Month: October 2016

It’s a near-universal truth that Monday is the worst day of the week (and we’ve got the Sunday Sads to prove it). According to research done by Stanford University, even unemployed people see their morale dip on weekdays. Happiness rises with the number of hours you spend with family and friends, the study says, so even if you aren’t working, Monday morning can still bum you out.

Flip the script and make every day feel like Saturday (well, almost) with these expert tips.

1. BRING A PIECE OF YOUR WEEKEND INTO YOUR WEEK.

You don’t need to save all the fun stuff for the weekend, says Janet Zinn, a New York psychotherapist and coach. So get together with friends, try a new workout, go to early hours at a museum before work, or take yourself out to breakfast with a friend, Zinn suggests. “Anything that allows for some fun or feels restful during the week,” she says. “It could be a 20-minute shift in your schedule; or, if you have the flexibility, do something that takes at least an hour.”

2. WAKE UP EARLIER.

Weekend mornings are awesome because they’re quiet and relaxed, says Glen Stansberry, co-founder of Gentlemint.com. During the week, mornings tend to be rushed. Stansberry recommends you emulate your weekend mornings during the week by setting your alarm a little earlier. “It doesn’t have to be much, just try enough that it allows you to do something that you don’t normally get to do: drink your coffee slowly, take a nice, relaxed shower, even lounge around,” he says.

3. UNPLUG DURING THE WEEK.

One of the best parts of the weekend is that you can give yourself a break from business-related email, says Stansberry. But you can set limits on email during the week, too. “Make it a point—unless your job explicitly requires it—to turn off email for periods of time,” Stansberry says. “Check it in intervals instead of having it constantly on, and reply to messages in batches, which is actually much more efficient anyway.”

4. DO SOME LIGHT WORK ON THE WEEKEND.

Most likely, part of the reason you’re so stressed during the week is that you’re overloaded with work. But if you do a small amount of work on the weekend, you’ll free up some time during the week to do something fun, says Carole Lieberman, a Beverly Hills psychiatrist.

But this doesn’t mean you have to drag yourself to the office on a Saturday. “If you have reading to catch up on, you can use this as motivation to go someplace relaxing, like a park or the beach, where you can lay out a blanket, read, and have a little picnic,” Lieberman says. “If the weather doesn’t permit outdoor relaxation, you can take it inside to your favorite coffee ship or cozy bookstore.”

5. GET A NEW JOB.

A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that those who love their job and their boss had a much smaller—and sometimes even a non-existent—”weekend effect” on their moods. One of the major reasons why people look forward to the weekend is to get away from their jobs; but if you love your job, then you’ll be happier during the week, the study found.

If you can’t switch your job, you can find little ways to boost your mood at the office, says Gini Graham Scott, author of Enjoy! New Ways to Add Fun to Your Work Every Day. She suggests making more of an effort to become friends with your co-workers, including planning post-work socials, potluck lunches in the cafeteria, and coffee outings.

Dog owners tend to fall into one of two camps: Those who let their pups kiss them on the mouth and those who don’t. Some members of the former group defend their love of sloppy licks by saying a canine’s mouth is no dirtier than a person’s. But according to The New York Times, their muzzles actually teem with microorganisms that we, as humans, aren’t designed to battle.

Long story short, it’s not true that dogs’ mouths are more hygienic than ours. They contain as many microbes, and different ones from those that dwell in human saliva. Plus, some of the bacteria is zoonotic, meaning it can be passed from dogs to humans. For example, some common types of canine-transmitted zoonotic bacteria—including clostridium, E. coli, salmonella, and campylobacter—can cause unlucky pet owners to develop gastrointestinal disease.

Meanwhile, dogs often sniff, lick, and eat gross things, including other animals’ fecal matter. It’s rare—but entirely possible—for a canine to transmit an intestinal parasite to its owner by licking them on the face.

Still, this knowledge shouldn’t relegate you to a life without doggy licks. Experts say it’s likely fine for a dog’s tongue to touch your skin, since it won’t absorb the saliva. But since a dog’s saliva and pathogens can be absorbed through the nose, mouth, and eyes, you should probably set some limits on face-licking. The occasional kiss probably won’t hurt you—but just to stay safe, make sure your dog is de-wormed, up-to-date on all its vaccinations, and stays away from other animals’ feces (all things you should already be doing as a responsible dog parent).

[h/t The New York Times]

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What is the difference between fuel and propellant?

Robert Frost:

A fuel is a substance that can burn in the presence of oxygen. An oxidizer is a source of oxygen. A propellant is the combination of fuel and oxidizer. It is the chemical mixture that is burned to provide propulsion.

The three most common rocket propellants are liquid (hypergolic), liquid (non-hypergolic), and solid rocket.

For hypergolic fuels, these two substances are so reactive that just coming into contact with each other causes them to ignite. For non-hypergolic fuels, an ignition source is provided.

Pumps inject fuel and oxidizer into a combustion chamber where they burn, producing hot, rapidly expanding gases that are looking for a way out.

Solid rockets have a single substance that is pre-mixed to contain fuel and oxidizer. That substance is cut or molded into shapes and thicknesses appropriate for the types of burns the rocket needs to perform. That material is put inside the rocket fuselage. Sometimes it is bonded to the sides, sometimes it isn’t. And then ignition is provided in the center of the fuselage so that the fuel burns from the inside out.

With the liquid propellants, thrust can be easily manipulated using the turbo pumps that feed the fuel and oxidizer into the combustion chamber. The engine can be stopped and restarted. Solid rockets can usually only be controlled by their shape. Once they are burning, it really isn’t practical to stop them from burning. Some rockets work around this by using multiple sections of solid fuel and then burning them separately.

This post originally appeared on Quora. Click here to view.

 
Glaucoma is a leading cause of irreversible blindness in the world. A condition of the eye where blocked drainage canals lead to a buildup of pressure and loss of vision, glaucoma has no cure. Treatment is limited to applying medicinal latanoprost drops in order to alleviate the accompanying pressure of the disease, hopefully keeping it from progressing. But drop application can be imprecise, and patients often forget to use them. So two researchers at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary and Boston Children’s Hospital recently designed a contact lens that delivers medication directly to the eye.

Drug-dispensing contact lenses of the past have been ineffective because they did not dispense the drugs quickly or consistently enough to relieve symptoms. However, the researchers were able to show in a 2014 study that their lens design successfully delivered medication continuously to the eyes of glaucomatous rabbits for one month. In their latest study on glaucomatous monkeys, published in the medical journal Ophthalmology, they were able to show not only that their lens could deliver the drug continuously, but that the lenses alleviated the ocular pressure caused by the disease—possibly even more effectively than manually applied drops do.

“One of the first times I presented our research, I heard some people thought it wouldn’t work in a real contact lens due to prejudices based on previous failures,” Daniel S. Kohane, director of the Laboratory for Biomaterials and Drug Delivery at Boston Children’s Hospital, and a professor of anesthesiology at Harvard Medical School, tells mental_floss.

The secret of their success, says Kohane’s collaborator, Joseph B. Ciolino, an ophthalmologist at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, was “the development of polymer drug delivery.”

Kohane explains the process using a Jell-O analogy: Think of the drug as a red powdered dye and the eye as a bathtub. “If you take the red powder and you throw it in a bathtub, all the water in the bathtub becomes red,” he says. However, “if you put the dye into Jell-O, and you throw the Jell-O cubes into the bathtub, the tub will become red very, very slowly.” In the case of the contact lens, “the drug is released slowly by a combination of diffusion and degradation of the polymer film.”

What they found when they applied it to the eyes of monkeys with glaucoma was that “our low-dose lens was equally as effective as the [latanoprost] drops, and in the high-dose lens, was more effective in reducing pressure than the drops,” Ciolino tells mental_floss. “When we first saw the data, we were ecstatic.”

Of course, Ciolino is careful not to “overstate” the findings, since they have yet to be proven effective in human trials, but says, “our findings are potentially exciting to those who are interested in sustained drug delivery.” Kohane hopes to start human trials within a year. 

For the millions of people with glaucoma, these new lenses may offer new hope for living with the disease.

While most of us think of a coffin as having a pretty singular purpose, there are plenty of inventive people out there who have reimagined what the coffin (or casket) can be. Here are some examples of alternative uses for coffins, both before and after death.

1. BOOKSHELF

 
Thinking about building your own coffin but not sure how to store it until your last exit? Just add some slats and set it on end, and you have an instant ominous bookshelf. Woodworker Chuck Lakin makes a more subtle bookcase coffin that is basically two shelves hinged together, ready to transition into a chest for burial. Phoenix Boatworks likewise creates canoe-shaped coffins that function as bookshelves until the “final voyage.” Designer William Warren, meanwhile, has envisioned “Shelves for Life” with wooden parts for book storage that can be reconfigured into coffin parts in death.

2. FLOWER PLANTER

Back in 2013, a man in Northumberland, England, discovered that the garden trough he’d been using for three decades was in fact a rare Roman sarcophagus. That discovery followed a 2012 auction of a Roman marble coffin that had been found in a Dorset garden. Maybe your resting place will have an unexpected resurrection—it might if you’re buried in stone like a member of the Roman Empire.

3. COUCH

Coffin Couches create their plush furniture from 18 gauge steel coffins obtained from California funeral homes. These aren’t being recycled out of the cemetery. The coffins are models that have “slight cosmetic inconsistencies,” have been scratched during shipment, or were bought by a family and held a body, but not used in cremation or burial.

4. COFFEE TABLE

 
Designer Charles Constantine‘s “Coffin Table” might seem like a bold modular choice for the living room with its pine wood angles. Made with open sides for storage, it’s also an unusual bent shape. This hints at its future reuse as a coffin, in which the body is arranged in a fetal position facing the eastern sun, a sign of rebirth in some cultures.

5. POOL TABLE

 
Although this isn’t exactly up to regulation billiards standards, the coffin pool table from Casket Furniture was envisioned as a source of entertainment in life before its final reuse as a tomb. Considering both a fine pool table and high-end coffin cost thousands of dollars, it makes sense to get some enjoyment from the object in the time you have.

6. TANNING BED

The slyly named “Sundead” was a 2012 conceptual project in which Argentine artist Luciano Podcaminsky built a tanning bed contained in a coffin. The piece contrasted the quest for physical perfection with the inevitability of that body’s decay.

7. BAR AND GRILL

This is best suited for a cookout where your friends are quite chill about their transience, as the roving Open Casket Bar and Grill from the Nightmare Cruisers Hearse Club is a combo hearse and coffin turned into a mobile grilling machine. And if you’re in the Detroit area, it’s rentable for parties.

8. BOAT

Last year, a mysterious “Lost Undertaker” was spotted paddling a coffin in Australia’s Lake Burley Griffin. Chilean artist Sebastian Errazuriz was way ahead of him, exhibiting his 2009 “Boat Coffin” in the 2012 London Design Festival. The casket-shaped contraption has a working motor and keel, the idea being that a “sailor” could stage his or her own funeral, navigating the casket from shore, then pulling its plug when they’re ready for the end.

9. HOT ROD

You’d think the data on traffic fatalities would make drivers superstitious, but hot rods made from coffins aren’t that uncommon. The most famous is likely the puntastic DRAG-U-LA from The Munsters, especially the 1965 episode “Hot Rod Herman,” in which Grandpa Munster competes in a drag race. That car was made from an actual fiberglass coffin. Classic and custom car fans, perhaps inspired by the eerie auto, are still building their own DIY vehicles—maybe for some grand theft grave digging.

In an effort to harness alternative energy, one Icelandic company is looking deep beneath the Earth’s surface. The Iceland Deep Drilling Project (IDDP) is currently drilling a 3-mile-deep hole into Reykjanes, Iceland that will tap into the power of super-hot magma, New Scientist reports.

While deeper holes have been drilled into solid rock in the past, the IDDP rig will be the deepest well of its kind to penetrate a fluid system. The area they’re targeting is a landward portion of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge fault line. At those depths, ocean water that’s seeped beneath the seabed meets flowing magma, creating a “supercritical steam” that holds more energy than liquid or gas.

The project began on August 12 and is slated to wrap up by the end of 2016. Once completed, the hole is expected to be the hottest on Earth, reaching temperatures as high as about 1800°F.

Iceland is already ahead of the curve when it comes to geothermal energy: Its prime real estate along the Mid-Atlantic ridge allows for the operation of six geothermal power plants. This latest project could deliver the underground power to the country on a much larger scale. Albert Albertsson of HS Orka, an Icelandic geothermal energy company working on IDDP, told New Scientist that their hole will be capable of producing 50 megawatts. That’s enough to power 50,000 households compared to the 5000 that run on a conventional geothermal well.

[h/t New Scientist]

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Vanilla Ice may soon be more popular for his design skills than for his rhymes. HGTV’s Vanilla Ice Project, the rapper’s house-flipping home renovation show, is gearing up for its seventh season. And you could be on the receiving end of his architectural expertise, as a project he and his team designed and built is up for sale.

The 4000-square-foot McMansion borders a canal in Lighthouse Point, Florida, an oceanside community just outside Boca Raton. It’s got four bedrooms, three and a half bathrooms, and an 8-foot-deep pool. Not to mention the canal waterfront just at the edge of the backyard. Inside, everything is white, shiny, and very slippery-looking. (It’s—dare I say—downright icy.)

This may come as a disappointment for true fans of Rob Van Winkle (the rapper’s legal name), but it’s not the home he was renovating when he was caught burglarizing the next door neighbors in 2015.

But the home does have other perks. For nearly $2.4 million, according to the listing, the sellers will even throw in a boat “so you can move right in and experience the lifestyle of being on the waterfront and being a boater.” What’s an “as seen on TV” purchase without a little freebie thrown in?

All images courtesy Estately.

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Although passing gas is a fact of life, there are times when you may want to reduce your chances of clearing a room or creating a biohazard situation in an elevator.

Fortunately, a new study offers up some helpful advice. Researchers at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, recently examined how different foods can affect the amount of hydrogen sulfide produced by bacteria in the gut. While farts are made up of several different gases—oxygen, nitrogen, methane, carbon dioxide, and hydrogen—it’s the hydrogen sulfide that’s responsible for making your wind smell like a carton of eggs left to rot in the sun.

In order to discover how the gas interacts with feces, the scientists gathered the poop of seven healthy volunteers and then mixed it with components commonly found in both meat and carbohydrates to see which produced more of the odor-causing gas. The result? Cysteine, an amino acid found in meat, eggs, and other protein-heavy foods, increased the hydrogen sulfide sevenfold.

But when they mixed the waste with fructans and resistant starch, production of the sulfide was reduced by 75 percent.

In other words, your typical bodybuilder’s diet that’s high in protein is likely to make for a terrible post-workout car ride. If you plan on being in a situation where a malignant toot would be socially crippling, you might want to ease up on the eggs and instead opt for carbs like bananas, potatoes, wheat, or vegetables like artichokes and asparagus.

According to lead study author Chu Yao, the biggest takeaway from the research would be not to avoid fiber for fear you’ll suffer from gas. While fart production might increase, fiber soaking up water in the intestine helps knock out the sulfide and reduce the smell.

“The concerning thing is that there are all these people walking around constipated because they are too scared to eat fiber in case they do a bad fart,” Yao told New Scientist.

[h/t New Scientist]