James Buchanan Duke: Father of the modern cigarette - Merchant of death ??

 

It looks harmless enough - white, 3ins long and about the width of a child's finger - but the cigarette is vilified like no other product. Who invented it and how much responsibility does he bear for the countless deaths it has caused?

US surgeon Alton Ochsner recalled that when he was a medical student in 1919 his class was summoned to observe an autopsy of a lung cancer victim. At that time, the disease was so rare it was thought unlikely the students would ever get another chance. But by the year 2000, it was estimated that 1.1 million people were dying annually from the disease, with about 85% of those cases stemming from a single cause - tobacco.
"The cigarette is the deadliest artefact in the history of human civilization," says Robert Proctor of Stanford University. "It killed about 100m people in the 20th Century."

Jordan Goodman, the author of Tobacco in History, says that as a historian he is careful about pointing the finger at individuals, "but in the history of tobacco I feel much more confident saying that James Buchanan Duke - otherwise known as Buck Duke - was responsible for the 20th Century phenomenon known as the cigarette."

Not only did Duke help create the modern cigarette, he also pioneered the marketing and distribution systems that have led to its success on every continent. In 1880, at the age of 24, Duke entered what was then a niche within the tobacco business - ready-rolled cigarettes. A small team in Durham, North Carolina, hand-rolled the Duke of Durham cigarettes, twisting the ends to seal them.

Two years later Duke saw an opportunity. He began working with a young mechanic called James Bonsack, who said he could mechanise cigarette manufacturing. Duke was convinced that people would want to smoke these neatly-rolled, perfectly symmetrical machine-made cigarettes.
Bonsack's machine revolutionized the cigarette industry.

"It's essentially a cigarette of infinite length, cut into the appropriate lengths by whirling shears," says Robert Proctor. The open ends meant it has to be "juiced-up with chemical additives". They added glycerine, sugar and molasses, and chemicals to prevent it drying out.

But keeping cigarettes moist was not the only challenge that Bonsack's contraption presented to Duke. While his factory girls typically rolled about 200 cigarettes in a shift, the new machine produced 120,000 cigarettes a day, about a fifth of US consumption at the time.

"The problem was he produced more cigarettes than he could sell," says Goodman. "He had to work out how to capture this market."

The answer was to be found in advertising and marketing. Duke sponsored races, gave his cigarettes out for free at beauty contests and placed ads in the new "glossies" - the first magazines. He also recognised that the inclusion of collectable cigarette cards was as important as getting the product right. In 1889 alone, he spent $800,000 on marketing (about $25m in today's money).

Bonsack retained the patent to his machine, but as thanks for Duke's support in developing it, he offered him a 30% discount on the lease.

This competitive advantage - coupled with vigorous promotion - was key to Duke's early success. As he had suspected, people liked mechanised cigarettes. They were modern-looking and more hygienic - one campaign emphasised this point over cigars, which were manufactured using human hands and saliva.

But although cigarette smoking in the US quadrupled in the 15 years to 1900, it remained a niche market, with most tobacco being chewed or smoked through pipes and cigars.

Duke - a cigar smoker himself - saw the potential for cigarettes to be used in places closed to cigars and pipes, such as drawing rooms and restaurants. The ease with which they could be lit and - unlike pipes - remain lit, also suited them to coffee breaks in modern city life.

"The cigarette was really used in a different way," says Proctor. "And it was milder - and this is one of the great ironies, that cigarettes were widely thought to be safer than cigars, because they are just 'little cigars', right?

Women are free

 Dr Robert K Jackler of Stanford University Medical School explains how women were persuaded to smoke in the early 20th Century.

The industry had a problem. You can't advertise your way into convincing women to smoke - you have to change cultural expectations. A woman smoking on a street corner was a signature of prostitution. A polite woman would never be caught smoking in public.

Edward Bernays - who was actually Sigmund Freud's family member - was engaged by the American Tobacco Company to work out a public relations strategy to enable women to smoke. So in the late 1920s, for example, they hired a bunch of young women to march down Fifth Avenue in the Easter Parade, holding their "torches of freedom" - their cigarettes. And this then became a symbol of women's emancipation.

 

We now know that cigarettes are far more addictive than cigars. The fact that the smoke is inhaled - which it is not traditional for cigars - also makes them more dangerous. But a correlation with lung cancer was not made until the 1930s and the causal link was not established until 1957 in the UK and 1964 in the USA.

Counting the cost

 

 

Cigarettes cause about one death per million smoked.  A 40 ft container... houses 10m cigarettes, which means that each container will cause about 10 deaths. A factory such as Hongta's in Yuxi [China] is responsible for generating 25,000 or 30,000 deaths per year from lung cancer. And about twice that number from other diseases. Cigarette makers make about a penny in profit for every cigarette sold, which means that the value of a life to a cigarette maker is about $10,000.

 

Cigarettes were in fact promoted as beneficial for health. They were listed in pharmaceutical encyclopaedias until 1906 and prescribed by doctors for coughs, colds and tuberculosis (a disease which the World Health Organization now links with tobacco).

There was an anti-cigarette movement in the early 1900s, but it was more concerned with morality than health. A rise in smoking among women and children fed into a wider concern about the moral decline of society. Cigarettes were prohibited in 16 different US states between 1890 and 1927.

Duke's gaze shifted overseas. In 1902 he formed British American Tobacco with his transatlantic rival, Imperial Tobacco. The packaging and marketing would be tweaked for different consumers but the cigarettes would remain largely the same. More than a decade before the creation of the Model T Ford, Duke had a universal product.

"To him every cigarette was the same," says Goodman. "All of the globalization that we are now familiar with through McDonalds and Starbucks - all of that was preceded by Duke and the cigarette."

The global reach of cigarettes is still extending today. Although smoking in wealthy parts of the world is in decline, cigarette demand in developing countries is increasing by 3.4% a year, leading to an overall growth in cigarette consumption.

The WHO warns that unless preventative measures are taken, 100 million people will die of tobacco-related diseases over the next 30 years - more than from Aids, tuberculosis, car accidents and suicide combined.

Tobacco and the birth of globalization

 

Buck Duke is said to have marched up to a map of the world and planted a finger on China, saying "This is where we're going to build our empire!"

The man tasked with achieving this was James Thomas. Until the company was asked to leave China in 1952, British American Tobacco's market share did not drop below 50%. Thomas was rewarded with a salary of between $60,000 and $100,000 in 1912 ($1.4m - $2.3m in today's money).

 

Howard Cox of the University of Worcester says Thomas was one of the first Westerners to understand Chinese ways of doing business, based on networking and reciprocal favours.

At first, cigarettes were imported from the US, but manufacturing soon shifted to China. For Cox, this transfer of production technology rather than product marks a move from colonial trade towards the current age of globalization and multinational corporations.

Thomas had his own team of salesmen from the US, but he also formed joint ventures with established Chinese firms to distribute his product. This way of doing business is the norm today for international firms hoping to tap into the Chinese market.

But can we blame Buck Duke for any of that? After all, no-one is forced to take up smoking, even if they find it difficult to give up once they have started.

In a recent essay for the journal Tobacco Control, Robert Proctor argues that many people in the tobacco industry all share some responsibility. "We have to realise that adverts can be carcinogens, along with convenience stores and pharmacies that sell cigarettes. The executives who work for cigarette companies cause cancer, as do the artists who design cigarette packs and the PR and advertising firms that manage such accounts," he says.

Successful lawsuits that have been brought against "big tobacco" have tended to argue that tobacco companies knew about the detrimental effects of their products, but did nothing about it. But Buck Duke, who died in 1925, did not.
"I wouldn't want to blame him for cigarette consumption," says his biographer Bob Durden, who is keen to point out Duke's positive character traits. "He was very hard-working. He loved his work."

Those who still find something unsavoury about Duke may wish to consider his good deeds. He gave more than $100m to Trinity College in Durham, North Carolina, which was renamed Duke University in 1924 (in honour of James Buchanan Duke and his father, Washington Duke, another benefactor).

But if it weren't for Buck Duke, would Americans still be chewing tobacco today? Would modern sports bars have spittoons by the door? Goodman believes that the world was inevitably heading towards mechanized cigarette production. Bonsack's machine wasn't the only prototype, and if Duke hadn't seized the opportunity another businessman would have.

"He was both a hero and a villain I suppose. Buck Duke is a hero in terms of his understanding of the market, his understanding of human psychology, his understanding of pricing, his understanding of advertising. He's not villainous in that sense," says Goodman.

Yet however great Duke's achievements as an architect of mass-production and globalization, his legend will continue to be eclipsed by his controversial creation.
"He made the world smoke cigarettes," says Goodman. "And it's the cigarette which has been the problem of the 20th Century."

Other Merchants of death?

 

 

The AK-47 assault rifle - or Kalashnikov - is the world's most popular assault weapon. There are thought to be as many as 100 million AK-47s in circulation globally, but its designer, Mikhail Kalashnikov (left), laments the fact it has become the weapon of choice for the world's guerrilla armies. "It is not the designers who must ultimately take responsibility for where guns end up - it is governments who must control their production and export," he says.

J Robert Oppenheimer (centre), along with Enrico Fermi, is often called the "father of the atomic bomb" for his role in the Manhattan Project, the World War II programme that developed the first nuclear weapons. After the war he became a chief adviser to the United States Atomic Energy Commission and lobbied for international control of nuclear power to try to avert nuclear proliferation.

Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel patented dynamite and gelignite. In 1888, when a French newspaper accidentally published his obituary, he was shocked to read: "The merchant of death is dead… Dr Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday." It's thought this may have led him to bequeath $2.69m when he died in 1896 ($301m  in today's money) to establish the Nobel Prizes.

Time to heal: The materials that repair themselves

 

 

At some point in the near future you'll wear out those running shoes, break that squash racket, drop your smartphone and crack the screen. They will need to be replaced - at a cost. But what if we made things from materials that can heal themselves - like a plant or animal heals a wound? According to experts, the first products with truly self-healing properties may be just around the corner. 

Smartphone solution

 

One much discussed application of self-healing materials is for smartphones or tablet devices with scratched or cracked screens.  Prof Ian Bond's  team has carried out a feasibility study to look at a similar problem affecting bullet-proof glass. "The windshield takes the bullet, but it shatters so that you can't see through it," he explains. Prof Bond looked at whether it was possible to flood the windshield with some substance that would fill the cracks. "That same principle you could potentially apply on a smaller scale," he says.
Bond says an intrinsic system with a trigger - sunlight perhaps - might also work: "Soldiers boil their goggles up in a billycan to heal any scratches or cracks on the surface. You can't do that with your phone, but you could perhaps put it by the window in the sunshine for 24 hours, and you might be able to heal up some cracks."
 

But it was a 2001 study led by Scott White from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, that really helped to kick-start the field. The group infused a plastic-like polymer with microscopic capsules containing a liquid healing agent. Cracking open the material caused the capsules to rupture, releasing the healing agent. When the agent made contact with a catalyst embedded in the material, a chemical reaction bonded the two faces of the crack together. The polymer recovered some 75% of its original toughness.

In the last decade, the team has developed and refined its capsule-based systems, recently demonstrating an electrical circuit that healed itself when damaged. Microcapsules in the gold circuit released liquid metal in response to damage, swiftly restoring electrical conductivity, and bringing self-repairing electronic chips a step closer.

Co-author Dr Benjamin Blaiszik, now at Argonne National Laboratory, explained that the self-healing circuitry could find uses in a military setting where it would be exposed to extreme stresses or in long-term space applications. He adds: "Imagine if there is a mechanical failure of a microchip on the Curiosity rover, due to thermomechanical stresses, or if there had been an interconnect failure during the landing phase. There is obviously no way to manually repair nor replace the probe."

The Illinois group is already commercializing their work via a spin-out company, Autonomic Materials, which has raised about $4m (£2.4m) of investment. Its chief executive, Joe Giuliani, told me the first applications of microcapsule systems are likely to be in coatings, paints and adhesives for environments where corrosion poses a challenge. "Worldwide, corrosion costs over $500bn (£312bn) a year, so it's a huge problem".

Oil and gas is a key area. Re-healable products are likely to find uses on platforms - where the ability to heal drilling parts would be highly desirable - in pipelines and in refineries. They would potentially last several years longer than their conventional counterparts, lengthening the periods between maintenance.

"Over the life of that equipment, there would be huge savings," says Giuliani. "It is out of commission for a lot less time too, which in the oil and gas business is huge. It can cost them $1m a day if an asset is out of service."

Military vehicles, cars and ships are other targets for self-healing coatings. The firm has about 30 products in testing and development and expects to fulfil its first commercial orders in the next six months. Some manufacturers might not welcome the idea of products that last years longer than usual. But paint and coatings producers "know they can get more per gallon of paint they're selling," says Mr Giuliani, "the customers have shown us they're willing to pay the up-charge."

Scott White, from Illinois University's Beckman Institute, says that healing structural damage in sports equipment or aircraft components, for example, represents a "mid-term target" for scientists.
He says the whole area of self-healing has seen an explosion of interest in the last decade, with some 200 academic papers published on the topic last year alone. And scientists are working on everything from re-healable polymers and composites (materials made from two or more different ones) to self-repairing metals and ceramics.

Using the human circulatory system as their inspiration, they rely on a network of channels (like capillaries, veins and arteries) within the material to deliver healing agent to the site of damage.

Each of the approaches has advantages and limitations that come into play when considering applications. Microcapsules are finite: as they get used up, the material loses its healing properties. And intrinsic systems need a stimulus - such as heat or light - to trigger healing, which can be good or bad depending on the application.

If the amount of damage is microscopic, capsule-based or intrinsic systems may be the best option. But, says Prof White, "if it's a large damaged volume, then neither of those approaches are going to work and you have to go with a vascular-based system". This is because they allow large amounts of healing agent to be transported to the breached area. But the sheer complexity of vascular networks presents a daunting challenge. 

Prof Ian Bond and his colleague Dr Richard Trask at Bristol University are developing vascular networks based on hollow fibres that transmit healing agent through polymer composite materials. "A self-healing aeroplane is the idea," Prof Bond tells me.

Re-healable fuel tanks

 

Battlejacket is a spray-on coating that can be applied to fuel tanks to prevent or minimise leakage if they are hit by small-arms fire. The system, built by Oregon-based High Impact Technology (HIT-USA), has already proven its use to the US military in Iraq.
After the invasion in 2003, insurgents targeted fuel tankers in military convoys, which would leak flammable fuel, posing a hazard to troops and contractors. When a fuel tank is treated with Battlejacket it will quickly seal up bullet holes.
There are three layers to the coating: the inner and outer layers are made from a specially formulated plastic which stretches around the projectile. Between the plastic is a special layer containing absorbent beads. When these beads come into contact with fuel, they swell into a solid, sealing off the entrance and exit holes made by the bullet. HIT's co-founder Russ Monk said: "One of the fuel hauler tanks has over 600 bullet holes and we understand it is still delivering fuel.

Self Healing Concrete

 

Small cracks are a routine outcome of concrete hardening. But over time water and chemicals get inside the fractures and corrode the concrete.

The solution developed at TU Delft could improve the service life of the structure - promising considerable cost savings. Harmless calcite-producing bacteria, along with nutrients, are embedded in the concrete mixture. When water activates the dormant spores, the microbes feed on the nutrients to produce limestone, patching up cracks and small holes.

Longer-term, Scott White envisages materials that respond in a more complex way to damage or wear, renewing themselves over their lifetimes, in much the way that bones do.
"We're only beginning to understand how nature does what it does with such basic materials."

CIA Director David Petraeus resigns over affair

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CIA director David Petraeus has resigned from his post, admitting he had an extra-marital affair.
In a statement, Mr Petraeus described his behaviour as "unacceptable" for the leader of the nation's main intelligence agency.  Unnamed officials said Mr Petraeus conducted the affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell. Mr Petraeus became CIA boss in 2011 after heading international forces in Iraq and later in Afghanistan.

He was the highest-profile military officer of the post-9/11 years, winning plaudits for his role running the "surge" in Iraq and implementing a counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan.
He left his command role in Afghanistan in mid-2011, resigning from the US Army to head the CIA after Leon Panetta became defence secretary. Shortly after Mr Petraeus resigned, reports emerged that the FBI had uncovered the affair during the course of an investigation into Mrs Broadwell.
The FBI was monitoring Mr Petraeus' email account to check whether Mrs Broadwell had access to it, administration officials were quoted as saying by the Associated Press.

Mr Petraeus' resignation came just three days after President Obama's re-election, and prompted a flurry of statements from the White House, intelligence community and Mr Petraeus himself. Announcing his decision to stand down, the former general was full of contrition.
"After being married for over 37 years, I showed extremely poor judgment by engaging in an extra-marital affair," Mr Petraeus said in a statement.
"Such behaviour is unacceptable, both as a husband and as the leader of an organization such as ours. This afternoon, the president graciously accepted my resignation."

Paula Broadwell

Mrs Broadwell is a Harvard University research associate and PhD candidate at King's College, London.She has a military background, graduating from the same West Point Academy as Mr Petraeus. She is married to radiographer Scott Broadwell and lives in Charlotte, North Carolina.

She spent months embedded alongside the then-general in Afghanistan while researching her 2011 book, All In: The Education of General David Petraeus. The book was widely seen as a positive account of his leadership methods. Last week Mrs Broadwell wrote a piece for Newsweek entitled General David Petraeus's Rules for Living.

Mr Obama's statement said Mr Petraeus had "provided extraordinary service to the United States for decades", citing both his time as CIA director and service to the military.
"By any measure, through his lifetime of service David Petraeus has made our country safer and stronger."
"Going forward, my thoughts and prayers are with Dave and Holly Petraeus, who has done so much to help military families through her own work."

Senior Obama advisor David Axelrod said the president had not known about the Petraeus issue during the campaign, and that the former general had come to Mr Obama after the election to offer his resignation. James Clapper, director of national intelligence, thanked Mr Petraeus for his decades of service: "Dave's decision to step down represents the loss of one of our nation's most respected public servants.
"I have spent more than five decades serving our country - in uniform and out - and of all the exceptional men and women I have worked with over the years, I can honestly say that Dave Petraeus stands out as one of our nation's great patriots."

CIA deputy director Michael Morell will serve as acting director of the agency, the White House confirmed. Eventually Mr Obama must nominate a new director to head the agency, who will then need to be confirmed by the Senate. Mr Morell, who is well respected at both the White House and on Capitol Hill, also served as acting director following the departure of former CIA chief Leon Panetta.

The CIA faces a potential period of instability after Mr Petraeus' resignation, as it also deals with a budget squeeze and questions over its response to the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi.

David Petraeus: Career highlights

• Graduated from West Point in 1974
• Commander of Multinational Force Iraq, Feb 2007 to Sept 2008
• Commander of International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) in Afghanistan, July 2010 to July 2011
• Became CIA director in Sept 2011 after being confirmed by the senate 94-0

Why Delhi is submerged in deadly smog

 

For the past week, residents have been driving to work through a "pea-souper" - thick fog which has hung menacingly over Delhi and its neighbourhood.  The city has looked like a smoggy dystopia. The people of Delhi are mourning the death of the sun.  Although the sun made a welcome appearance on Friday, some media reports say the smog is far from defeated and may return during the weekend.
People's eyes hurt and water when they step out, and they have complained about nagging headaches. Most are wheezing, sniffing and coughing. The papers are full of stories of clinics overrun by patients suffering from respiratory ailments.

Winter smogs are not uncommon in Delhi, but this year has been rather extreme, sending air pollution levels way above permissible limits.  Independent environment group say that rising pollution is to blame. Researchers belonging to the watchdog Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) say Delhi's air quality has deteriorated sharply - particulate matter in the air has risen by 47% between 2000 and 2011, while nitrogen dioxide levels has leapt by 57%.  Delhi, they say, is a gas chamber: its air contains a lethal cocktail of poisonous gases like nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, ozone, and benzene.

The government appears to be rather blase about it all, blaming the weather (slow wind speeds, low temperatures and high humidity) and curiously, even hinting at conspiracy by neighbouring states
"It is as if it is deliberately being done to choke Delhi," Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit told a newspaper.
CSE Executive Director Anumita Roychowdhury, in charge of its air pollution and transportation programme, warns that government's response could have disastrous consequences.
"Unfortunately, despite the scary hard facts about the elevated cocktail of pollution and health risks, the problem is being dismissed as a mere weather phenomenon," she said.
"In other parts of the world, governments issue warnings and take pollution emergency measures during such severe pollution episodes to protect public health. But we are doing nothing."

She is right. So what has gone so awfully wrong with Delhi's air. Researchers believe that the unfettered growth in the number of vehicles, especially ones driven on diesel, is a key reason.
Delhi alone adds over 1,000 new vehicles every day, half of them diesel-fuelled. The capital has over 6.5 million vehicles, which is more than the total number of vehicles in the cities of Mumbai, Chennai (Madras) and Calcutta.

A thriving suburbia, including areas like Gurgaon, Noida and Faridabad, has meant that over a million vehicles - 70% of them cars - enter and exit Delhi every day. The new vehicles are better, the fuel is cleaner, but their sheer numbers do not do any good to the city's air.

It is not rocket science to conclude that Delhi needs to ramp up its public transport and cut down on private pollution-carrying vehicles. To be fair, the city has come a long way in improving public transport: the quality of its passenger bus fleet is among the best in India, and an impressive metro railway now links most parts of the city.

But environmental groups like CSE say this is simply not enough. "Delhi is taking too long to scale up its public transport," says Ms Roychowdhury. Some 6,000 passenger buses run in the city - but the government itself admits it needs nearly three times that number to cater for peak passenger traffic. The city is bereft of pavements and footpaths, betraying a skewed planning ideology which favours cars over cycles and pedestrians.

Environmentalists also recommend higher parking charges for cars and a crackdown on unauthorised parking to force more car owners to use public transport - parking spaces, by one estimate, gobble up to 10% of Delhi's land, and daily additions of new cars creates demand for parking space that is bigger than 300 football fields every year.

Although cars are the mode of transport for only 14% of travel trips in the city, parking fills up disproportionately large spaces. Environmentalists also suggest a hike in diesel prices, an upgrade emission standards, the introduction of buses for commuting to and from the suburbs and the imposition of congestion charges.

But the authorities don't seem to be listening.

New Mastercard has LCD screen and keyboard

 

 

A credit card with an LCD display and built-in keyboard has been launched in Singapore by Mastercard. The card has touch-sensitive buttons and the ability to create a "one-time password" - doing away with the need for a separate device sometimes needed to log in to online banking.

Future versions of the card could display added information such as the remaining balance.

The card will be available from January before being rolled out globally. Many of the world's banks require customers to log in to online banking by using a small security device to generate a one-off password. While considerably more secure than typical static username and password log-in systems, many people find using security tokens cumbersome given the need to keep it with them in order to use online banking.

Mastercard's interactive card aims to solve that issue. "We brainstormed on ways to make it convenient and yet secure for customers," said V Subba from Standard Chartered Bank, which is collaborating with Mastercard.

"The question was: instead of sending customers another bulky token, could we replace something which already exists in the customer's wallet? That was when credit, debit and ATM cards immediately came to mind."

Eventually, the card could display information such as loyalty or reward points or recent transaction history. Improving the portability of secure banking is a continuing priority for the world's credit card firms. Last year, Visa announced a similar card with interactive functions.

 

 

Dear Maxy ,
For anyone who is having difficulty with their student loans , please tell them to check the website www.ibrinfo.org , it lets you know your rights and explains the ways to lower payments . It also informs debtors about legislation that affects them .
Been There

Dear Been There ,
Thanks for the information , it may not be for everyone , but it's worth looking into .
Maxy

Dear Maxy ,
My in-laws called and told me , not my husband , that they are coming to visit for a month at the end of the year .They did not ask . They just said this is how it's going to be . Never mind that there is five of them and four of us, and we live in a two-bedroom apartment .
How are we going to manage this ? I didn't want to say no, nor did I get a chance to say that . But a month is too long for all of us to coexist without some kind of explosion .
Overwhelmed

Dear Overwhelmed ,
Ask your husband for his input . Find out if there is a bed-and-breakfast or other affordable lodging that you can recommend to them as an option . Call them back and tell them they can visit for a shorter time .You do not have to agree with their terms simply because they asserted them . Decide with your husband what you can manage and let them know it .
Maxy

Dear Maxy ,
A few years ago, I met the most amazing man. "Jim" is the love of my life . I fell in love with his family , too.
The problem is , after a year of marriage, I recieved a text from my mother-in-law (Jim's stepmother) stating that his family has never wanted me around and they don't like me . I get along fine with Jim's siblings, all of whom lives out of town, and they have assured me that they do not feel this way .
Jim works away from home for weeks at a time . When he is away I am not invited family outings the way I am when he is here . Then, I feel uncomfortable when they do include both of us . I have told Jim that I will no longer attend his family functions . But is this fair to him ? Is there anything I can do to recify the situation ?
Should I ask Jim to speak to his father ? I would hate to cut this good man out of my life .
Hurting

Dear Hurting ,
What a nasty bunch you've married into . Even if Jim's stepmother is the only one who dislikes you, the others are following her directives . Your husband should make it clear to all of them that you are his family now, and they should treat you with respect and consideration , or they risk losing both of you. Meanwhile, have you invited his siblings and parents to your home? Hospitality works both ways . Do your best to ingratiate yourself and see whether it helps before you throw in the towel .
Maxy

Spiders jump with deadly accuracy under green light

 

 

Researchers have discovered a unique visual attribute that jumping spiders use in attacking and catching prey. The arachnids use what is called image defocus-proven in part by videos that show spiders jumping with deadly accuracy in green light (and fumbling in red light).