By Kate Dailey

"Sweetie," "Sugar," and "Honey." There's a reason we call our loved ones flavor-derived nicknames. "We're all born liking sweet tastes," says Dr. Alexei B. Kampov-Polevoi, a professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. "It's kind of the yardstick for all pleasures." But what does it mean for food to taste sweet? And how does that taste affect our brains and our bodies? 

The desire for sweetness is hardwired into humans--give babies a little sugar on their lips and they'll smile. That's because up until the advent of artificial additives, sweet flavors signified calorie-dense foods. "If you're sitting there on the savanna and trying not to be eaten by something else, you want to be able to make a quick decision about what's good to eat," says Steven Munger, an associate professor of Anatomy and Neurobiology at the University of Maryland. A sweet snack indicated that not only was it probably not poisonous, it also would provide ample energy. While we can't blame everything on our prehistoric ancestry, the desire for sweetness is well-rooted in primitive genetics.
"All mammals - mice, dogs, humans—with the exception of cats, use the same types of genes and genetic mechanisms to detect sweet flavor," says Munger. (Cats have since mutated so that they no longer have the gene for detecting sweet food).

Still, some people crave sweetness more than others: women are more likely than men to have a preference for sweet food, a fact that's somehow tied to hormones. "During the menstrual cycle, the mood as well as the desire to eat sweets can fluctuate," says Dr. Kampov-Polevoi. "That indicates that sex hormones are involved."  
Children, as well, are more drawn than adults to like sweet foods, which makes sense. "Things that I loved as a child just taste so obnoxiously sweet to me now," says Danielle Reed, a member of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. Her research showed that as children grew, their preference and liking for sweet foods decline. The research indicates that the desire for sweetness is linked to stages of development. "When you're growing you need the [extra] calories, and when you stop growing you don't," says Reed.  

Whether one like the taste of sugar a little or a lot, sweet foods react with everyone's brains in the same way--by producing a rush of chemicals, including dopamine, which creates an opiate-like effect. "In Sweden, sweet-tasting foods like sugar solutions are used as anesthetic to do minor surgeries," says Dr. Kampov-Polevi. Sugar water is also used in the US on babies for minor procedures like blood draws. It's also a go-to staple for recovering addicts, who find that binging on sugary snacks can sometimes help fight the urge to drink.   

No matter how you get your sugar fix, the brain reacts the same: whether your source is artificial sweeteners, high fructose corn syrup, or fructalose. "A sugar is a sugar is a sugar," says Barry Popkin, professor of global nutrition at the University of North Carolina. (At one point, researchers thought that artificial sugars may make the body even hungrier, since they offer a sweet taste with no calories, leaving the body wanting more. That has proven not to be true, says Popkin.)

How we consume that sugar, however, does make a difference. Humans do all process sweetness in beverages differently than sweetness in food - that is, by barely responding to it at all. Though our brains associate the taste of sugar with calorie dense food, drinking highly sweet beverages doesn't impact our caloric impact. When test subjects consumer eat 500 calories of sugar-rich food, says Popkin, they're likely to eat 500 fewer calories sometime during the day. Not so with sweet beverages. Even when researchers stir in spoonfuls of sugar into a regular glass of water, subjects still fail to compensate for those extra calories elsewhere.

That's trouble. An increase in sugary beverages has translated into a two-thirds to three-fourths increase in overall calorie consumption over the last 20 years, says Popkin. We can speculate about what this means for our waistline--some studies claim that the rise in American obesity can be directly linked to the rise in inexpensively produced soft drinks - but we are less sure about other long-term implications.   

What's also unknown is the long-term effect of eating sweet foods over a lifetime. Americans are currently living in what could be called the Sweetest Generation: our access to sweet and sugary foods, especially beverages like soda and juice, is at an all-time high. "For the past 1000 years, it's mostly been breast milk followed by water," says Popkin.  Now, we get about twenty percent of our calories from sugary drinks, a number that's skyrocketed in the past 20 years. We're eating more sugary foods than ever, and researchers are still unsure of the consequences. 

"If you consume caffeine over time, you habituate to it, and it has a different effect," says Popkin. "With drug use, you habituate to a certain amount of drugs and need more over time. When it comes to sweetness, we don't understand the long-term effect." We do know that we love sweets - and that the country is sweeter than ever. But in this case, being sweet may not be a good thing.  

Nicole is on assignment in Boston, to solve a history mystery.  We all know the story of how during the American Revolution, lanterns in a church steeple signaled that the British were on the move.  But after more than 200 years, we still don’t know just who hung those lanterns. Plus, Nicole gets to go where few visitors are allowed.  And she gets more clues toward solving just who hung the signal lanterns for Paul Revere.

If you’re a teenager, how do you know whether it’s cool to smoke cigarettes, curse or get a cartilage piercing? Look around: To find out what’s socially acceptable, impressionable adolescents generally turn to their peers. Now, new research finds that this social dynamic also plays out when it comes to more violent behaviors.

A new study, published yesterday in the American Journal of Public Health, draws on surveys of thousands of teens to reveal how the people around you influence your tendency to engage in violence. The authors report that adolescents are far more likely to commit a violent act if a friend has already done so—adding evidence to a mounting theory that violence in communities can spread like a disease.

The study was born of an unusual collaboration between Ohio State University social psychologist Brad Bushman and OSU political scientist Robert Bond. Bushman, who has written and lectured extensively on humans and violence, was interested in exploring the model of violence spreading like a contagious disease that had beens popularized by University of Chicago at Illinois epidemiologist Gary Slutkin. Bond had expertise in analyzing social networks. "We just really hit off and decided that we should to try find a way to merge our research interests," Bond says.

For the study, the two tracked the behavior of more than 90,000 American teenagers at 142 schools, who were surveyed in class starting in the mid-1990s as part of the National Longitudinal Study on Adolescent to Adult Health. By accessing follow-up interviews that were done with nearly 6,000 of the teenagers years later, the researchers were able to see whether they had practiced violent behavior in the past year—namely, getting into a serious fight, pulling a weapon on someone or hurting someone badly enough that they needed medical attention.

The teenagers were then asked to identify five male and five female friends, who were subsequently interviewed by the surveyors about their violent behavior. With this web of data, Bond and Bushman were able to piece together nodes of violence and their effect on the people connected to them.

What they found was a contagious model. Teenagers were 48 percent more likely to have been in a serious fight, 140 percent more likely to have pulled a weapon and 183 percent more likely to have hurt someone badly enough to require medical attention if they knew someone who had done the same. Moreover, the influence of one violent person can spread through up to 4 degrees of separation. In other words, if your friend's friend's friend's friend practices violent behavior, it's more likely you will too.

"People who exhibit these kinds of behaviors tend to be friends with one another," Bond says, adding: "They're teenagers. They're still sort of learning how to navigate their social environment."

For years, social scientists have theorized that violent behavior can spread from person to person like an illness, infecting whole neighborhoods and communities. This contagious theory was pioneered by Slutkin, who spent his early career working to prevent the spread of communicable diseases such as tuberculosis in San Francisco and Somalia, and AIDS in Uganda.

After returning to the U.S., Slutkin was troubled by the amount of violent crime he saw present in American culture. “I saw that these kids were killing each other,” he says. Soon, he started to see parallels between how violence was being viewed and treated by officials and how the AIDS epidemic was mismanaged and underfunded. “[Violence] is the only contagious epidemic that is not being managed by the health sector,” Slutkin says. “It's been fundamentally misdiagnosed.”

In 2000, Slutkin founded the movement Cure Violence to gain support for viewing violence as a contagious disease as opposed to solely a criminal justice issue. Cure Violence uses epidemiological techniques to target the people most at risk of spreading violence, and by working to stop its spread by “interrupting” violence before it starts. Slutkin has given a TED Talk on his approach, which was featured in the 2011 documentary The Interrupters. Cure Violence’s model, however, has faced resistance from law enforcement suspicious of treating violent criminals as victims, and Chicago dropped the program from its policing efforts in 2013.

Slutkin says that Bushman and Bond’s study adds to the now “thousands of studies that show the contagion of violence.” It also shows evidence that different forms of violence can be similarly contagious, from physical fights to violence using weapons, he says. This supports what he’s seen in his work. “We all unconsciously copy each other, especially with violence,” Slutkin says.

When it comes to other communicable diseases—say, a virus—the best way to avoid falling ill is to avoid the bug in the first place. Bushman thinks that this avoiding exposure is also the best for prevent violent behavior in teenagers. He also believes that the same contagious model could be used to spread non-violent behavior: By training teenagers to practice more empathy, schools and social workers could unleash positive behavior into social networks that would spread to people who don't receive treatment directly, he says.

Bond pointed to school-based violence prevention programs already in place across America to train students to practice peaceful conflict resolution, and said that their research could lead to better targeting of teenagers who would have the most social influence on their networks. "Those types of programs might be a lot more effective," Bond says, "because they're affecting not only who is directly affected by it, but the other people who see the changes in those people's behavior."

For future research, Bond is considering collecting his own data on how teenagers process and react to violence in some kind of a laboratory setting, while Bushman is interested in studying how violence could spread through other kinds of social networks, such as networks of terrorists on social media or in neighborhoods worldwide.

Slutkin, meanwhile, still hopes that people and governments will someday adopt his model of ending preventable violence. He draws parallels between his model and the new theory of our solar system proposed by astronomer Galileo Galilei, who faced opposition when his observations of the planets and moons didn’t fit with the prevailing theory of an Earth-centered solar system. “The theory was wrong,” Slutkin says. “It required a new theory.”

ENTER BY FEBRUARY 23 FOR YOUR CHANCE TO WIN $15,000!

The 2017 TeenDrive365 Video Challenge is accepting entries!

Learning to drive is one of the coolest times for a teen. But facts have shown it can be extremely dangerous. You have the power to inspire your fellow teens, maybe better than a teacher or a parent can, because you know what messages will be the most powerful. Create a 30-60 second video for your fellow teen drivers that highlights the importance of safe teen driving and you could win $15,000, or one of 14 other prizes!

Contest ends February 23, 2017

CHECK OUT THE PRIZES:

• 1st Place: $15,000 and the chance to work with a Discovery film crew to reshoot your video into a TV-ready PSA!
• 2nd Place: $10,000 and a behind-the-scenes trip to a Velocity show taping
• 3rd Place: $7,500
• People's Choice: $5,000 and a behind-the-scenes trip a Velocity show taping
• 4th Place - 10th Place: $2,500
• Four Regional Winners: $1,000

Click here to Enter

Thank you to B-Forc for letting us know about this opportunity!

By Marcelle Yeager

More and more people are considering starting their own gig. It offers flexibility and the opportunity to be your own boss. The possibility of making a lot of money may excite you, or your primary driver may be the chance to follow your passion. When you think about whether to go for it, you're probably thinking of questions like: Can I risk several years of financial and job insecurity? Am I OK with failing? Do I have the right expertise to do this? What do I do if it doesn't work?

Our top story focuses on how music, once illegal in Afghanistan is now once again becoming part of the lives of some Afghani teens.  We take a look at the documentary “Dr. Sarmast’s Music School” which tells the story of bringing music back to Afghanistan and the birth of the Afghan Youth Orchestra..  Plus Daniella reports on what may be called a “musical miracle”…visiting teens from Afghanistan getting the chance to play music side by side with American high school students.  While these young musicians started off worlds apart, we learn how they quickly came together preparing for a very special musical performance.

Alexa takes us to a Red Cross babysitting class. The class teaches teens how to properly care for a child, including how to change a diaper, put kids to bed, stay safe on the job, and what to do in an emergency. The course also gives advice on how to advertise your babysitting services.

Tyler reports on the issue of sugar in cereal. Sugar has been linked to obesity and diabetes. The Environmental Working Group tested 84 cereals and found that three out of four of them failed the nutrition guidelines set by the federal government. The guidelines are voluntary but they ask that cereal not be more than 26 percent sugar by weight. However, some cereals were found to be more than 50-percent sugar. To figure out how much sugar is in a cereal, read the label.  Ingredients are listed in the order of the amount they are used in the food. When looking at the ingredients keep in mind that sugar can have many names including: honey, high fructose corn syrup or molasses. If some form of "sugar" heads the ingredients list that cereal has more sugar than any other ingredient. 

Eden tells us about a difficult time in US history. During World War Two, after Japan bombed the United States’ Pearl Harbor, terrible discrimination began against Japanese Americans. The US government rounded up people of Japanese Ancestry and sent them what were essentially prison camps. It was not until the end of the war that the Japanese Americans were finally released. Today, the “National Japanese American Memorial for Patriotism during World War II” stands in Washington DC. The memorial lists the names of the 10 relocation camps along with the numbers of those forced to live at each camp. It also pays tribute to the thousands of Japanese Americans who fought for the United States in World War Two.

By Evan Andrews

The origins of Chicago’s famous nickname are not entirely clear. The most obvious explanation is that it comes from the frigid breezes that blow off Lake Michigan and sweep through the city’s streets. However, another popular theory holds that it was coined in reference to Chicago’s bloviating residents and politicians, who were deemed to be “full of hot air.” Proponents of the “windbag” view usually cite an 1890 article by New York Sun newspaper editor Charles Dana. At the time, Chicago was competing with New York to host the 1893 World’s Fair (Chicago eventually won), and Dana is said to have cautioned his readers to ignore the “nonsensical claims of that windy city.” Dana is often credited with popularizing the “Windy City” moniker, yet according to David Wilton’s book “Word Myths: Debunking Linguistic Urban Legends,” researchers have never managed to find his original article. Many now dismiss it as a myth.

Even if Dana’s editorial does exist, it’s unlikely that either he or the World’s Fair debate were responsible for popularizing Chicago’s nickname. Etymologist Barry Popik, a longtime researcher of the Windy City question, has uncovered evidence that the name was already well established in print by the 1870s—several years before Dana. Popik also dug up references showing that it functioned as both a literal reference to Chicago’s windy weather and a metaphorical jab at its supposedly boastful citizenry. Many of the citations are found in newspapers from other Midwest cities, which were in a rivalry with Chicago over who was the region’s main metropolis. For example, an 1876 headline in the Cincinnati Enquirer used the phrase “That Windy City” in reference to a tornado that swept through Chicago. “The Cincinnati Enquirer’s use is clearly double-edged,” Popik told the Chicago Tribune in 2006. “They used the term for windy speakers who were full of wind, and there was a wind-storm in Chicago. It’s both at once.” Since Chicago had previously used its lake breezes to promote itself as a summertime vacation spot, Popik and others conclude that the “Windy City” name may have started as a reference to weather and then taken on a double meaning as the city’s profile rose in the late-19th century.

Interestingly, although Chicago may have gotten its nickname in part because of its fierce winds, it’s not the breeziest town in the United States. In fact, meteorological surveys have often rated the likes of Boston, New York and San Francisco as having higher average wind speeds.

Don’t call Joey Alexander a genius. Yes, the 13-year-old is a celebrated jazz artist and one of the youngest Grammy nominees in history, for his debut album My Favorite Things. But he doesn’t like the labels that come with being preternaturally talented.

“I really don’t think I’m a genius or a prodigy,” he says. “I want people to dig my music, and not care about who I am.”

Alexander was born in the summer of 2003 in Denpasar, the sweltering capital city of the Indonesian island province of Bali. His family is a musical one: his mother’s sister is the Indonesian pop singer Nafa Urbach; his father dabbles in piano and guitar.

“My parents told me that when I was in my mother’s womb, they’d play jazz greats for me,” he says. He remembers hearing jazz for the first time when he was three — Louis Armstrong and Thelonius Monk — and started playing himself three years later. He saw an electric keyboard and thought it was a toy. “And then I found the keys, and I just felt the sound,” he says.

His father taught him the rudimentary basics of the piano, but Alexander largely taught himself how to play. He and his Dad would attend jam sessions at local jazz clubs. One day Joey went up. “Afterwards, I was just, like, ‘wow,’” he says.

His potential was obvious to all who cared to listen, and plenty did. In Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital and largest city, he performed for the storied jazz pianist Herbie Hancock. Then in 2014, the jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, artistic director for Jazz at Lincoln Center, spotted him playing on YouTube. He invited him to play at the Center’s gala that year, and has subsequently become a mentor.

Alexander says his discovery was “God’s plan.” A devout Christian, the teenager alternates hours of piano practice with bible study. His faith has helped keep him grounded, he says. “My music, it’s a gift from God, and it’s a gift I’ve had to learn. It takes hard work and focus.”

What’s next? The future looks bright; he just released his second album, called Countdown, after a John Coltrane track. But adulthood is also looming, and all that it brings. “When he really experiences life — when he has his first heartbreak, say — we’re going to see his music evolve,” his drummer, Ulysses Owens Jr., says. As he gets older, he’ll have more to say.”

The series of intermittent conflicts between France and England that took place during the 14th and 15th centuries wasn’t classified as the “Hundred Years’ War” until 1823. Traditionally, the war is said to have begun in 1337 when Philip VI attempted to reclaim Guyenne (part of the region of Aquitaine in southwestern France) from King Edward III—who responded by laying claim to the French throne—and to have lasted until 1453 when the French claimed victory over the disputed territory at the Battle of Castillon. By this calculation, the Hundred Years’ War actually lasted 116 years.

However, the origin of the periodic fighting could conceivably be traced nearly 300 hundred years earlier to 1066, when William the Conqueror, the duke of Normandy, subjugated England and was crowned king. Technically a vassal of the king of France (as the duke of Normandy), William’s simultaneous new role as king of England ushered in a complex web of dynastic marriages in which descendants of both the French and English kingdoms could arguably lay claim to the same territories. Over time, these overseas possessions resulted in inevitable clashes, and by 1337, Philip VI’s declaration that Edward III had forfeited his right to Guyenne was just the push Edward needed to renew his claim to the French throne as the nephew and closest male relative of King Charles IV, who had died in 1328.

From the French perspective, the conventional dates attributed to the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453) marked the beginning and end of English hostilities on French soil. However, the English retained possession of the port city of Calais until 1558 and continued to assert a claim to the French throne until King George III finally relinquished the title in 1800.

The world’s smallest flowering plant is the watermeal, or Wolffia globosa. Found all over the planet, this bright green oval plant is about the size of a grain of rice!

Wolffia is the smallest genus of the aquatic plants known as duckweeds, which are part of the family Lemnaceae. Usually found floating in masses in freshwater lakes, streams, and marshes, they are rootless and rarely flower, mostly reproducing when the main plant, or “mother frond,” grows a new segment, or “daughter frond,” from one end. Wolffia also produce the world’s smallest fruit.

According to the International Lemna Association (ILA), this tiny plant and its relatives could help our planet in a big way. The nonprofit organization is dedicated to promoting duckweed as a fast-growing, sustainable crop with a wide variety of uses. Duckweed is eaten by ducks and other aquatic birds, along with certain fish such as tilapia, but it can also be used in the diets of chickens, pigs, and cattle.

According to John W. Cross, author of the website The Charms of Duckweed, these plants quickly absorb the minerals they need for growth, as well as other organic nutrients, from the water they’re floating in. Duckweeds are especially good at taking phosphates and nitrogen out of water — two substances that need to be removed during sewage treatment and from farming runoff. Yet when grown on sewage or animal waste, duckweeds normally don’t retain toxins, so they can be used as feed or to fertilize crops.

Wolffia globosa with the larger leaved Spirodela polyrhiza Photo: Eric Guinther

The ILA website says that duckweed has other potential commercial applications: it could be a source of renewable and sustainable fuel to replace fossil fuels. Also, because it contains around 44 percent protein, it can be used to make bioplastics. Cross notes that genetic engineers are modifying duckweeds to produce low-cost pharmaceuticals such as vaccines.

Josephine Garis Cochrane was an independent woman of the mid-1800s. When she married husband William Cochran, she took his last name but added an “e” to the end. And when she realized no one had yet created a proper automatic dishwasher, she invented one herself!

Josephine led a comfortable life in Shelbyville, Illinois. William was a successful businessman, and the couple often held dinner parties in their large home. She even had servants to clean up afterward. But one morning after a party, she found some of her good china had gotten chipped. She was so upset, she decided to wash the dishes herself from then on. It wasn’t long before Josephine wondered why no one had invented a machine to do the job … and soon she had sketched out the idea that would become the first commercially successful automatic dishwasher.

Her design used water pressure to clean, just as today’s dishwashers do. It had wire compartments for the dishes, which fit into a wheel inside a copper boiler. A motor turned the wheel while soapy water sprayed onto the dishes. It was practical, but Josephine had a hard time trying to hire a mechanic to build her machine the way she wanted, instead of insisting on building it HIS way. She finally found a man named George Butters to work with, and the Garis-Cochran Dish-Washing Machine was patented in 1886, three years after her husband died.

Josephine thought her invention would appeal to other housewives, but it was more of a hit with hotels and restaurants, maybe because it was an expensive appliance for a regular family to buy. She opened her own factory in 1897, and personally sold her machines nearly up until her death in 1913. In 1926, her company was bought by Hobart, which eventually became the modern appliance giant KitchenAid.

Kristina does a special report on the royal achievements of some teens!  The Duke of Edinburgh Awards, were started by Prince Phillip in the 1950s. The goal is to encourage young adults around the world to embrace self-improvement.  In part one, Kristina takes us to the awards ceremony in Nashville Tennessee, where she was not only reporting, but also an award recipient.  On hand at the ceremony, was Prince Phillip’s youngest son, His Royal Highness, the Prince Edward who travels the world attending these ceremonies. Plus, Kristina gets a chance to sit down with Royalty…she interviews His Royal Highness, the Prince Edward. 

How did the ancient Romans deal with plumbing? They built huge and extensive
aqueducts, which is Latin for waterway.  These under- and above ground channels, typically made of stone, brick, and volcanic cement, brought fresh water for drinking and bathing as much as 50 to 60 miles from springs or rivers. Aqueducts helped keep Romans healthy by carrying away used water and waste, and they also took water to farms for irrigation.

So how did aqueducts work? The engineers who designed them used gravity to keep the water moving. If the channel was too steep, water would run too quickly and wear out the surface. Too shallow, and water would stagnate and become undrinkable. The Romans built tunnels to get water through ridges, and bridges to cross valleys.

Once it reached a city, the water flowed into a main tank called a castellum. Smaller pipes took the water to the secondary castella, and from those the water flowed through lead pipes to public fountains and baths, and even to some private homes. It took 500 years to build Rome’s massive system, which was fed by 11 separate aqueducts. To this day, Rome’s public fountains run constantly, as do smaller faucets that provide fresh water to anyone who stops for a drink.

The empire stretched across an immense part of the world, and wherever the Romans went they built aqueducts — in as many as 200 cities around the empire.  Their arched bridges are among the best preserved relics of that empire, in part because many aqueducts kept working for centuries, long after the Romans had retreated. You can still see their arches in Bulgaria, Croatia, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Lebanon, Spain, Tunisia, and other former Roman colonies.

Aqueduct of Segovia