I'm muddling the headline a bit because there's quite a lot of unpack. Michael Siegrist and Angela Bearth, professors at a university in Switzerland, polled people in eight European countries and asked them if they would like to live in a world without chemical substances. Ilya Somin writes at Reason:

A recent study published in Nature Chemistry finds that 39 percent of respondents in eight European countries say they "agree" with the statement that "I would like to live in a world where chemical substances don't exist." Another 39 percent say the "slightly agree" or "slightly disagree" with this statement. Similarly, 40% say "they do everything I can to avoid contact with chemical substances in my daily life."

As the study's authors—Swiss academics Michael Siegrist and Angela Bearth—point out, such "chemophobia reflects stunning scientific ignorance, because human life would be virtually impossible without chemicals. Indeed, pretty much everything we use or touch is a chemical or combination of chemicals.

So it's even worse than we thought! The chemicals are everywhere!

For several years, when I've conducted one-shot information literacy classes at my library, I've done a cold open in which I pull up the hilarious DHMO.org website and launch into a fast-paced and hopefully terrifying rant about the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide.

That's water.

Increasingly, though, I find that I can't lead with this shtick because the students already know what dihydrogen monoxide is or have already seen the website. That's an unscientific sample without even casual methodological rigor, but it's encouraging.

-via Instapundit | Image: A Cure for Stupid People t-shirt now on sale at the NeatoShop!

Hannah Fry is a mathematician with expertise in the algorithms tech companies use. She is also a privacy expert, and has warned against allowing Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa into the bedroom.

While Amazon previously denied that its Echo devices were used to spy on people, earlier this year they admitted that their employees listen to customer voice recordings in order to improve speech recognition.

It was also revealed that recordings of personal moments were inadvertently caught up after the smart speaker was triggered by words that sounded similar to "Alexa".

After requesting audio data from Amazon that had been recorded by her Echo speaker, Dr Fry discovered it had picked up conversations that were never directed at the voice assistant.

With an estimated two million UK households owning Alexa devices, the associate professor warned people to be careful how they use them.

Dr. Fry believes that there should be spaces in our homes that should remain completely private, such as the bathroom and the bedroom.

Scary!

(Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

How should you wrap your cat so that she or he fits neatly under the Christmas tree, ready to be opened in the morning? Anne Holdren provides this helpful instructional video.

She also provides an alternate version in which the person wrapping the cat (the same cat) is a hunky shirtless firefighter. I asked my wife which one I should post and she just glared at me. So I'm going with the first one.

Nota bene: not all cats will approve of being wrapped and may resist quite vigorously.

-via Ace of Spades HQ

What is unclear is whether the Taiwanese online retailer is hoping to convince toilet seat customers to buy a Switch or Switch customers to buy a toilet seat. Nintendo Life reports:

A Taiwanese retailer has decided that the best way to flog Nintendo Switch systems is to chuck in a smart toilet seat - you know, for those lengthy play sessions. According to Chinese Nintendo, the bundles' names translate to "Sit well full-length" for the original Switch model, and "Loneliness Eliminator" for the Switch Lite. Truly inspiring.

With the pace of gaming technology, this won't even be an issue within a year or two, as most toilet seats will be gaming consoles anyway.

-via Dave Barry | Image: Chinese Nintendo

It’s official. Cats are the nemesis of Christmas trees. It doesn’t matter how big or small the Christmas tree is — a cat can and will bring it down at all costs.

Note: When I say cats, I don’t just mean the domesticated ones. I also mean the big cats (they are part of the family, too!)

See the other photos (and GIFs) of cats destroying Christmas trees over at Meowingtons.

(Images Credit: Meowingtons)

Looking forward to a unique food experience this Christmas time? Try making this Puerto Rican Christmas meal called pernil. It is a slow-roasted pork roast meal commonly shared in Puerto Rico on Christmas. For the Puerto Ricans, it is not Christmas without this.

The downside to this meal, however, is that it takes a lot of time, and you might not be able to prepare the meal in time with Christmas Eve. Nevertheless, it’s worth trying to cook this.

Know how to prepare this meal over at the Los Angeles Times.

(Image Credit: Celeste Noche / For The Times)

Ever since the release of the first iPhone in 2007, a US study has found that phone-related injuries have risen dramatically. The injuries greatly varied from exploding batteries to injuries sustained via walking to a lamppost.

Readers of The Guardian provided their own stories of phone-related injuries. Here is just one of them:

One morning I was watching a YouTube video of the Superbowl half-time show where Madonna kissed Britney and Christina. I slipped down a steep set of stairs, taking off most of the skin on my left side and leaving me with a terrible ache in my elbow in cold weather that I now affectionately refer to as “Madonna elbow” whenever it strikes. I learnt a lesson that day!

More of these stories over at the site.

Do you have phone-related injuries?

(Image Credit: DariuszSankowski/ Pixabay)

Social media has gone into a frenzy thanks to this picture of a bride and her bridesmaids who posed with “bouquets” made of beer bottles. A guest shared the wedding snap on the discussion website Reddit, and the bride was shamed a lot.

A commenter said that the bottles, some still with labels on, had no “class.”

The women in the snap all hold a beer bottle each containing a single white flower to resemble "bouquets".

"That could've been cute if they either put more flowers inside the beer bottle, or made something ornate with the bottle caps to look like flowers,"

Some criticized the wedding for its “lack of sophistication,” such as the lack of footwear or the hideous color and shape of the skirts.

Personally, I feel like the wedding is totally fine, and I believe that everyone had a blast. But what are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Reddit/ Mirror)

43-year-old Veronica Duque arrived at the lesson at Maria Teresa Inigo de Toro school in Valladolid wearing a white coat. When she removed the white coat, however, there were "confusion, shouts, applause and some covered their eyes" — apparently, she was wearing a bodysuit which depicted the internal organs of the human body. Her reason for doing this? To help her year four class "visualise the disposition of internal organs".

She wanted to make the class more practical, so used the outfit to pique her students' interests before turning to the traditional plastic bust the school uses to teach anatomy.

Ms Duque revealed she found the costume by pure chance after seeing an advert online and decided to buy it.

What a very passionate teacher. I hope more teachers follow her example and create inventive ways to teach students.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: @mikemoratinos/ Sky News)

Happy Hanukkah to all those who celebrate it on Earth! #HappyHanukkah pic.twitter.com/FKC2M5iXni

— Jessica Meir (@Astro_Jessica) December 23, 2019

As Hanukkah began at sundown on Sunday, NASA astronaut Jessica Meir sent a photographic greeting to earth via Twitter. She's been aboard the ISS since September, and had planned ahead well enough to take a pair of festive socks for the occasion. That may be the extent of her celebration, considering the restrictions of space.

But lighting fires in outer space can be especially challenging, considering that flames can react to the absence of gravity in an uncontrolled manner.

Perhaps for this reason, for her messageMeir opted for a picture of her feet wrapped in a pair of entertaining socks featuring pink menorahs and green stars of David on a blue background. And she did follow the tradition of placing the menorah close to the window, since behind her feet, the earth is visible thousands of kilometers away.

In case you are wondering what a lit candle looks like in space, you can see that. Also, since there are around eight "sundowns" per day on the space station, Meir began the holiday using her home coordinates. Meanwhile, a Twitter user in Jerusalem is wearing astronaut socks.

Happy Hanukkah from Jerusalem pic.twitter.com/zSLmwzZTPg

— Yiftah Curiel (@yiftahc) December 23, 2019

-via reddit

Almost everyone gestures while talking, at least in some situations, some people more than others. Tom Scott explains the many different ways we use gestures, and the many reasons we do it.

Each year millions of people apply to some of the biggest and most in-demand employers out there. With so many resumes to sift through, how do these companies simplify their task of identifying promising candidates efficiently and without comprising quality? Well, some companies like Amazon and Google would look for these 3 telling words. Google calls it the XYZ formula: “Accomplished [X], as measured by [Y], by doing [Z].” 

Or in simpler terms, include the words “from,” “to,” and “by” generously and properly in your resume. 

Applicants whose resumes are filled to the brim with those three words will look more promising, compared to the resume of a hypothetical competing applicant who has the exact same background. 

The reason is that it's almost impossible to write a fluffy, blustery resume that looks good superficially but doesn't provide much useful information, if an applicant uses those words over and over.

Check out Inc. for more useful techniques on how to best improve your resume. 

Photo: Lukas / Pexels

Dental implants are one solution to tooth loss among adults, though not always the most comfortable nor fastest way to recovering our pearly whites. But Dr. Jeremy Mao and his team at Columbia University have come up with an interesting technique for dental implants that could significantly alleviate this common problem.

The group believe that they've found a way to have the body’s stem cells migrate to a three-dimensional scaffold made of natural material and placed in a patient's mouth. Once the stem cells have colonized the scaffold, a tooth can grow in the socket and then merge with the surrounding tissue.

Although the results of their study were published in the Journal of the American Dental Association almost 10 years ago, Columbia University have already applied for patents for this technology, possibly making it a commercially viable reality in the near future. 

-via Megaphone 

Photo: LionFive / Pixabay

When libraries troll their patrons. pic.twitter.com/Hn8a96f8je

— Bartre (@Metafrantic) February 4, 2018

“Do you have this book that has a red cover?” is apparently a question commonly asked by customers to librarians. Queries like this lack useful specific details, making the librarian’s job particularly challenging, especially when there are so many other books with the same description. This tweet by @metafrantic shows the frustrating reality behind it and how librarians have cleverly poked fun at people who have this annoying habit.

And here was the reply of another Twitter user who had a similar experience:

Lolz my library did this too. I took a photo because we used to get this question all the time when I worked at a bookstore. pic.twitter.com/QDeZ8hvG0W

— Karah Sutton 🇳🇿 (@Karahdactyl) February 5, 2018

For those who have worked at libraries, has this ever happened to you? 

Read the full post from Megaphone.  

(Image credit: Twitter)

A reader asked: "Could you get in trouble legally if you murdered someone in space? Asking for a friend." The answer is yes. But from there it gets a bit complicated.

To begin with, while you might think it can’t actually be possible to commit a crime in space because no country seemingly has jurisdiction there, you’d be wrong. Much like the myth that you can do whatever you want in international waters because no country holds sway, it turns out, among other agreements and rules, International laws are a thing.

On that note, while aboard a given vessel, the ship you’re on officially hails and is registered from some nation or group of nations (like the European Union) and the laws from said entities are binding aboard it in most cases while it’s out at sea. This is outlined in the United Nations Convention for the Law of the Sea, “every State shall effectively exercise its jurisdiction and control in administrative, technical and social matters over ships flying its flag.”

While obviously there isn’t exactly a court case history to back this up, the general consensus is that the same basic idea will hold true for ships in space, and certain agreements to date concerning space ships do seem to bear that out, as well as help give a partial framework for judges to work with.

Where it gets complicated is when you mix the nationalities of missions, as in the various countries that use the International Space Station, or when NASA sends astronauts up on Russian spaceships. Murder is murder everywhere, but some countries have laws that others don't. There is a framework for space jurisdiction, but it might upend horribly the first time someone is accused of espionage. And what about an international colony on Mars? Read what rules govern space flight as of now at Today I Found Out.

(Image credit: NASA)