That depends on whether you count clonal colonies. There's a quaking aspen colony (the 47,000 stems are all connected via the one root system) in Utah that's estimated to be 80,000 years old.

Pando in Fishlake National Forest? There's also a box huckleberry bush in Pennsylvania that's thought to be 13,000 years old, and a colony of Neptune grass near Ibiza that's 8km across and maybe as much as 100,000 years old.

Don't you think the misleading ads funded by key church groups had something to do with Prop 8's defeat in Cali? I wonder if it came up for a vote in 2012 if the outcome would be the same.

That said, I an not a fan of making civil rights a ballot measure.

YAY Washington!!

When my kids are my age they will say, "I remember when I was a kid gay people couldn't even get married." The times they are a changing. Never fast enough, but it is happening.

When my kids are my age they will say, "I remember when I was a kid gay people couldn't even get married." The times they are a changing. Never fast enough, but it is happening.

This.

Yesterday I felt foolish wearing my hikers - so today I wore sneakers.

Wrong choice.

The sidewalks are all slippery.

It turns out that it rained last night and then the temperatures dropped to below freezing. It's foggy as heck out this morning. I hope that the temps rise above freezing so that the sidewalks are safer this evening.

Luckily, I didn't fall.

New study out of UCSF contends it's sugar, not obesity causing chronic illness.

Lustig has written and talked extensively about the role he believes sugar has played in driving up rates of chronic illness such as heart disease and diabetes. Excessive sugar, he argues, alters people's biochemistry, making them more vulnerable to metabolic conditions that lead to illness, while at the same time making people crave sweets even more.

It's sugar, not obesity, that is the real health threat, Lustig and his co-authors - public health experts Laura Schmidt and Claire Brindis - say in their paper. They note that studies show 20 percent of obese people have normal metabolism and no ill health effects resulting from their weight, while 40 percent of normal-weight people have metabolic problems that can lead to diabetes and heart disease. They contend that sugar consumption is the cause.

In other words, not everyone gains a lot of weight from over-indulging in sugar, but a large proportion of the U.S. population is eating enough of it that it's having devastating health effects, they say.

"The gestalt shift is maybe obesity is just a marker for the rise in chronic disease worldwide, and in fact metabolic syndrome, caused by excessive sugar consumption, is the real culprit," said Schmidt, a health policy professor who focuses on alcohol and addiction research.

Americans eat and drink roughly 22 teaspoons of sugar every day - triple what they consumed three decades ago - and most people aren't even aware of the various ways sugars sneak into their diets, often via breads and cereals and processed foods. Terms that identify sugars on labels include sucrose, glucose, fructose, maltose, hydrolysed starch and invert sugar, corn syrup and honey.

New study out of UCSF contends it's sugar, not obesity causing chronic illness.

Since there's no chronic disease that *only* obese people get (i.e., thin people get The Diabetes, too), that's not exactly a shocker. (Er, to me. I know there are tons of people who think that OMGDEATHFATZ, but they are wrong.)

And I believe that sugar is not the healthiest thing in the world. But it's SO TASTY!!!!!!

invert sugar

I'm picturing a bag of sugar hanging upside down from a jungle gym.

I'm picturing a bag of sugar hanging upside down from a jungle gym.

Doing sugar crunches.

Back in the nineteenth century "invert sugar" would mean "gay sugar."

Since there's no chronic disease that *only* obese people get (i.e., thin people get The Diabetes, too), that's not exactly a shocker.

I'm not disputing the research, but this is a logical fallacy. Non-smokers can get lung cancer, that does not mean that smoking can't cause lung cancer.