Packing is one of the biggest drags about moving to a new home. It’s such a pain, most people try to put it off for as long as possible. But, as with most forms of procrastination, this just makes the process harder. Learn from your past mistakes and start planning your move at least two months in advance (if possible).

This checklist from residential property development company Barratt Homes will help you plan your move, from when to throw away unwanted stuff to how best to unpack in your new place. It also includes some steps you might not have thought to do, like taking pictures of utility meters and finding a pet sitter to watch Fido on moving day. 

[h/t Daily Infographic]

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The Scariest Movie Monsters. With video evidence, if you really want to watch them.
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The World’s Last Great Wilderness. Preserving Antarctica will depend on international cooperation.
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Find the Most Hipster Neighborhood In Every State, In Case You Were Wondering. You probably haven’t heard of them.
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Will sitcoms ever stop shaming single people? It’s not a personal failure, just the latest fashionable group to make fun of.  
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Research May Show Why Acne Today Means Younger-looking Skin Tomorrow. One bright spot in a few miserable years.
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People of Earth: Inspired by the Truth and Empathy of Aliens. It’s a sitcom that actually has a lot to say.
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The pioneering paranoia of America’s preppers. They’re ready for disaster, or even an apocalypse.
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9 Halloween Pumpkin Projects. Just in case you want to do something besides a traditional jack-o-lantern.

Is a dead shark in a tank really worth millions of dollars? Art, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder—but Damien Hirst’s infamous 1991 work, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, fetched a reported $12 million for reasons aside from its creative merit. In the video above, Vox breaks down the economics behind high-profile art market sales, and explains why an art dealer’s reputation is sometimes just as important (if not more so) than a work’s creator.

[h/t Vox]

Banner image: iStock

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We’re all constantly bombarded with health advice, from advertisements to Facebook postings to warnings from Grandma. Unfortunately, much of that advice is unreliable, unproven, and downright harmful. It can be very hard to separate medical fact from fiction, but that’s exactly what scientists are teaching elementary-school kids in Uganda to do.

Andy Oxman is research director at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. He’s been working in Uganda since 2012 on the Supporting the Use of Research Evidence (SURE) program, which aims to improve both access to health care and patients’ ability to make better-informed health decisions. The program brought Oxman into conversations with politicians, who struggled with the same fact-or-fiction issues as the rest of us. But educating them was an uphill battle.

“Working with policymakers made it clear most adults don’t have time to learn, and they have to unlearn a lot of stuff.” But kids, he thought—kids might catch on pretty quickly, Oxman told Vox.

The best-known primer on evidence-based health education is a book called Testing Treatments (available for free here [PDF]). The book breaks down the basics of scientific literacy and teaches readers to cast a careful eye at health claims and medical research. “You don’t need to be a scientist to think critically and ask good questions,” co-author Iain Chalmers told Vox.

After the latest edition of the book came out in 2012, Oxman approached Chalmers with his big idea: to teach its contents to children. “You’re mad,” Chalmers said. But Oxman was serious. Why shouldn’t kids be given the tools to evaluate what they’re told?

Oxman and Chalmers enlisted other scientists from Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Norway, and the UK to help identify the most important lessons a health literacy program should teach when considering the value of different medical treatments. They arrived at a list of 32 concepts, highlighting the need to be wary of things like small clinical trials, dramatic results, and a bias toward newer or more expensive treatments.

Next, they collaborated with schoolteachers in Uganda to translate those concepts into lesson plans, a teacher guide, and workbooks and readings illustrated with cartoons.

Because evidence and data are kind of their thing, the researchers decided to test the program’s efficacy as they implemented it. They set up a randomized controlled trial (the gold standard for scientific studies) involving more than 15,000 fifth-graders. From June to September of one school year, half of the students trained in BS detection, while the others went about their education as usual.

When the school term ended, the researchers tested all the kids to see if they’d become savvier consumers of health information. They’re currently crunching the numbers, but expect to find that their program did the students some good.

“My hope,” Oxman told Vox, “is that these resources get used in curricula in schools around the world, and that we end up with the children … who become science-literate citizens and who can participate in sensible discussion about policy and our health.”

[h/t Vox]

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In the Mojave Desert you’ll find California City, a city famous for dreaming big. A huge chunk of it is gridded roads—complete with names, speed limits, and GPS driving directions—with nothing built on the vast majority of those plots.

Incorporated in 1965, California City is a living contradiction. Today it’s a working community with roughly 15,000 residents. But it’s simultaneously enormous, having been planned at a scale to rival Los Angeles. The city has over 200 square miles of land, planned by Nat Mendelsohn as a model city.

In this mini-documentary, Tom Scott visits California City and interviews various city officials. He digs into the city’s storied past, and shows us both what is there and what is not. The city is physically enormous, so it’s certainly possible that one day it will grow to meet its original plan. It might just take a few centuries.

Have a look at the third-largest city in California (by land area, anyway):

Related is this behind-the-scenes video in which Scott explains why he’s interested in California City:

Even the Peruvian Amazon isn’t safe from politics during an election cycle. Earlier this fall, while on a jungle excursion, nature shutterbug Jeff Cremer photographed a furry yellow critter perched on a tree branch. Scientists call it the Megalopyge opercularis, or the flannel moth caterpillar—but since the insect’s gravity-defying neon hair bears a striking resemblance to Donald Trump’s notorious coif, Cremer re-christened it the Donald Trump caterpillar.

In some ways, the Amazon jungle and the Washington, D.C. political scene are a lot alike. But unlike politicians, animals typically don’t want to attract attention, since they want to avoid predators. In the video below, PBS “It’s Okay to Be Smart” host Jon Hanson explains how the Trump caterpillar’s garish fuzz actually scares other critters away—and why other organisms have evolved to mimic its appearance.

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