Anxiety is a tough battle to win. Sometimes it’s there, sometimes it isn’t. We don’t know when an anxiety episode will arrive, but when it does, it feels like a freight train suddenly barging into the depths of one’s mind. It takes a lot of effort just to pull yourself back up and to continue. Sometimes we really want to avoid crying or breaking down in public, and we just want a fast fix to get ourselves somewhere we can get through an episode more personally. Refinery 29 lists some expert-backed tricks that we can use to calm ourselves down when everything gets in our head, and overwhelms us completely: 

Try a breathing technique. 

Dr. Sherry Benton, Ph.D., ABPP, the founder and chief science officer of TAO Connect, says that to know how to combat anxiety when it strikes, you have to know what’s going on in your body. “Your breathing becomes more shallow and rapid,” she says. “Your heart starts beating faster, and this all feeds into changing your thinking to be more stressed and worried.”

Stop and inhale for four counts, pause, and then breathe out for four counts. While you do this, you can try saying a mantra. Perhaps try thinking “I am” as you breath in, and “relaxed” as you breathe out, Benton suggests. 

Challenge your thinking. 

stop yourself from doing this, you should challenge your thinking. Ask yourself: How realistic is this? Think about what you would tell a friend in the same situation. 

Write it down. 

Benton also says that when you’re spiraling into anxious thoughts, it can help to stop, write down everything you’re worried about, and then consider what you wrote: Is it realistic, or is it an exaggeration?

Distract yourself. 

It can be helpful to call a loved one or do an activity that takes some focus, like a Sudoku puzzle, to distract your mind from its unpleasant thoughts that are magnifying your worries. 

Try mindfulness meditation. 

There are all kinds of meditation apps you can try that are made to calm you down during the day, while helping you focus on the present moment. “Rather than thinking all of those thousand other things, it gives the brain a break,” Benton says. “It’s turning off the constant conversation in your head so you can be in this moment.” 

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To prevent the rising case of Salmonella, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reminded everyone in an update after their investigation of several multi-state outbreaks of Salmonella to give the chickens space. Don’t snuggle, kiss, or invite chickens into your homes, and make sure to wash your hands with soap and water after touching one. The CDC reminded everyone to avoid kissing their fowl companions after a 2016 study from the CDC showed that people contracted Salmonella from sharing a smooch with a chicken. CNN has the details: 

The CDC and health officials have been The organization issued an update to its investigation on August 30, and cautioned all chicken keepers to wash their hands with soap and water after touching poultry or anything where such animals roam.

The CDC reports that as of August 23, there have been more than 1,000 cases of Salmonella from the outbreak across 49 states. Two people have died from the infection, and 175 people have been hospitalized.

image credit: via wikimedia commons

(Image credit: Flickr user Fon Zhou)

In the 12th century, the people of Fujian province in China developed an architectural wonder to protect their communities from bandits and warfare. A tulou is a fortified apartment home for several hundred people with a central courtyard and outer walls up to six feet thick! The floors are cantilevered to maximize living space while preserving the common courtyard.  

Most tulous are either circular or rectangular in shape.  As a result of the walls and their sheer size the result was a mini-city which was also wind-proofed and extremely well ventilated: the tulous are an oasis of coolness in the hot summer months and the insulation provided by the walls means that they retain warmth in the winter.

There was also another significant advantage of these vast structures.  Whether it was planned originally or not, the tulous are able to stand up to high magnitude earthquakes – the major contributor to their centuries of longevity.

(Image credit: Flickr user Squashimono)

The Fujian Tulou is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Some of the tulous are still occupied, while others are used for reunions by families who retain property rights. Read about tulous and see plenty of pictures at Kuriositas.

In this song parody, YouTuber Liechee uses Carly Rae Jepson's song "Call Me Maybe" to tell the story of The Little Mermaid. It's not only a clever and funny idea (if a little dated), but the song and video turned out right nice. -via Geeks Are Sexy

The engineer, Seth Vargo, pulled his open-source code off Github when he found out that the company using his code worked with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. With him pulling off his code from the repository hosting device, the company, enterprise software company Chef, discovered that without Vargo’s code, their business stopped working.

Vargo had worked for the Seattle-based company, but he didn’t know about the contract with ICE until tech writer Shanley Kane tweeted about it on Monday. ICE, which was formed under the presidency of George W. Bush in 2003, has stirred protests as it ratcheted up deportation and family separation policies under President Donald Trump.

Vargo reached out to Chef executives to better understand their rationale for the ICE contract, but got no response for three days. “It became apparent that they had no interest in acknowledging their partnership with ICE — the organization best known for tearing apart families and locking children in cages,” Vargo wrote in a text conversation with The Verge.

… he decided to pull the open-source project off Github. He knew the company would notice, but he was surprised to find out it relied on his code so heavily that it began experiencing significant downtimes at once.

More details of this news over at The Verge.

What are your thoughts on this one?

(Image Credit: Comfreak/ Pixabay)

props to the Google Engineer who yanked code from Chef for working with ICE. You've made my job harder today, but I really don't mind.

— marea rosa (@smrt_fasizmu) September 19, 2019

We're still waiting for a cure for HIV and AIDS but there have been significant progress as some research on using antiretroviral therapy has proven to cure HIV in mice and it could possibly carry over to humans as well.

For now, HIV-infected individuals must rely on other drugs and treatment. In Canada, a new pill called Dovato has been approved which combines two different components used in treating HIV.

The drugs inside Dovato are not new. Dolutegravir has been used in Canada since 2013. It belongs to a class of drugs called integrase inhibitors. Over the past seven years, integrase inhibitors have become the cornerstone of combination therapy for HIV in Canada and other high-income countries.

The other medicine that makes up Dovato is the nucleoside analogue 3TC (lamivudine). This drug has been used in HIV treatment regimens since the mid-1990s. It is generally safe and a successful part of many regimens.

For the first time, dolutegravir and 3TC are in one pill and this pill is approved for the initial treatment of HIV infection.

To know more about this hybrid pill, check it out on CATIE.

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It's been two years since the last season of The Crown and with the new trailer being released by Netflix, it's certainly is worth the wait and should get everyone excited to meet the new face who will be portraying the Queen, Olivia Colman.

(Image credit: Netflix)

No doubt some of the most endearing anime to become very popular not just in Japan but all over the world are the works of Studio Ghibli and its co-founder Hayao Miyazaki. From beloved titles like Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke, we are taken into worlds of Miyazaki's imagination.

With stories and characters that dig deep into concepts like environmental consciousness, youthful romance, childlike curiosity, and the human essence, watching these Ghibli films is like being a child once again and looking at the world from their perspective.

But where does Miyazaki find inspiration to make these stories?

(Image credit: Hayao Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli via Gurney Journey)

Our parents would often think and tell us that playing video games is detrimental to our physical, mental, social, and emotional well-being, and perhaps at a certain point, they are right and it becomes that way. But setting some proper limits, video games and online gaming in particular, could have some surprising benefits. BitRebels lists some of them here.

(Image credit: Florian Olivo/Unsplash)

The mystery surrounding Amelia Earhart's sudden disapperance over the Pacific is still something that leaves us dumbfounded. We can only speculate what must have happened to the first female aviator to cross the Atlantic solo, when she and her navigator Fred Noonan went missing.

But now, the former Navy officer Robert Ballard who is known for his discoveries on the wrecks of the battleship Bismarck, the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown, and RMS Titanic, will investigate on the whereabouts of Amelia Earhart's wreckage and hopefully make clear the details of what happened once and for all.

Following decades of speculation by TIGHAR (The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery), Ballard and his futuristic ship the E/V Nautilus have made for Nikumaroro, an island in the Western Pacific.

Why there? National Geographic – who provided funding – reports on Dr. Ballard’s mission, writing that “At the time of Earhart’s disappearance, the tide on Nikumaroro was especially low, revealing a reef surface along the shore long and flat enough for a plane to land.”

(Image credit: Los Angeles Daily News/UCLA Library; Wikimedia Commons)

Chucky costume for dog? Take my money, please. #horror #horrorfans pic.twitter.com/tTEHVFrzJJ

— My Favorite Horror (@FavoriteHorror) September 18, 2019

Halloween is fast approaching and many people are getting into the spirit of the occasion. One dog in particular has been making rounds on Twitter, in a viral video showing the little adorable canine wearing a Chucky costume. -via Screen Geek

(Image credit: @FavoriteHorror/Twitter)

You might think you've seen this before, maybe in a movie or something. Photographer Rachel Perman decided to do a photo shoot with her twins for their fifth birthday. Her daughter Emilee wanted a unicorn theme, and those pictures were lovely. Elijah wanted his pictures to center around his favorite movie, Pixar's Up! The family enlisted Elijah's 90-year-old great grandparents, who closely resemble Carl and Ellie from the animated film. You can see many more of the pictures, from both sessions, in Perman's Facebook post. -via Considerable

The autumnal equinox falls on September 23 this year, which is the traditional time to balance an egg on its end, so you may as well learn to do it properly. It's not an important tradition, like changing the batteries in your smoke detector, and is in fact rooted in folklore.  

Legend has it that balancing an egg on its end was so difficult that you effectively needed planetary alignment to make it happen. Thus, the myth was born that balancing an egg was only possible on the equinox.

Fortunately, it’s completely bogus.

It's also not that hard to do if you know how. From The Art of Manliness, we get complete instructions on how to balance an egg on its end, any day of the year. Go here to see the rest of the instructional graphic. You can use this on Monday to perpetuate the myth and impress the kids, or just use it any other day to bust the myth and still impress the kids.  

(Image credit: Ted Slampyak)

It's the best popcorn. Ever. Or so says their website. But Bjorn Qorn is a special type of popcorn as it contains nutritional yeast and high B-vitamin seasoning. You won't have to worry about your health as much since they produce it with all natural, gluten free, and vegan ingredients.

I am Bjorn Qorn.

Like Bjorn Qorn's founder, Bjorn, I am a person of the corn. He's a Minnesota corn farmer's son and I'm from Kansas and was a horse girl. He went to Bard, bringing his family popcorn recipe.

I, too, have a family popcorn recipe. During a game of catch, he met an artist and innovator named Jamie who would become his cofounder, and they make artisanal popcorn together using solar power and topped with nutritional yeast.

(Image credit: Joseph De Leo)

Ben Jonson's "On My First Daughter" is a sad but beautiful sonnet that depicts a father's grief over his daughter's passing in her infancy. And with the last two lines of the sonnet, Zach Weinersmith of SMBC Comics made several other scenarios inspired by them but placed the setting in different locations in outer space. Check them out here.

(Image credit: Zach Weinersmith/SMBC Comics)