langley for a few years.

But the more Shetterly dug, the more computers she discovered. “My investigation became more like an obsession,” she writes in the book. “I would walk any trail if it meant finding a trace of one of the computers at its end.”

She scoured telephone directories, local newspapers, employee newsletters and the NASA archives to add to her growing list of names. She also chased down stray memos, obituaries, wedding announcements and more for any hint at the richness of these women’s lives. “It was a lot of connecting the dots,” she says.

“I get emails all the time from people whose grandmothers or mothers worked there,” she says. “Just today I got an email from a woman asking if I was still searching for computers. [She] had worked at Langley from July 1951 through August 1957.”

Dr. Christine Darden. Courtesy NASA

Langley was not just a laboratory of science and engineering; “in many ways, it was a racial relations laboratory, a gender relations laboratory,” Shetterly says. The researchers came from across America. Many came from parts of the country sympathetic to the nascent Civil Rights Movement, says Shetterly, and backed the progressive ideals of expanded freedoms for black citizens and women.

But life at Langley wasn’t just the churn of greased gears. Not only were the women rarely provided the same opportunities and titles as their male counterparts, but the West Computers lived with constant reminders that they were second-class citizens. In the book, Shetterly highlights one particular incident involving an offensive sign in the dining room bearing the designation: Colored Computers.

One particularly brazen computer, Miriam Mann, took responding to the affront on as a her own personal vendetta. She plucked the sign from the table, tucking it away in her purse. When the sign returned, she removed it again. “That was incredible courage,” says Shetterly. “This was still a time when people are lynched, when you could be pulled off the bus for sitting in the wrong seat. [There were] very, very high stakes.”

But eventually Mann won. The sign disappeared.

The women fought many more of these seemingly small battles, against separate bathrooms and restricted access to meetings. It was these small battles and daily minutiae that Shetterly strove to capture in her book. And outside of the workplace, they faced many more problems, including segregated busses and dilapidated schools. Many struggled to find housing in Hampton. The white computers could live in Anne Wythe Hall, a dormitory that helped alleviate the shortage of housing, but the black computers were left to their own devices.

“History is the sum total of what all of us do on a daily basis,” says Shetterly. “We think of capital “H” history as being these huge figures—George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and Martin Luther King.” Even so, she explains, “you go to bed at night, you wake up the next morning, and then yesterday is history. These small actions in some ways are more important or certainly as important as the individual actions by these towering figures.”

The book and movie don’t mark the end of Shetterly’s work She continues to collect these names, hoping to eventually make the list available online. She hopes to find the many names that have been sifted out over the years and document their respective life’s work.

The few West Computers whose names have been remembered, have become nearly mythical figures—a side-effect of the few African-American names celebrated in mainstream history, Shetterly argues. She hopes her work pays tribute to these women by bringing details of their life’s work to light. “Not just mythology but the actual facts,” she says. “Because the facts are truly spectacular.”

Nicole continues her series: UK OK!, by visiting the historic town of St. Andrews.  Its home to the one of the oldest English speaking universities in the world…and its considered the “home of modern golf”.

BY Andrea Aronson

In the sports-obsessed United States, many students assume that the ticket to a hefty college scholarship is athletic prowess on the field, on the court, or in the pool.

Not so.  Just look at the total numbers.

Between the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and the National Association for Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) about $3.2 billion in athletic scholarships are disbursed every year.  While that might sound like a hefty chunk of change, the reality is, when you do the math and look at the overall dynamics of athletic scholarships, you’ll see that number can be misleading.

Remember that of that $3.2 billion, only approximately one-quarter of it will be available to graduating high school seniors.  With an estimated 54,000 incoming first-year athletes potentially receiving scholarships each year, that means that, on average, an athlete might expect to receive around $15,000 in scholarship dollars. Not bad, you may be thinking, but not the mother lode either when you consider the average cost of a college education.

Further, keep in mind that “full-ride tuition scholarships” only really exist for a few sports (men’s football and basketball, women’s basketball, volleyball and gymnastics) and for a few players in that sport, and that most athletic scholarships are only a fraction of those averages.  Note, too, that many players at all levels of varsity play are on their teams with no scholarship money, at all.  While Division 3 players never receive athletic scholarships, Divisions 1 and 2 teams carry several players who receive zero award dollars.

Contrast all this with the facts and figures of academic scholarships.  Individual colleges and universities give away approximately $24 billion in scholarship awards, and the Federal government gives away another $22 billion in need-based aid.  About 13.2 million students attend four-year colleges and universities.  Obviously, if we did some math, the amount of money, on average, going to a student at a four-year college or university would be pretty tiny.

But it’s not distributed evenly—just as the athletic scholarship money is distributed unevenly, so too are academic scholarship dollars. No surprise: the best athletes (in certain sports) get more money than other athletes (in other sports).  The best students with the best grades and tests scores get more money than other students.

But which is the better bet? Where you should spend the most time and energy in order to get a better scholarship and reduce the cost of college?

Well, we’re betting on academics.

Here’s why:  no matter what the scenario, having strong academic credentials is appealing for both colleges and college coaches, and yes, it can even help you be recruited for that varsity collegiate spot on the team.

At best, college athletic recruiting is a crapshoot.  Even the most seemingly talented players may not get the kind of coach interest that they believe that they deserve.  Every year, every coach seeks something different for their team and needs that different something to varying degrees.  Depending upon how much they need it, and whether you offer it, the calculus of whether you’ll get recruited, and how much money you might be offered can change.  Add into this that many sports are not well-supported financially at many colleges, and that the large majority of sports are “equivalency sports” that have a bucket of money that has to be divided up across all players, and suddenly you have a recipe for total scholarship unpredictability.  Will you get recruited?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  Will you get scads of scholarship money?  Highly unlikely.

On the other hand, everybody wants a good student, and many institutions are more than willing to provide significant scholarship dollars to get that high-flyer.  There is no gray here. No unpredictability.  No complicated calculation.  And, what constitutes a strong student is generally objectively agreed upon across all colleges: a solid performance in classwork as reflected by the high school transcript.  Contrast this to the subjectivity of athletic recruiting, and you’ll see why spending time studying may be a better bet than spending money on that extra session of private coaching.

Plus, coaches are desperate for good students that they can recruit since they help out the coach on many levels.  Coaches need to meet certain academic standards both with their recruiting class’ high school performance as well as ongoing with their varsity team’s collegiate academic achievements.  Often, coaches will have what they consider to be “academic recruits.”  These are players who may not be considered superstars in their sport but who can help buoy the team in the classroom, and, yes, they get actively recruited to be on the team. (Though, admittedly, these players don’t usually get much in the way of large athletic scholarships, they often do get sizable merit scholarships because of the strength of their academics).

So, which athletes get the biggest scholarships?  The ones who don’t rely on their athletic prowess to be the main driver of their potential scholarship dollars and who study, study, study!

 Smoking is bad news for everyone, but especially for kids who have asthma. In our continuing series brought to you by the Connecticut Tobacco & health Trust Fund, Scott takes a look at the effects of smoking, if you have asthma

Federal law in the United States requires that the presidential election be held every four years on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. In modern society that seems like an arbitrary time to hold an election, but it made a lot of sense in the 1800s.

In the early decades of the United States, the date for the election of the president would be set by the individual states. Those various election days, however, almost always fell in November.

The reason was simple: under an early federal law, the electors for the electoral college were to meet in the individual states on the first Wednesday of December. And according to a 1792 federal law, the elections in the states (which would choose the electors) had to be held within a 34-day period before that day.

Beyond meeting legal requirements, holding elections in November made good sense in an agrarian society, as the harvest would have been concluded.

And the harshest winter weather would not have arrived, which was a consideration for those who had to travel to a polling place.

In a practical sense, having the presidential election held on different days in different states was not a major concern in the early decades of the 1800s. Communication was slow, and when it took days or weeks for election results to become known it didn't matter if states held elections at different times.

As communication improved with the introduction of the railroad and the telegraph, it seemed obvious that election results in one state might influence the voting yet to occur in another. And as transportation improved, there was also a fear that voters could travel from state to state and participate in multiple elections.

In the early 1840s Congress decided to make a standardized date for holding presidential elections across the country.

Congress Standardized Election Day in 1845

In 1845 Congress passed a law establishing that the day for choosing presidential electors (in other words, the day for the popular vote that would determine the electors of the electoral congress) would be every four years on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November.

That formulation was chosen to fall within the time frame determined by the aforementioned 1792 law.

And making the election the first Tuesday after the first Monday also ensured that the election would never be held on November 1, which is All Saints Day, a Catholic holy day of obligation. There is also a legend that merchants in the 1800s tended to do their bookkeeping on the first day of the month, and scheduling an important election on that day might interfere with business.

The first presidential election held in accordance with the new law was held on November 7, 1848. In that year's election, the Whig candidate Zachary Taylor defeated Lewis Cass of the Democratic Party, and former president Martin Van Buren, who was running on the ticket of the Free Soil Party.

Why Hold the Presidential Election on a Tuesday?

The choice of a Tuesday is most likely because elections in the 1840s were generally held at county seats, and people in outlying areas would have to travel from their farms into town to vote. Tuesday was chosen as people could begin their travels on a Monday, and thus avoid traveling on the Sunday sabbath.

Holding important national elections on a weekday seems anachronistic in the modern world, and it's no doubt true that Tuesday voting tends to create obstacles and discourages participation.

The introduction of early voting procedures in many American states in recent elections has addressed the problem of having to vote on a specific weekday. But, generally speaking, the tradition of voting for the president every four years on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November has continued uninterrupted since the 1840s.

We’ve all get so anxious about exams, some get cold sweats, some get dizzy and faint, some become nauseous. Extreme test anxiety, while rare, can be a tremendous problem. Daniella gets some advice from an expert on how to deal with pre-test stress

At age 13, Nathyn Costello picked up a pair of dumbbells at his friend's place and started working out. He was a skinny kid, and had recently watched a couple of Jean-Claude Van Damme movies. He saw the man in the skin-tight singlet showing off his ripped abs and bulging biceps, watched him high kick and fly kick the bad guy and ultimately get the girl. Costello decided then and there what he wanted to be—big.

Seven years later Costello had achieved his dream; his body was buff and sculpted and there was barely a molecule of fat on his frame. But taking his shirt off in front of other men at footy training, eating a piece of fruit and even going out to dinner with friends had become the stuff of his nightmares.

'The best way to think about muscle dysmorphia is like reverse anorexia,' says Scott Griffiths, a psychologist from the University of Sydney whose research focuses on muscle dysmorphia and eating disorders in men.

'Guys with muscle dysmorphia are not trying to be skinny: their ideal physique is lean, cut, and very big, so the type of dieting and exercise they do is different to people with anorexia,' says Griffiths. 'But it's just as aggressive, so they too can look you in the eye and tell you that they're small, even though they're huge.'

In his early twenties, toned, trim and muscular, Costello would sit in the gym, watch other guys walk past and think how fit and strong they looked. He'd catch sight of himself in the mirror and get upset.

Outside the gym, as a coach of a high-level football team, Costello wouldn't take his shirt off unless he knew he was under a certain body fat percentage, and socializing with friends became almost impossible. When he was invited out to dinner he would eat his own meal before or after, or avoid social activities altogether.

Griffiths says Costello's story is a familiar one among the men he speaks with during his research.

'Once those thoughts, feelings and behaviors escape the context of the gym and they start to interfere in personal relationships, your ability to hold down a job and to do your job properly, that's when you need to have that honest conversation with yourself,' he says.

Costello says he knew something wasn't right with his behavior but when he saw his body reflected in the mirror he remained unhappy. So even with his strict diet and workout regime, Costello says he was driven to 'improve the outcome'. He turned to steroids.

Rising from the underground

Steroid use is on the rise in the US.

This recent rise in steroid use is something Ben Ly, a personal trainer, says he has noticed over the past few years among young men, especially among 15 to 25-year-olds.

'They're very impatient; they want to put on muscle as fast as they possibly can, they look at muscle magazines and movies, and see these huge, ripped out guys but they don't realize that [a lot of those guys] have something called 'mature muscle', which is five to 15 years’ worth of weight training that has gotten them to that point.'

Ly says he's also noticed that over the past three to four years, steroid use has become less of a taboo subject.

'Illicit steroid use was very underground, no one would mention it. But even in the last year, it's become very open. Just last week I had two young guys [ask about steroids] and approach us directly at the reception counter, it was like they were just asking for a cigarette or a lighter … it's so big and well used now in society that to them, it's not illegal ... and everybody wants to be a part of it.'

This recent rise in steroid use has Costello worried because it reminds him of his own experience with steroids in the past.

'I knew guys who were using 10 to 30 times [the dosage] I was, and that was very common, and I'd be concerned. These guys would put on a lot more muscle, a lot more quickly, but from my observation they'd also be the ones who were more fragile—they'd run out of the drug, lose a bit of weight, and their confidence would drop through the floor.'

That kind of unregulated and sporadic use also has Griffiths concerned. He says the period of time when someone with muscle dysmorphia is coming off a steroid cycle is critical. He sees some of his clients experience big mood swings and emotional instability, including the risk of suicide.

'For a guy whose body image, self esteem and emotional stability rests heavily, if not exclusively, on how he looks and his appearance, he's going to experience a very rapid drop in muscularity ... and to see that happen over just a couple of days can be quite traumatic.'

Griffiths also says the way in which steroid users have recently been associated with violence in the media has not helped in encouraging men to come forward and seek help. While the taboo around steroid use has diminished, Griffiths says there's still a stigma for men who want to seek help.

'I think to a large extent men are discouraged from talking about their vulnerabilities, especially when it comes to mental illness. I think the perception that muscle dysmorphia is a disorder that men can suffer from hasn't quite permeated through the public consciousness yet.'

Costello was never diagnosed with muscle dysmorphia, but now at age 36, believes he had the disorder in his twenties.

'The truth is I think I just wanted acceptance,' Costello says. 'I was very skinny and wanted to feel more confident, I guess. That's where it started ... the world automatically rewards people who look good, but there aren't enough people who want to be vulnerable to talk about how they're feeling.'

Boys are more likely than girls to drop out of school before finishing high school. We hear from a group of boys as they express what makes middle school difficult for them. Their answers varied from academic challenges to social issues. Many boys feel under pressure to be fast, strong and athletic. Middle school boys must also deal with their peers’ sometimes insulting and making fun of them. Plus Scott gives us some ways boys can deal with the challenges of middle school.  Things that can help are: take advantage of the different activities and clubs offered in middle school; or even consider starting your own club. Scott also explores the difficulty boys have dealing with girls in middle school. To learn more watch our next video report. 

Our top story focuses on the ongoing effort to set teens straight about the use of steroids. TKN has reported on the dangers before, but with professional athletes continuing to ruin their careers with these illegal drugs, teens are getting the wrong message about what it takes to get ahead athletically and even socially. We hear form experts and adults who have had first-hand experience dealing with the tragedy sometimes associated with the use of steroids. 

It's a funny custom, isn't it? Dressing up like ghouls and goblins, and going from door-to-door to beg for fistfuls of usually forbidden treats... whose idea was that? 

The custom of trick-or-treating may have Celtic origins, related to the pagan celebration of Samhain, which marked the end of the harvest and the threshold of a new season. According to anthropologist Bettina Arnold:


The association between Halloween and ghosts and spirits today comes from the Celtic belief that it was at this time of transition between the old year and the new that the barrier between this world and the Otherworld where the dead and supernatural beings lived became permeable....Trick-or-treating is a modern day holdover of the practice of propitiating, or bribing, the spirits and their human counterparts roaming the world of the living on that night. Pumpkins carved as jack-o-lanterns would not have been part of traditional Halloween festivals in Celtic Europe, since pumpkins are New World plants, but large turnips were hollowed out, carved with faces and placed in windows to ward off evil spirits.

Others argue that Halloween is a Christian, not a pagan holiday, pointing to the early Catholic church's celebrations of All Hallows (Saints) Day, and the night before it, All Hallows E'en (Evening), when Christians were instructed to pray for the souls of the departed. I can see how that would lead to a certain fascination with ghosts, but the candy? Well, back in medieval Europe, kids and beggars would go "souling" on All Hallows Eve...which sounds like a macabre version of door-to-door Christmas caroling: Instead of a merry song, the visitors offered prayers for dead loved ones, in exchange for "soul cakes." (These, too, may have had pagan roots.) 

Some chap named Charles Dickens mentions this tradition in an 1887 issue of his literary journal, " All the Year Round" (actually, I think it must have been Charles Dickens, Jr., who took over the journal after his dad died in 1870):

"...it was a custom to bake on All Hallow E'en, a cake for every soul in the house, which cakes were eaten on All Souls' Day. The poor people used to go round begging for some cakes or anything to make merry with on this night. Their petition consisted in singing a doggerel sort of rhyme: A soul cake, A soul cake; Have mercy on all Christian souls; For a soul cake; A soul cake. In Cheshire on this night they once had a custom called 'Hob Nob,' which consisted of a man carrying a dead horse's head covered with a sheet to frighten people."

Eep! That's quite a trick, alright. In America these days, not too many people take the "trick" part of trick-or-treating seriously anymore; it's more like: "Hi, gimme candy." But according to this New York Times article, Halloween night trickery is a problem in the United Kingdom, where "egg-and-flour-throwing, attacks on fences and doors and the theft of garden ornaments" are enough to make some people— gasp!—"hate Halloween." 

By Steph Yin

Halloween is here again. That means your co-workers have planted surprise spiders around the office. You’ve been invited to a haunted hayride. Your neighbor’s yard has a full cemetery, rigged with motion detectors and pop-up zombies. Chicken-livered from the start, I have always dreaded this time of year. Haunted houses, ghost tours and horror film fests are not my thing, and why people love having the daylights scared out of them completely escapes me.

I decided to try to understand my friends who are on the lookout for thrills this time of year. As it turns out, there are many possible reasons some people like to be scared stiff. Each person’s threshold for experiences that provoke fear is made up of a unique recipe that blends nature and nurture. “The ingredients vary from person to person,” said Frank Farley, a psychologist at Temple University and a former president of the American Psychological Association.

Dr. Farley is interested in what draws certain people to extreme behaviors, like driving racecars, climbing Mount Everest and flying hot air balloonsacross oceans. In the 1980s, he coined the term “Type T” personality to refer to the behavioral profile of thrill-seekers. What makes someone thrill-seeking, he said, comes down to a mix of genes, environment and early development.

David Zald, a neuropsychologist at Vanderbilt University, studies one piece of the equation. His research partly focuses on dopamine, a chemical involved in our brain’s response to reward. In the past, he has found that people who lack what he calls “brakes” on dopamine release tend to pursue thrilling activities.

When you go to a haunted house, you’re grappling with a conflict, Dr. Zald said: The experience could either be fun or terrifying, and how you weigh that balance could depend in part on dopamine levels. “Having a greater amount of dopamine pushes someone to pursue the goal of excitement,” he said, “whereas someone who basically has less dopamine is more likely to hold back and say, ‘No, this isn’t worth it to me.’”

Socially, we get cues about how to respond to fear from those around us, said Margee Kerr, a sociologist and author of the book “Scream: Chilling Adventures in the Science of Fear.” Early on, that’s taking notes from our parents about how to deal with distress. Later, experiencing stressful situations with others can cultivate social bonds.

Part of that has to do with emotional contagion, or a communal response to shared experiences, Dr. Kerr said. If your friend is captivated by the horror movie you are watching together, you process that by recreating the same feeling in your own mind, and that can bring you closer together. People also tend to hold onto memories of fear more intensely, she said, so if you have positive associations with a scary situation, like going to a haunted house, you’ll likely want to do it again.

Fear-seeking can also be a way of testing oneself. Josh Randall and Kristjan Thor, creators of Blackout, a haunted house experience that consistentlytops rankings of “Most Extreme Haunted Houses,” said they see many people coming to their events with a goal of self-fortification. “It’s almost like a dare to themselves,” Mr. Thor said. “People want to be able to conquer something.”

For many, being scared is a jolting escape from daily life. When immersed in a scary situation, you can suspend your disbelief and live in the moment — and that loss of control can feel really good. This is key for Blackout, Mr. Randall said: “For a finite period of time, that audience member can turn off the real world, and live in a fantasy world.”

After talking with the experts, I was starting to see why some friends love getting spooked. But why do I hate being scared so much?

It could be because I was never exposed to horror movies or haunted houses growing up, so by the time I did experience these things, I was ill-prepared. It could be that the regions in my brain involved in coding fear and anxiety are more sensitive. Most likely, it is a mix of many different factors. Regardless of the reason though, “it’s perfectly O.K. not to like scary things,” Dr. Kerr said.

For people who cannot fathom sitting out a haunted house, it’s important not to coerce your more cautious friends into doing something they do not want to, Dr. Kerr said. “That can compound the fear, and make it even worse.” So, for any friends who were thinking of inviting me to the haunted house this weekend, save your breath — I have a doctor’s note.

By Jason Daley

Genealogy has gotten pretty sophisticated in recent years. There are now massive online archives that make it easier than ever to hunt down obscure ancestors, not to mention mail-in DNA tests that can reach back centuries. But an approximately 350-year-old manuscript published online for the first time can reveal another fascinating detail about one's family history: whether any ancestors were accused of practicing witchcraft.

Just in time for Witch's Night (Halloween that is, not Walpurgisnacht), London’s Wellcome Library, which specializes in medical text and history, has digitized Manuscript 3658, Names of Witches in Scotland, 1658. The ledger records all the men and women accused of witchcraft in Scotland in between 1658 and 1662, during the apex of a century-long witch scare. According to a press release, the bound book contains the names of the accused, their town and notes about their “confessions,” which likely took place under some sort of torture.

According to The Scotsman, about 3,000 to 5,000 people in Scotland were publicly accused of witchcraft in 16th and 17th centuries, spurred on by the Scottish Witchcraft Act of 1563, which made witchcraft a crime punishable by death. That Act was vague, both in its definition of witchcraft and in how to identify witchcraft. At least 2,000 people were killed for being witches before the Act was repealed in 1736.

“This manuscript offers us a glimpse into a world that often went undocumented,” says Christopher Hilton, Senior Archivist at the Wellcome Library says in a press release on Ancestry.com, which hosts the list, though the manuscript is also available for free from the library. “How ordinary people, outside the mainstream of science and medicine, tried to bring order and control to the world around them. This might mean charms and spells, or the use of healing herbs and other types of folk medicine, or both. We’ll probably never know the combinations of events that saw each of these individuals accused of witchcraft.”

According to the extensive Survey in Scottish Witchcraft, there are records for 3,837 people accused of witchcraft, and 84 percent of the accused are women. About 65 percent of the accused were over the age of 40. Contrary to popular legend, the Survey found that folk healers and widows only made up a fraction of the accused witches. Nor were they necessarily poor; while nobles only made up about 6 percent of accused witches, about 64 percent of the accused came from what would now be considered the middle class.

Torture was often used to elicit confession, with sleep depravation being a favorite tactic. In Scotland, at least, the swimming test, known as indicium aquae, was rare. The test judged whether those believed to be witches (or criminals) were guilty by tying them up and then tossing them into water. If the water rejected them as a “servant of the devil,” they floated and were deemed guilty. If they sank, and often subsequently drowned, they were found not guilty. Most witches were tortured into a confession. If they were found guilty they were typically strangled at the stake then burned.

Over time and especially during the panic covered by the Wellcome manuscript, lawyers in Scotland began to distrust some of the tactics used to identify witches, such as searching for "witches marks" or "witches teats" on their bodies which were often just scars, moles, warts, skin tags or birth marks. As the state became more secular and the Enlightenment began to take hold, belief in witchcraft decreased. In 1736, when the Scottish Witchcraft Act was repealed, it was replaced with the crime of “pretended witchcraft” which carried a 1-year prison sentence instead of death.

In our special report from the National Aquarium in Baltimore Maryland, Scott gets a close encounter of the dolphin kind.  A marine mammal trainer takes Scott on a behind the scenes tour for some hands on experiences with bottle nosed dolphins.  We learn just how smart and social this mammal is. Plus Scott finds out that why dolphins always seem to be smiling and does that really mean they’re happy all the time.