Taken at their word, the USDA’s official recommendations for dealing with leftovers seem designed to scare Americans into tossing out perfectly good food. “Discard any leftovers that have been left out for more than 2 hours at room temperature,” the federal agency advises, and “leftovers can [only]...
What if your Fitbit, or Apple Watch, or whatever other doodad you use to obsessively track how many steps you take each day didn’t just keep tabs on your body, but actually made you money in the process? That’s the premise of a new paper out of...
We live in an age in which people willingly lube up homemade electrodes, strap them to their heads, and then crank up some voltage to zap their brains. It’s called transcranial direct-current stimulation, or tDCS, and it is very much a thing — there’s some slick consumer products you...
Once upon a time, the internet was made up of awkward personal blogs and weird webpages about string theory. Then, for a while, it was mostly made up of cats (plus some quizzes). But in the past year or so, the internet has entered a new phase:...
We live in a post-tryptophan world. The idea that turkey makes you sleepy because it has a special chemical in it has been a standard part of Thanksgiving small talk since time immemorial. Plus, having a scientific term on hand let us pretend there was a pseudo-medical...
The promise of “power posing” was simple: Stand like Wonder Woman for two minutes a day, and you’ll instantly feel more powerful, more accomplished, and able to achieve. In recent years, power poses have become a standard of the productivity-maximizing business life hack literature. You could read...
Spend enough time on Yelp, and you’ll lose your faith in the wisdom of the crowd. Someone will give a Sichuan restaurant one star for including Sichuan peppercorns in their food, and then go on to rave about the turkey melt at Subway. But sometimes, in the...
“All you can eat” is more than just a business model for buffets — it’s a dream, a utopia, the promise of the infinite plenty of the cornucopia, rolled up into four magic words. At a buffet, the bowls aren’t just big; they’re bottomless. The refills aren’t just free;...
Dr. Jerome Pittman, founder of the Gentle Circumcision clinic in Culver City, CA, estimates that he gets through about 15 procedures a day. Newborns in the morning, older kids in the afternoon, adults on Fridays (so they have time to heal before work on Monday). School-age patients...
The march of progress has not been kind to comedy. The banana peel gag? Ruined when we developed a modern waste-management system. Seltzer in the face? Hard to accomplish with a can of La Croix. Crossed letters, missed phone calls, mixed-up messages left on answering machines? Driven...
In a low gray building on the side of a dusty road in Sun Valley, CA, human bodies are being sliced up, bloodied, and otherwise mutilated in unspeakable ways. It’s high season for horror, and Dapper Cadaver, a “death-related prop house and prop fabrication shop” is churning...
Feel like you haven’t gotten a good handshake in years? It’s not you. Kids today can’t grip for shit. A study out of Winston-Salem State University found that men in their early 20s in 1985 could crush, on average, 121 pounds with their right hand, and 105...