Benjamin Franklin once said, “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.” But surely this is yet another instance of the Man keeping us down? Growing scientific evidence suggests that some of us are hardwired to be night owls, and we’re...
Last month, a 34-year-old man developed a series of skull-crushing “thunderclap” headaches after eating a Carolina Reaper—the world’s hottest pepper—while participating in a competitive eating event. The extremely hot pepper reportedly motivated blood vessels in his brain to constrict, which was diagnosed as the “unusual” cause of...
We’ve all done the pee dance—when you have to go so badly you can’t help but do a weird little dance to hold it in until you reach the toilet. But does bobbing up and down and gyrating actually minimize that feeling of a soon-to-burst bladder? Dr....
When I was just a young boy, I slammed my thumb in a car door. That fingernail proceeded to fall off about a week later, revealing a brain-like section of skin that both intrigued my boyish self and absolutely terrified every normal adult who had the misfortune...
Drunk sleep is famously lousy. If you pass out at 2 a.m., odds are you’ll wake up at dawn, unrested and unable to go back to sleep. Even if you do sleep through the early morning hours, noon finds you no better rested. A fog envelops you...
Most of us wake up in the morning and proceed to wipe away our eye gunk without stopping to think: What is this stuff, where does it come from and why does it mostly only come about when we’re asleep? Dr. Andrea Thau, optometrist and president of...
Serve someone a bucket of fried chicken and they’ll gleefully gnaw on the bones. Serve someone a bucket of raw chicken, and they’ll vomit on your shoes. Needless to say, many of us have an aversion to raw meat, which isn’t unwarranted: Uncooked flesh is riddled with...
When you gotta’ go, you gotta’ go—even if that means squatting in a heavily-used public restroom. During moments like these, some turn to toilet seat covers as a last-ditch effort to protect their behinds from legions of strangers’ germs. But is that thin toilet-seat-shaped sheet of paper...
The World Health Organization (WHO) has released a five-year plan to help countries phase out industrially-produced trans fats from the global food supply, in an attempt to improve public health, and like, save our lives. Their mission is honorable, indeed: They estimate that trans fats are responsible...
I’m shook. I just discovered I might have been drinking feces the past few years, and my world has never felt like more of a lie. For pretty much my entire adulthood, I’ve operated under the belief that you almost never need to clean a water glass....
Getting blitzed in the middle of the day, unless you meant to, can be far more unpleasant than getting accidentally hammered at night. This is because day drinking (usually) requires maintaining at least the appearance of real-world competence while you continue to challenge that competence with a...
You go to the beach happy. You soak up some sun. You jump in the water. You have a couple of drinks. It’s maybe the least effort you can put into anything ever. But by the time you get home, you feel as though you’ve spent the...