This year, there were several studies and researches that have been conducted in the medical field that might give a lot of us a fighting chance and hope to live. The BBC has compiled a list of all the breakthroughs that could help save and change lives for the better.

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Just a month or so after the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, New York City will have one more sight for people to revel at and look forward to, and that is New Year's at Times Square. Spenser Mestel of The New York Times writes about it:

More than a million revelers are expected to celebrate New Year’s in Times Square. They’ll start gathering in the early afternoon, the hard-core among them wearing diapers so as not to lose their spots. No matter where they stand, however, they are certain to be covered in some of the 3,000 pounds of confetti that will be released 20 seconds before midnight.

The confetti drop started in 1992, when it was intended to lighten up the tone of the event. “Up until that point, it had just been a drunken brawl,” said Treb Heining, who managed the confetti that first year and has been doing it ever since. “It was so seedy.”

The confetti was an instant success. “We literally saw it transform the whole Times Square area before our eyes,” Mr. Heining said, “which is what they wanted — to clean the place up.”

Check out the article on The New York Times to see how they plan the confetti drop from start to finish.

(Image credit: Johnny Milano/The New York Times)

Just two days after Colin O'Brady finished his solo ski adventure across Antarctica, British explorer Louis Rudd has also made it toward the end line.

Concluding the most epic polar competition since Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott raced to the South Pole in 1911, British adventurer Louis Rudd skied to the edge of the Antarctic land mass on December 29, the 56th day of his expedition, to complete his solo, unsupported, and unassisted crossing of the frozen continent.

It was American Colin O’Brady who had completed his own unsupported solo crossing of the same route only three days earlier, making him the first person to ever do so. Both men had set off on November 3 a mile apart at the Atlantic coast on the other side of the great white continent aiming to be the first person to ski alone and unassisted from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific by way of the South Pole. Now Rudd becomes the second member of this ultra-exclusive club.

Sharing his thoughts on the matter, he says:

“I’ve always been keen to avoid the media [who try] to make it a race issue,” he wrote. “The minute you get drawn into a race scenario, everything you’re doing is dictated by the other person ... It changes the whole nature of the expedition. I decided right from the early stages I wasn’t going to get drawn into that… I’ve just come and done my journey.”

Read more on National Geographic.

(Image credit: Louis Rudd)

Frames of Reference is a 1960 educational film that was made to be shown in high school physics courses. It features professors Patterson Hume and Donald Ivey of the University of Toronto who illustrate various physics concepts through different frames of references. - via Aeon

I don't know about other families but usually, children are told to do chores so that they can help out their parents at home, and this is done without compensation. Children do it because it would be the least that they could do for their parents, and they don't really need to be coaxed into doing it, do they?

In America, it seems the mindset is different. Children are motivated to do their chores in order to get allowance. However, in the long-term this may have the opposite effect and may even be counterproductive.

Joe Pinsker writes about the opinions of various experts who say that tying chores to allowance may be detrimental to children's motivation for helping out:

A range of experts I consulted expressed concern that tying allowance very closely to chores, whatever its apparent short-term effectiveness, can send kids unintentionally counterproductive messages about family, community, and personal responsibility. In fact, the way chores work in many households worldwide points to another way, in which kids get involved earlier, feel better about their contributions, and don’t need money as an enticement.

Suniya Luthar, a psychologist at Arizona State University who studies families, is skeptical of the idea of paying kids on a per-chore basis. “How sustainable is it if you’re going to pay a child a dime for each time he picks up his clothes off the floor?” she says. “What are you saying—that you’re owed something for taking care of your stuff?”

What do you think about this approach?

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For several decades now, one of the buzz words in the medical field has been 'stem cell'. It has been said to aid in treating illnesses like multiple sclerosis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Alzheimer's disease, and heart diseases.

For the past three years, researchers at the Hubrecht Institute in the Netherlands have been painstakingly cataloging and mapping all the proliferating cells found in mouse hearts, looking for cardiac stem cells. The elusive cells should theoretically be able to repair damaged heart muscle, so the stakes in finding them have been high.

This week, however, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is scheduled to announce the results of the Hubrecht team’s work: no evidence of cardiac stem cells at all.

Most of the stem cells we have identified come from the bone marrow and the blastocyst. But it seems that our cells are actually more capable than we thought.

Read more on Nautilus.

(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Our survival instinct is what has kept us going through millennia. No matter what difficult situation we may face or what unexpected obstacles we experience in our journey through life, the human spirit has proven that it takes a lot before it breaks. We may sustain damage along the way, we may be inflicted with wounds and bruises, but as long as we have breath, we will press onward.

In this collection of stories by Will Cockrell and Peter Frick-Wright at Outside Online, we get to read and learn about the different ways people did to survive from the most shocking and unrelenting of situations.

It takes some of the most extreme situations to test our desperate desire to live.

(Image credit: Martin Wickstrom/Outside Mag)

Famous science fiction author and a professor of biochemistry, Isaac Asimov was asked by the Toronto Star around 35 years ago what he think the world would be in 2019 and he gave a few interesting predictions. The question was based from George Orwell's 1984 which was published in 1949, predicting what the world might be 35 years later. Here is Asimov's answer:

Asimov wrote that it was pointless to imagine the future of society if the United States and the Soviet Union were to engage in nuclear war, so he assumed that wouldn't happen. He then broke down his predictions under two main themes: computerization and space utilization.

(Image credit: Big Think)

Water is one of the basic needs for survival but not all places have a rich supply of water. Arid areas scarcely receive any water all year round and it would be very difficult and expensive to build irrigation systems.

So a group of researchers from Ohio State University set to find solutions and they need not look far. They simply observed how nature survives in such places:

“We thought: ‘How can we gather water from the ambient air around us?’” said Bharat Bhushan, Ohio Eminent Scholar and Howard D. Winbigler, Professor of mechanical engineering at Ohio State. “And so, we looked to the things in nature that already do that: the cactus, the beetle, desert grasses.”

The cactus, beetle and desert grasses all collect water condensed from nighttime fog, gathering droplets from the air and filtering them to roots or reservoirs, providing enough hydration to survive.

And so they tested out the idea. The results seemed favorable although it has only been done inside a lab. It would take a bit more resources to scale it up but if they are able to make a large model, it might solve the issue of water supply in many regions of the world.

(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

We live in a three-dimensional world. Everything that we perceive and how we move around the space in which we are contained, it is all in three dimensions. But perhaps you have heard of four and even ten dimensions.

So what does it mean to live in a three-dimensional or even a multi-dimensional reality? Margaret Wertheim explores the concept in her article on Aeon.

(Image credit: Richard Wilkinson/Aeon)

It's nice to just be out of the urban jungle once in a while and experience the beauty of nature especially the picturesque landscape of the night sky gleaming with all the stars and celestial objects that decorate it.

In 2017, a multinational research team found that the Earth had gotten brighter at a rate of about 2 percent each year between 2012 and 2016.

Increasingly, denizens of the developed world do not know what Paul Bogard, author of “The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light,” calls “a wild sky” — the brilliant stars seen over Zion National Park in Utah, or Assateague Island National Seashore in Maryland and Virginia, or Death Valley, California.

In addition to obscuring an essential aspect of the natural world, light pollution has been shown to disrupt normal sleep-wake cycles in humans and animals alike and to disorient wildlife in detrimental ways.

Read more on Undark.

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No surprise there. A lot of people who are well-versed on the internet know that there are so many scams and shams going on in the internet.

There are fake accounts, fake websites, fake reviews, fake products. Anything and everything can be peddled on the internet and unsuspecting victims would still bite.

In this story by Max Read, he tells us about two of the largest digital ad-fraud operations online. Read more on New York Mag.

(Image credit: Ayatgali Tuleubek/NY Mag)

Yup, it seems that someday, robots will take over the world. There were already developments regarding an AI news reporter in China and now, we have AI creating realistic photos of people, none of whom exist.

All of them come, in fact, as products of a state-of-the-art generative adversarial network, a type of artificial intelligence algorithm that pits multiple neural networks against each other in a kind of machine-learning match.

These neural networks have, it seems, competed their way to generating images of fabricated human faces that genuine humans have trouble distinguishing from images of the real deal.

Read more on Open Culture.

(Image credit: Open Culture)

Nobody can truly justify taking the life of another person, taking the law in one's own hands, thinking that you are doing them and others a service. For Samuel Little, he thought of himself as "an angel of mercy, divinely commisioned to euthanize." At least that's how he saw his acts of violence and murder.

Jillian Lauren shares her interviews with Little in prison at The Cut.

(Image credit: Samuel Little/The Cut)

I'm all for helping people cope with substance use and drug addiction, and rehabilitating them so that they wouldn't go into relapse.

This new method may be a bit of a stretch but if it succeeds, perhaps it can help many people who are suffering from addiction, and not just from drugs but from other addictions as well.

Recently, much attention has focused on addiction as a chronic disease, but Mike Saladin, the research and clinical psychologist who led the study, explains that addiction is, in part, a disorder of learning and memory. The goal of his study is to reactivate memories of drug use — and then weaken them so they lose their power.

(Image credits: Wikimedia Commons)