Some people bite their nails out of habit, to ease anxiety, or just to calm themselves down. But biting your nails can cause injury, and in some cases, get you straight to the operating room. If you’re a nail biter, here’s one story that can hopefully convince you to stop the habit. Lauren Nichols stopped biting her nails after a cuticle infection, when she almost had to get her fingertip amputated. Buzzfeed has more details: 

she woke up one morning with red swelling around a green spot on her cuticle. She went to the doctor and found out she had paronychia, aka a cuticle infection.

Nichols eventually had to have a type of surgery called a therapeutic washout to remove the infection. Her doctor told her that she needed to stop biting her nails. "He told me that he has to amputate the tips of people's fingers because the infection gets too bad, and that I'm lucky I came when I did," she told BuzzFeed.

image via Buzzfeed

People tend to unwind and relax by doing things that they don’t usually do during their regular schedules. With the world’s fast-paced and tedious transportation system, sometimes we would like to step away from the daily rush towards work or school and just relax and enjoy the travel. India’s Kalka-Shimla ‘toy train’ is a perfect attraction for a relaxing tourist trip. The toy train is a UNESCO World Heritage site, and is a tourism magnet, as CNN details: 

There's no denying that having "toy train" in the name ensures the rail line is a tourism magnet, a catchy description for the narrow-gauge, small-sized locomotives tirelessly serving the route.

But it's also got an interesting backstory too, its history interconnected with British colonial rule in India.

Ever since the beginning of the Raj -- the period of British rule on the Indian subcontinent from 1858 and 1947 -- the new rulers were searching for an "English climate," a place that would offer refuge from the unbearable heat of the Delhi and Kolkata summers.

They found it in Shimla, which, before the second half of the 18th century, was nothing but a remote forested area with a few temples.

British travelers who visited the area noted the climate's resemblance to their homeland and in 1863 the Viceroy of India, John Lawrence, decided to move the summer capital to Shimla.

It soon became a travel hotspot, its Neo-Gothic architectural core welcoming a colorful crowd of high-ranking officials, British soldiers and adventurists.

image via CNN

Moving through a day on bare minimum hours of sleep, or none at all, is a torture and a challenge. Half of the time you’ll probably just doze off, or you get cranky, find it harder to finish tasks, or fall into a bad mood. While these are very common effects of lack of sleep, it turns out that there’s another overlooked effect of sleeplessness, which is anxiety. A team of scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, found that the longer people go without sleep, the more distressed they begin to feel. Erman Misirlisoy has the details: 

Sleep disturbances are also a common symptom of major mood disorders such as depression. Improving sleep quality is an early target for many approaches to therapy, because when people sleep better, they feel better.

It could be that sadness and worry are simply consequences of feeling tired, but it could also be that there are direct links between sleep and mood regulation systems in the brain. To answer this question, the Berkeley researchers surveyed people’s anxiety levels both after a normal night of sleep and after a second night of total sleep deprivation. In addition, they recorded each person’s brain activity while they watched videos that made them uncomfortable (for example, witnessing a young child cry).

As expected, people felt more anxious when they were deprived of sleep than when they were allowed to sleep. When the researchers looked inside people’s heads with a brain scanner, they found that a brain area known as the medial prefrontal cortex — an area linked to emotional control — reduced its activity when people were sleep deprived. More specifically, this area of the brain was less active in response to the stress caused by watching uncomfortable videos. This suggests that a sleep-deprived brain is less able to control its reaction to momentarily stressful events.

image via wikimedia commons

The folks at How It Should Have Ended had a lot to think about after seeing The Rise of Skywalker. They came up with about a dozen points in the movie where it could have ended rather suddenly, which they show us quickly. It took them two months to decide on the best alternate ending for the Skywalker saga, the one that would have been the most satisfying, not to mention funny.

Despite the fact that the Americans spent $264.6 billion on health and fitness in 2018, which is far more than any nation, the United States still rank lowest in that same field.

The United States leads the world in spending for every segment, including fitness classes ($37 billion), sports and recreation ($58 billion), apparel and footwear ($117 billion), equipment and supplies ($37.5 billion), mindful movement, such as yoga ($10 billion), and related technology ($8.1 billion).

The question is, why? What are the underlying causes of this rather ironic situation?

There are a few factors, according to the Global Wellness Institute, for this discrepancy between the amount of money spent and the actual participation. These are: lack of sidewalks and bike lanes; youth sports becoming costly and hypercompetitive; and the lack of a supportive and communal exercise culture.

In addition, the health and fitness industry has become obsessed with complexity. Sometimes this is warranted, but often it’s not. One reason people make things complex is so they can sell them. It’s hard to monetize the basics, but come up with an intricate and sexy-sounding approach to something and people will pay for it.

Now that we know what the problem is, how do we fix it?

The answer is, we don’t need to spend that much money. We just need to move our bodies more.

More details over at Outside Online.

(Image Credit: Wokandapix/ Pixabay)

It’s been over a month ever since the new year, and now it’s that time of the year again colds and flus have once again become a trend, not to mention COVID-19, a newly identified respiratory disease. How, then, do we avoid getting infected? Or if you’re the one sick, how do you avoid infecting others?

To cut your risk of catching a respiratory illness on your next flight, experts offer two pieces of common-sense advice: Wash your hands frequently and keep a distance from people who are sick.

[...]

If you're sick with a respiratory illness, wearing a mask and opening the overhead vent could help prevent transmission.

Check out more details about these tips over at NPR.

I guess these tips not only can be applied while on a plane, but also on any transportation vehicle.

(Image Credit: StelaDi/ Pixabay)

A fellow named Slab went with this friends to The Amble Inn on Corindi Beach in Australia. After taking a swallow of his beer, Slab found a lifeless gecko inside. Heroically, he pulled the intoxicated gecko from his beer, placed its head inside his lips, and breathed life back into its tiny lungs.

The grateful gecko stayed with Slab the whole evening and went home with him.

Content warning: foul language.

-via Dave Barry

BERLIN — Last May, a 32-year-old part-time farmer named Steffen Schwarz, 32, proposed to his girlfriend by using a machine to plant a field of corn, with the gaps spelling “Do you want to marry me?”

Schwarz then got his girlfriend to fly a drone over the field, and his girlfriend saw the message, and she said yes.

What Schwarz wasn’t expecting however, was that his proposal was captured on Google Maps, and he didn’t know it until an aunt in Canada pointed it out to him.

(Image Credit: Google Maps)

Alasdair Martin's mother, who has been baking fanciful cakes for 45 years, made this cake for her office Valentines Day party. It's a reference to the Edgar Allen Poe tale. The Jell-O heart has a pump inside, and the writing on the book was made with an icing printer. The sound comes from a separate source. While we are impressed, only time will tell if anyone has the guts to cut and eat it. -via reddit

An iceberg, which was estimated to be as big as Atlanta and roughly the same size as Malta, has just broken off Pine Island Glacier (PIG) on the edge of Antarctica. The phenomenon was captured via satellite images taken by the European Space Agency (ESA) last Tuesday. The iceberg quickly fragmented.

"What you are looking at is both terrifying and beautiful," Mark Drinkwater, head of the Earth and Mission Sciences Division at the ESA, told CNN.

"It is clear from these images (that the Pine Island Glacier) is responding to climate change dramatically," he added.

While icebergs calving from glaciers is a natural process, Drinkwater made it clear that the rate of melting and calving being seen in West Antarctica is greater than anything observed in the satellite record.

(Image Credit: European Space Agency/ CNN)

Mice are subterranean creatures who love lurking underground, and since the London Underground is, well, underground, it won’t be a surprise if we find some of these mice in the public transit system.

Sam Rowley was fascinated by these mice, and he decided to spend a week down The Tube (a nickname for the London Underground) trying to take a photo of these rodents.

And one night, he captured an image of two of them literally battling over a morsel of food dropped by a passenger.

That persistence to get the snap has won Sam the Wildlife Photographer of the Year LUMIX People's Choice award.

The photo was titled “Station’s Squabble”.

Check out more photos entered in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year (WPY) competition over at BBC.

(Image Credit: Sam Rowley/ WPY)

Like all morally decent and physically attractive people, I enjoy pineapple on pizza. Ideally, genetic engineering will make this Maximumble cartoon a reality. Better yet, it may permit me to make a pizza with a single pineapple slice a the crust. After adding tomato sauce and cheese, let this optimal pizza be topped with an additional slice of pineapple.

Any parent who has stopped to peek into their children's notebooks before discarding them knows they can be a treasure trove of writing that reveals what's inside the child's mind. Simple composition books (or exercise books, as they are called elsewhere) can contain surprising insight into a child's life. A teenager named Anne Frank wrote her private thoughts down in notebooks that were eventually read all over the world. Thomas Pololi and Anna Teresa Ronchi collect children's notebooks from all over the world, going back as far as 1773, and started the Exercise Book Archive, an ongoing project to bring those notebooks to the public. Collectors Weekly interviewed Thomas Pololi about the project, the trends in education they reveal, the everyday things that were important to the students, and the eras they documented.     

What are some of the memorable historic moments recorded in these books?

Pololi: There are many historical periods narrated in the books from the point of view of children. It’s poignant because you have this contrast between the innocence of children and the drama happening around them. This is especially true of compositions about war, propaganda, or political events that we now recognize as terrible. But in the narration of children, there is often enthusiasm about the swastika in Germany, or the Duce in Italy (dictator Benito Mussolini), or for Mao in China. It is quite impressive because we know what happened, but reading the personal words of children is an immersion in the period and the daily life of children in these contexts. In most cases, the children tended to see the positive side of traumatic things, perhaps because their main goal is to grow up, and they needed to do it the world they lived in.

Read the rest of the interview and see a gallery of the notebooks at Collectors Weekly.

Alpacas are great animals to keep. Aside from the cuteness they bring every time you see them, their fleece can be one asset we can hugely benefit from. Their fleece is naturally plentiful, and easy to maintain.

The thermal, breathable, flame-resistant, hypoallergenic, and super-soft qualities of alpaca wool put traditional wools to shame. Without the natural lanolin, sometimes called “wool grease,” of other fleece, alpaca doesn’t require harsh washing during processing.

There is a problem, however. Most of the alpacas that we see today can be considered “mutts” due to their mixed-up family trees which were a result of the Spanish colonization of Peru. Fortunately, there are ongoing efforts to resurrect a better class of alpaca.

More about this over at The Walrus.

(Image Credit: kasjanf/ Pixabay)

NBC baseball writer Craig Calcaterra has a 16-year-old daughter named Anna. He found a map of the Western Hemisphere that Anna had been working on, and we all have so many questions. My question is, what are Florida and Chile thinking, as they've taken so much land that will be underwater in a few years? Calterra posted the map at Twitter, but couldn't provide any explanation because Anna was at school. But she eventually was able to text.

Update: I asked her if Ohio2 was a replica of the actual Ohio or if it’s just a cutout shape. pic.twitter.com/SE6yrfd2Q9

— Craig Calcaterra (@craigcalcaterra) February 12, 2020

People have a lot of opinions about how their home states are affected in this map, and plenty of horror at the very idea of Ohio2, which is now trending at Twitter. Anna explained more about the map at CNN.  -via Mashable

(Image credit: Anna Calcaterra via Craig Calcaterra)