My parents don't understand why I don't eat certain foods. I particularly don't like okra and the bitter melon, partly because of the taste, but mostly because of their texture. According to Rhonda Miller, who has been researching mouthfeel at the Texas A&M AgriLife research facility, the way we eat our food and how we manipulate food in our mouths can be a key determining factor to what kind of food we like.

There are a few types of eaters based on texture or mouthfeel. There are the chewers and crunchers who use their molars to chew the food, and then there are the suckers and smooshers who use their tongue and palate to swirl food in their mouths. There are further nuances between each type. Although chewers and crunchers use their molars, chewers are less vigorous and eat slowly, while crunches are the loud eaters. Smooshers relish their food with their tongue and the roof of their mouth, while suckers suck the flavor of the food before chewing.

Miller has been doing research on beef products and how these eating behaviors affect what kind of beef each eater would thoroughly enjoy. In her study, she found what kind of burgers each of them enjoy. Read more about it on Futurity.

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Sarah Gundle had met her friend Becca in university and they clicked. Through all of her life moments, Becca had been her voice of reason, and the person who encouraged her to take risks and live her life to the fullest. So, it came as a shock to her and to Becca's friends and family when one day, she was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. It seemed awfully like something from a movie, but for Sarah, it was real and unnerving.

And for years after Becca's death, Sarah had been sending one-way text messages to her friend's phone number, until one day, five years later, she received a reply for the first time. The message read, "I'm sorry, who is this?". It was surprising because Sarah knew that nobody could have been using her friend's old phone number. She read that if it hasn't been used for 90 days, it would be unusable. But there it was, somebody had sent her a reply from her friend's old phone number.

A short conversation between them followed, with Sarah explaining that the number used to belong to her friend who died five years ago. The person on the other end offered their condolences. But the last five words Sarah received shook her to her core. It read, "But please, don't text again." To read the rest of her story, check it out on Huff Post.

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The stigma behind mental health issues and talking about them has slowly crumbled, and people are more open to talk about their feelings and struggles with their peers and coworkers. Indeed, in workplaces where a healthy number of millennials and Gen Zs abound, the language of therapy has seeped into the daily dictionary of employees.

Certainly, having a workplace where people are aware and care about others' mental health as well as their own is a good thing. Then, it will be much easier to cope with the stress that work might entail. People will be more understanding and helpful to address and resolve issues that workers might be going through.

There is a caveat however, in that the growing usage of therapy-speak in the workplace must also be coupled with the proper actions. There might be instances that top management may be using these words without showing any genuine concern as they carry on with existing practices that make employees overworked but underpaid. Or, the language may also be misused and miscontextualized.

So, although it has good points, there are things to watch out for as well, which Amanda Montell points out in her article on Harper's Bazaar.

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When textspeak or chat lingo started gaining prominence, there must have been people, mostly our not so tech-savvy parents or grandparents, who were confused by the acronyms and abbreviations that suddenly popped up in their online conversations with family. Nowadays, acronyms like LOL, LMAO, and ROFL are more commonplace, and people generally know what they mean, but there are still a lot of Google searches being made about other acronyms and initialisms.

Letter Solver did a study on which acronyms were the most searched. They categorized these acronyms and initialisms into five different areas: gaming, tech, business, dating, and US states. Yes, your state's abbreviation can be confusing. Just ask people what the abbreviations for Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, Maine, and Michigan are, and, unless you have specifically searched about them before (as I have), it can get really puzzling.

One thing to note about the study is that there are certain initialisms which might have two or more different meanings, so the number of searches for some initialisms may have been conflated. By the way, the difference between an acronym and an initialism is that an acronym is pronounced like a word (like SCUBA) and initialisms have the individual letters spelled out when you say them (like CEO). Mental Floss explains 25 of the most confusing abbreviations but if you want to check the full list of abbreviations, check out Letter Solver's study.

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Physics may have given us a piece of the puzzle as to how the Great Sphinx of Giza had been carved by ancient humans. A study suggests that nature had something to do with it. Leif Ristroph, along with fellow researchers from New York University, have observed how wind and other forces naturally eroded clay and other land formations to create what is called a "yardang". These yardangs are elongated protruberances, from which the people of ancient Egypt might have been inspired to form the Great Sphinx.

Ristroph and his team wanted to test out a controversial hypothesis by the Egyptian geologist Farouk El-Baz on how the Great Sphinx as well as the pyramids were constructed. El-Baz had asserted that the head of the Great Sphinx had been carved out naturally as a yardang and ancient Egyptians merely added details of its features. Afterward, they just dug out a ditch around the head to form the body. El-Baz also suggested that these formations were possible because the ancient Egyptians were aware of the phenomenon whereby the wind erodes the sand and clay to form conical structures which could survive for ages.

Conducting experiments in a lab, Ristroph and his team were able to approximate how the phenomenon occurred and might lend credence to El-Baz's theory. Despite not fully recreating the natural conditions that could have brought the Great Sphinx and the pyramids about, Ristroph and his team were confident that the results of their experiments may provide a possible explanation behind the phenomenon.

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The question Tom Howell posed to himself was, "Is it normal to know only five people in your neighborhood?". He has been living on the same street for 15 years, and a recent New Year's Eve Party put his neighbor knowledge to the test, wherein he found that he actually had an abysmal score. So, in order to get to know his other neighbors, he asked them how many neighbors they can name, and gave them a sheet to fill out.

With that cheat sheet, he was literally able to know all his neighbors' names. But then that poses the interesting issue of the "middle ring" which was mentioned by the sociologist Marc Dunkelman in his book The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community. The "middle ring" refers to that group of people with whom you must socialize despite not liking their company.

Of course, living in the suburbs might be a factor to whether or not you know your neighbors is a good or bad thing. It might be different if you were living in an apartment complex or in the city where people's social lives usually do not revolve around the people within their immediate vicinity. How many of your neighbors do you know?

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It's with good reason. The town of Fenton has a population of 226 people. It's the size of about 20 blocks, and the major thing that helps keep the town running is its collection of fines and forfeitures from traffic tickets. In 2022 alone, it raked in a whopping $1.3 million on traffic fines alone.

That's where the mayor is the judge comes in, because these traffic fines were collected through the "mayor's court", which is a special court that can only be found in Louisiana and Ohio. Mainly, it processes traffic tickets, which surprisingly come up to the thousands each year. From the collections gathered, the town is able to support itself and pay for the salaries of the people in the courtroom. But the mayor's court has been challenged for its fairness in passing judgment given the conflict of interest that having the mayor as the judge brings.

So, in order to investigate on the matter, a team from Pro Publica and journalists from WVUE were sent to Fenton to look into what goes on in the mayor's courts proceedings, and how the traffic cases were handled. Check out their full report here.

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Just as streaming has become a burgeoning threat to the TV and film industry, cable TV way back when was seen as a threat by the film industry. The reason being television production was just more efficient and cost-effective compared to films at the time, and a lot more profitable. Of course, later on, HBO became a big boon to the film industry, aiding with the economics of releasing a film, but that almost never happened due to a campaign that targeted cable TV altogether. That was the Save Free TV campaign.

It basically wanted the public to support a petition to prevent cable TV from existing. They wanted to assert that consumers should not have to pay for TV programs to be transmitted to their TVs at home. However, the reality of the situation was that cable TV providers just wanted to see whether the technology would be viable, instead of attempting to uproot network TV or movie theaters. But the big players who had large stakes in TV ads aggressively pushed for the ballot and the campaign was a success. The public voted against cable TV. Then, it was challenged in California's Supreme Court which ruled in favor of cable TV.

Still, the proponents of free TV kept pushing. But it was for naught as the Federal Communications Commission had already approved cable TV technology and handed out licenses. So that's why the US now has a multitude of TV shows to watch, not just from its big three networks.

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This new property in Victoria, Australia is an interesting piece of architecture. From the side, it looks like two cargo containers one on top of the other, with the top container placed perpendicular to the one below it, and a large portion hanging on both sides, yet it's completely balanced, and has no sign of falling over. The property is called View Hill, and is priced from $13.5 million to $14.85 million.

It was designed by architect John Denton, using the concept of cantilevered minimalist architecture, which is typically seen in bridge construction wherein there is a long projecting beam or girder fixed at only one end. Inside, it has five bedrooms and three bathrooms. The bedrooms are located on the eastern side of the first floor, where the living room, kitchen, and dining room are situated. On the second floor, there are two offices, a powder room, and a wine room. Outside, one has an idyllic view, a 60-hectare vast expanse of grass and vineyards.

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Archaeology tries to understand how humans in the past lived, what kind of customs or traditions they had, through the things that they left behind or have been preserved. With these artifacts, we're able to paint a picture of what human societies and cultures were like, and how they could have evolved through time. Most of these artifacts are stored in museums or archaeological collections.

But there are some artifacts that are dubious or even dangerous, as Mark Warner, an archaeologist, and Ray von Wandruszka, a chemist, both from the University of Idaho found. They sifted through 500 artifacts over 15 years and found many weird items from the gross to the deadly. Oddee shares a list of six examples of the most dangerous and disgusting archaeological artifacts that the two have found.

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In a city of more than 8 million people, you're likely to meet all sorts. New York City is known the world over, and many dream of visiting or even living there. And at the heart of New York stands one of the finest luxury hotels in the city, The Belvedere Hotel. To some, it might be a great accommodation when they want to explore and experience as much of New York as a leisurely trip could afford them. However, with rent stabilization, the Belvedere also serves as a home to many who ventured to come to New York in search of better pastures.

Room 208 was one such room and it was where Hisako Hasegawa stayed for more than 40 years. Not much was known about her, even by those who daily met her along the hallways or those living next to her. She was born in Japan in 1934, and she moved to New York in the '70s. What people can say was that she was overall kind and genial with everybody. The hotel staff liked her as she would always greet them and even give them thank you cards for their small acts of kindness.

Renee Querijero lived right across from her and Hasegawa would sometimes initiate some small talk, but she didn't say much else about herself to anyone. Until one day in 2016, Hasegawa passed away in her apartment at the age of 82. She was buried on New York's Hart Island, America's largest public cemetery. Her story has been recorded by Radio Diaries in its series The Unmarked Graveyard.

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If you have ever found yourself in a bout of insomnia, you might have tried different ways to get yourself to sleep. I used to listen to chill music with sounds of rain in order to make me sleep, but there are some people who find listening to white noise effectively puts them to sleep. Recently, people have been saying that they have been using brown noise to make them go to sleep. But what is brown noise?

Let's try to compare it with white noise to give a more colorful picture. White noise is a broadband sound that includes all audible frequencies. It's like a mishmash of different frequencies being played at an equal intensity put into one sound. Some examples include static from TV or radio, vacuum sounds, and the humming of an AC.

Brown noise, on the other hand, or Brownian noise which takes its name not from the color but from Robert Brown who discovered Brownian motion, produces a deep rumbling sound by lowering the high-frequency sounds from white noise. Some examples include rainfall, waterfall, thunder, and a shower with strong water pressure.

As of yet, there's no research backing up the claims that brown noise aids in sleep, unlike white noise which has had studies showing that it helped newborn babies and adults fall asleep faster. Different people have different means of falling asleep, and whether brown noise is truly effective or not, there's no harm in trying it.

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Forest & Bird, a conservation organization in New Zealand, annually holds a contest to elect the Bird of the Year, in order to raise awareness for some of the threatened native birds in New Zealand. The pūteketeke (Podiceps cristatus australis) was first recognized in 1844 as a subspecies of the great crested grebe and is native to Australia, Tasmania, and the South Island of New Zealand. Currently, there are fewer than 3,000 of the pūteketeke birds left in the wild.

Catching a whiff of the Bird of the Year contest, the staff of the late night show Last Week Tonight contacted the organization to ask them if they can campaign for the pūteketeke, to which they agreed. So, John Oliver released a worldwide campaign on behalf of the endangered bird. He and his team put out billboard ads in different parts of the world to convince people to vote for the pūteketeke. With all that effort, the pūteketeke won first with 290,374 votes, a landslide victory over the rest of its competition. Second place was taken by the North Island brown kiwi with 12,904 votes.

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NASA was founded on July 29, 1958 under the Eisenhower administration. Its purpose was to conduct research into flying within and outside the earth's atmosphere, but it was also established to consolidate the different US missile and space programs being done by different branches of the military. Over its 65-year history, NASA has made great strides toward learning about space, the different celestial bodies within our galaxy, and other technological advancements that further our efforts toward interplanetary exploration.

There have been many breakthrough moments in NASA's history, the most famous being the first landing of humans on the moon. But apart from that, NASA also took the first image of a black hole, took a photo that gave us definitive proof that the Earth is spherical, showed us what the Earth looked like viewed from the moon, and captured a photo of the Earth from roughly 3.2 billion miles from the Sun, just beyond the orbit of Neptune. These 16 iconic photos from NASA have been a testament of how far space exploration has come, and how much farther we have yet to go.

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I grew up listening to a whole variety of songs. Being raised in a religious household, gospel music has become ingrained in me and although my preferences for that particular genre has shifted and my musical sensibility for that category of songs has become more scrupulous, many of the songs that I heard when I was a child are still a part of me. On Sundays, my grandmother would turn on her radio and listen to songs from the 50s and 60s, and those also left their mark on me.

So, nowadays when I listen to new songs or a different genre of music, it fascinates me how many of the songs I find appealing have a connection to songs that I have grown up with or that I heard when I was younger. I have discovered, however, that my particular taste in music gravitates toward the alternative rock genre and some electro pop. This is more likely influenced by my discovery of Japanese bands, and songs from Japanese animated shows.

These things are all factors that contribute to my music palate. According to Nolan Gasser, a musician and musicologist, sociology plays a tremendous role behind our musical tastes. What we hear when we were babies and throughout our formative years become the home base of our musical sensibilities. But as we grow older, our taste in music evolves and expands as we become exposed to different music. For a deeper dive into musical taste, you may check out Nolan Gasser's Why You Like It: The Science & Culture of Musical Taste.

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