To some on the fringes, the only good planet is one without people. To some pseudo-environmentalists, a good planet is one where theirs is the only SUV. To millions more, nature is a way to escape the rigors of city life and enjoy the outdoors without being intrusive.

Ecotourism is big business these days. Convincing society that nature's beauty should be preserved and enjoyed has convinced more people than ever they should actually enjoy it.

But an examination of Californian forests says that hiking, bird-watching and other low-impact activities are linked to a sharp drop in carnivores like bobcats and coyotes. In other words, if you really care about Mother Earth you should leave nature to conservationists who get paid to monitor wildlife and instead walk around the local mall.

Sauna has long been a cottage industry in Finland and the entire Northern hemisphere, with Scandinavians and Russians claiming to have used saunas for cleansing and relaxation for over 2,500 years.

Saunas are the new Prius, with various studies claiming a positive influence on general health.

A recent study(1) conducted in 41 healthy volunteers and presented in Dermatology says that regular sauna also has a positive effect on skin physiology.

Our friends at LiveScience love Garth's stuff so much (*) they have created a nifty widget that will give you a little drop-down tool and let you see lots of his equations. So if you are unsure whether or not to bluff in Texas Hold 'Em, simply stop the game, pull out your iPhone, and plug in the numbers.

Likewise if you are standing in line at Starbucks and unsure how many cups of coffee you should have, this widget can tell you.

Basically, you can completely abdicate responsibility for your own decisions. Leave it to Garth. He knows what he's doing.

A few years ago Voyager 1 entered the final frontier, that place where the solar wind becomes denser and hotter and pressure from gas between stars causes it to slow - the Termination Shock.

Now that Voyager 2 has reached its edge of the solar system, just under 7 billion miles from Earth, it has confirmed what astrophysicists had believed - the conflict between the solar wind and the interstellar wind has made that part of the solar system slightly squashed.

Garth Sundem's television version of his Foolproof Equations For The Perfect Life will be on the Science Channel tonight at 6PM.

If it's hosted somewhere online (legally) we'll post a link to it afterward.

As a science site, one thing we understand is physics and how it can be exculpatory - no snowflake in an avalance ever has to take the blame.

The American Beverage Association(ABA) knows this too. They are the trade association representing the broad spectrum of companies that manufacture and distribute non-alcoholic beverages in the United States - that means soda and juice but also water and things that are basically good for you. Dr. Maureen Storey is their senior vice president for science policy and former director of the University of Maryland's Center for Food, Nutrition, and Agriculture Policy.

The ABA recognizes there is a lot of talk about childhood obesity and the link to sugary drinks. Since no snowflake in an avalanche takes the blame, that means obesity should be Doritos or it can be bread or it can be bad parents who buy their kids sugary drinks but the one thing that cannot definitively be linked to obesity are sugary drinks or the advertising departments at sugary drink companies. To prove this, Storey and colleagues did a meta-analysis (see notes) of 12 recent studies and published it in the June issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.