In October of this year, when the World Health Organization declared that polio’s type 3 strain had been eradicated, the world was able to have a sigh of relief, as it became a slightly better place. Both the type 3 and type 2 strains have been eradicated and no longer exist outside of highly secure laboratories, with the type 1 remaining the only strain at large. Thanks to the thousands of people who have worked hard for this to happen, the two strains will no longer cause paralysis and death.

While it was once just a dream, permanently ending diseases has been within our power since 1980, when smallpox was eradicated after an intense campaign. This victory has saved roughly 200 million people who would otherwise have succumbed to the disease since then.

But other attempts to rid the world of diseases have not gone as smoothly. Doctors have been working on ending polio for 31 years, initially hoping it would be completely gone by 2000. Now, due to difficulties tracking the disease, the target eradication date for the remaining type 1 strain is 2023. Another pathogen nearing eradication is a parasite known as Guinea worm, but again, problems have complicated that campaign, and others as well.

So what was it about smallpox that made it so much simpler to eradicate? What makes an organism eradicable in the first place?

More about this topic over at Quanta Magazine.

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

Cinnamon, hot cocoa, and nutmeg. Those are some of the usual scents you can smell in houses during the holiday season. Enter the smell of fried chicken.

Okay, so maybe it’s not the most traditional of festive, wintery scents but there’s no denying that the smell of seasoned and breaded chicken cooking in a vat of oil is ridiculously good, and terrible for you. Like all things during this time of year! So I think it only makes sense that we embrace this as a staple smell alongside apple cider and sugar cookies.

There is good news for people who love the smell of fried chicken: KFC is back with its firelog that smells like fried chicken!

Imagine the disappointment of your family once they see that you’re not really cooking chicken. Nevertheless, it is a good scent worthy of filling up your home. What do you think?

(Image Credit: FunnyOrDie)

English is an age old language with some very odd words that are rarely used today. Do you think Londoners will know what words like "tittynope" mean?

Psychologist Dr. Logan Jones says that while social media ‘detoxes’ can be helpful in some cases, it’s more important to explore why you need to take a break in the first place. 

"On a deeper level, these social media companies know exactly what they are doing [from] a neurological perspective. What they're doing is called intermittent reinforcement -- it's what casinos do too with slot machines. And it's the same with swiping on Tinder or checking your Instagram. The addiction is the reward pathway, it's a dopamine hit," Jones said. 

So, instead of quitting Facebook or Instagram cold-turkey, try lessening your social media intake bit-by-bit. For example, Jones suggests “turning off notifications, turning off vibrate, and using a feature on your phone that monitors how much time you spend on social apps.”

"Addiction is anything you do to escape a feeling that has a life-damaging consequence. So a lot of people will turn to social media to escape a feeling of boredom, loneliness, wasting time -- whatever feeling they want to escape. The life-damaging consequences of social media addiction are that you are not present and as engaged with life," Jones said.

These evaluation questions can guide you in your self-assessment.

It’s also helpful to replace your social media addiction with positive habits, like reading, exercising, or meeting up with friends in real life. But don’t be discouraged and give up if you feel the urge to check your phone for Facebook updates 3 seconds after you pick up a book. It takes at least 3 weeks or 21 days for new habits to fully form, according to Jones. 

In summary, social media is like a drug, so it’s best to take your recovery efforts one step at a time. Understand where the problem of your social media addiction comes from by assessing your own motives and then find new healthy habits to replace your addiction. But don’t forget to be patient with yourself, we are all a work in progress. 

Finally, always consult a health professional first regarding any questions or issues you have, these tips are no substitute for medical advice. 

You can find out more about positive reinforcement and building better social media habits here.

Photo: ROBIN WORRALL / Unsplash

This Christmas season, we could all use some practical tips to minimize stress in our homes. Cat owners know how difficult it is to keep a cat off a Christmas tree. And thanks to the Internet, life-changing remedies to mundane challenges are just a click away. Nick Douglas, seeing this problem, compiled answers from various Reddit users about how we can best manage cats on Christmas. Douglas, writing for LifeHacker, says,

Cats love Christmas trees. A lot of them love messing with the tree, even climbing it. They’ll knock off the ornaments, make needles fall, and even topple the tree. I looked through Reddit, where every user owns two hundred cats, digging through years of posts for the best advice on keeping cats from ruining Christmas trees or hurting themselves.

Discover those Holiday Hacks here.

Photo: Valentina Sotnikova / Unsplash

Lost in translation? It’s always useful to have a reliable translation app on-hand, especially for travelers in a foreign country where you don’t know how to speak the local language. 

Breaking the age-old language barrier has never been easier as it is today in the Digital Age. Many a faux pas has been avoided by taking a moment to be quick to hear and slow to speak. Still, learning from experience is the fun part and we’ve got hundreds of foreign language tools and resources available at our fingertips!

Lifewire gives us the 6 best translation apps for iPhone and Android users. Here, they consider the pros and cons of amazing features like quick and alternate translations, text-to-speech, phrasebooks, camera translation, conversation translation, and many more. 

Photo: mohamed hassan / pxhere

Who says you can’t have fun while working? With the help of these viral shortcuts, what normally takes you several clicks and scrolls could be done in a matter of nanoseconds. Try out these Microsoft Excel hacks or bookmark this cheat sheet to save yourself valuable time and effort, whether at home or in the workplace. 

Here just a few: 

• Shift+Space: Select an entire row
• Ctrl+Space: Select an entire column
• Alt+Semicolon: Select visible cells
• Ctrl+Plus: Insert new row or column above or to the left of selected row or column
• Ctrl+Minus: Delete selected row or column
• Alt+Plus: Calculate the sum of selected cells
• Ctrl+N: Open new workbook
• Ctrl+S: Save current workbook
• F4: Repeat last action
• Ctrl+Up/Down Arrow: Move to the first or last cell in a column
• Ctrl+X: Cut data in selected cell(s)
• Ctrl+9: Hide selected rows
• Ctrl+0: Hide selected columns
• Ctrl+T: Create table
• Shift+Arrow key: Add one cell to selection
• Ctrl+Period: Move active cell clockwise

Find out more here. 

-via Mental Floss

Photo: EsaRiutta via Needpix

What’s a fun way to make your online chat conversations more interesting? Here’s one: create your own personalized emoji! 

Emoji Maker gives you a simple interface for customizing your favorite emoji templates to create a brand new one. You can build on a blank template and add as many layers as you want or use the randomizer tool for a surprise. 

The only downside for now is that you cannot add it to an emoji keyboard, but you can download it as a png file and easily send it as a sticker. 

-via LifeHacker

(Image Credit: Emoji Maker)

"Good photos come from experience; experience comes from bad photos," says Nigel Danson, a landscape photographer with over 150k subscribers on his YouTube channel where he gives tips and techniques for landscape photography. 

In his recent video, he analyzes some of his “bad” photos and gives 5 points to consider in order to tell whether a shot is good or bad (I have added explanatory questions to go along with them): 

Balance - Do the various elements in your photo complement one another? 

Flow - Is there a simple and easy-to-follow direction for the viewer’s eyes? 

Attention - Which details stand-out and are being emphasized? 

Simplicity - Can your viewer understand what’s going on in the photo?

Distractions - Is there too much going on at one time in the photo?

Danson discusses what makes a photo a good one at 8:11. 

These tips are just a guide and he cautions that, 

It’s a good idea to get other people’s feedback, but then you’ve got to treat it with care; if you just take everyone’s feedback, then everyone’s gonna have something different and you’ll end up with nothing.

So, get feedback from other people but remember to stay true to your vision for each image because it’s easy to get lost in the woods. 

-via Shutterbug. 

Photo: Kaique Rocha / Pexels

“Electric Night” photographed by Ivan Pedretti was featured on Wednesday’s ‘Astronomy Picture of the Day’ on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration website with the caption: 

It may appear, at first, like the Galaxy is producing the lightning, but really it's the Earth. The featured nighttime landscape was taken from a southern tip of the Italian Island of Sardinia in early June. The foreground rocks and shrubs are near the famous Capo Spartivento Lighthouse, and the camera is pointed south toward Algeria in Africa. 

In the distance, across the Mediterranean Sea, a thunderstorm is threatening, with several electric lightning strokes caught together during this 25-second wide-angle exposure. 

Much farther in the distance, strewn about the sky, are hundreds of stars in the neighborhood of our Sun in the Milky Way Galaxy. Farthest away, and slanting down from the upper left, are billions of stars that together compose the central band of our Milky Way.

NASA selects a different photo of the cosmos each day. Here's the latest one!

-via News18

Photo: Ivan Pedretti

Kids love Frozen. It’s obvious from the animated feature film’s box-office success to the seemingly endless sale of books, video games, dolls, Broadway shows, and even cereal! Now Princesses Elsa and Anna, two fictional but larger-than-life characters, have made it to Google.

Google is bringing the leading ladies even closer to fans with a skill available by default on all Google Assistant devices. Just say, “Hey Google, tell me a Frozen story” and...

When you do, you’ll launch the skill (there’s some music and an intro), which takes you to a campfire with some of the film’s main characters. After the intro has finished playing, you or your child can select a character you’d like to tell you a story.

It’s a fun trick, and a free one, and is bound to impress younger kids.

Check out LifeHacker for more details. 

Video: YouTube

I am a music historian, and with @AdrianRMG I have researched the best-selling single of every decade all the way back to 14,000BC. Here's a thread:

2010s - Ed Sheeran, The Shape of You pic.twitter.com/Y4rrOdSGY2

— 𝗔𝗿𝗰𝗵𝗶𝗲 𝗛𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗼𝗻 (@jazzemu_) December 5, 2019

Archie Henderson teamed up with Adrian Gray to determine and present the top song of every decade,  going way back. Although I do believe he skipped some decades, all of the entries have a music clip.

1990s - Lou Bega, Mambo No.5 pic.twitter.com/GJ8r9iQdBw

— 𝗔𝗿𝗰𝗵𝗶𝗲 𝗛𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗼𝗻 (@jazzemu_) December 5, 2019

Somewhere along the line, you begin to get the idea that this is going somewhere you didn't expect.

1970s - The Beegees, Haaaah pic.twitter.com/OBWH6QjUeE

— 𝗔𝗿𝗰𝗵𝗶𝗲 𝗛𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗼𝗻 (@jazzemu_) December 5, 2019

It gets weirder as it goes. Continue reading to see the rest.

Emoticons and emoji are used to bring nuance to short text passages that might be misunderstood otherwise. Of course, some folks use it for decoration, emphasis, and humor, but that wasn't the original idea. Written language was first used to convey information, but as time passed and technology enabled communication over distances, humanity has struggled to imbue text communication with implied emotion that can get lost when you can't see the speaker's facial expressions and body language. At their core, such symbols are a form of punctuation, which was an early innovation in writing -even before spaces between words. Emoticons and emoji were not so much invented but instead evolved from the long process of refining written text. To understand this evolution, it helps to have a timeline of punctuation. The digital revolution ramped up the need for shortcuts in passing along in idea in text.

This all inspired the users of, for example, the PLATO IV system in 1972 to actually use a facility of that system to solve the problem, creating a whole slew of the first emojis and emoticons in the process.

And if you’re wondering about the distinction here, “emoji” derives from the Japanese for “picture” and “character”, so “picture character”. In contrast, “emoticon” derives from the English “emotion icon”. Thus, while you might think given the two words’ similarity and what they represent also being similar that one came from the other, this is actually purely coincidental.

In any event, going back to the PLATO IV system, with this system, users could press SHIFT-space and then a character to have that character plotted over the previous character without overwriting it. Particularly clever users used this fact to come up with all sorts of little images to represent various emotions and otherwise add context and meaning to a given bit of text, or sometimes to just have the thing stand alone to communicate something, like some sort of modern hieroglyphic. Eventually there were many hundreds of such symbols being used on this system.

There are other important moments in the development of emoticons, such as the time a theoretical discussion about a pigeon, a candle, and some mercury inside a falling elevator leaked outside of the chat forum at Carnegie Mellon University and almost caused a panic. Discussion of the incident emphasized the need for a way to denote something as a joke, which led to the sideways smiley face being widely adopted. Read a fairly in-depth history of punctuation that gave rise to emoticons and emoji at Today I Found Out.

Every time an eel farts, a Christmas tree grows brighter. Well, not exactly. The sound is generated from the setup at the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga. Any time the aquarium's star electric eel Miguel Wattson produces an electric current, the nearby Christmas tree gets a boost that brightens the Christmas lights. The aquarium named the project "Shocking Around the Christmas Tree."

“Whenever Miguel discharges electricity, sensors in the water deliver the charge to a set of speakers,” explains Joey Turnipseed, the Aquarium’s audio visual production specialist. Turnipseed is responsible for tackling the unique engineering challenge of translating Miguel’s electric pulses into a glimmering yuletide display. “The speakers convert the discharge into the sound you hear and the festively flashing lights.”

You can almost imagine the discussion on this. Can't we convert the sound into bells instead of fart noises? Sure, but the kids will like the fart sounds better. Okay, then. -via UPI

Meghan Hughes used her powers to transform into a unicorn. Then she brought the warmth of her love to her neighbors by clearing snow in her neighborhood in Schenectady, New York. CBS 6 Albany reports:

She says she's pleasantly shocked by all the attention.

“I thought it would be fun to put the Halloween costume on and bring some joy to something that isn't very joyous,” she said.

Meghan says she may have a business on her hands! She tells us people have asked her to snow plow their driveways and even attend birthday parties for kids.

-via Swiss Miss