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Science

A dog's sense of smell is so strong it's like having a second set of eyes, study says

They can even detect the adrenaline we secrete when we are scared or anxious.

A dog's sense of smell is so strong it's like having a second set of eyes, study says
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We know that dogs have highly sensitive noses. Anyone who’s tried to hide a peanut butter snack deep in the bottom of a backpack has found this out the hard way. But a new study suggests that dogs not only use their powerful snouts to smell, they also use them to see the world.

The study, published in The Journal of Neuroscience, revealed that vision and smell are linked in the neural pathways found in a dog’s brain. This is a trait not currently found in any other species in the world. If you need any further proof that dogs are special, here it is.

A team of veterinary and biology researchers performed MRI scans of a variety of canines and mapped an “extensive network,” starting from the olfactory bulb (the part of the brain that deals with smells) and forming connections with multiple cortices of the dog’s brain. That included the occipital lobe (the area of the brain that processes vision), but also the corticospinal tract and limbic system.

Basically, how a doggo sees, moves, feels … it’s all connected to smell. Yes, they really are just adorable walking noses.

This enhanced network explains why a blind dog might still be able to successfully play fetch, veterinary expert and one of the researchers on the study Dr. Philippa Johnson told Sky News.

dog smell study

Dog science is the best science.

Photo by Agatha on Unsplash

She used the example that where humans tend to walk into a room and rely heavily on vision to interpret their environment, blind dogs “can orientate around their environment, and they don’t bump into things.” This can be especially comforting for those who own dogs with incurable eye disease, Johnson noted.

Considering that a dog’s nose has up to 300 million olfactory receptors (compared to the mere six million we humans have), it's understandable that smell would play such a large role in a dog’s everyday experience. With just one inhale, they can detect bombs, recognize a long lost friend and find their way back home.

dog nose study

Hey you, why the long face?

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According to VCA Animal Hospitals, they can even detect the adrenaline we secrete when we are scared or anxious. That talent alone makes them very empathetic companions.

The study’s findings mark only the beginning of exploration. Johnson and her team plan to study other animals who rely heavily on their sense of smell. Included in that research lineup are horses, whose heads are “predominantly a nasal organ,” and cats, who “have the most amazing olfactory system too, and probably more connections than the dog,” according to Johnson.

Meanwhile, we can all bask in yet another reason to love dogs. Suddenly all that nonstop sniffing makes sense.

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Culture

Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard open up about being attracted to other people - and why that's OK

For many couples, bringing up such a sensitive topic can cause some major jealousy.

via The Walt Disney Company / Flickr

One of the ways to tell if you're in a healthy relationship is whether you and your partner are free to talk about other people you find attractive. For many couples, bringing up such a sensitive topic can cause some major jealousy.

Of course, there's a healthy way to approach such a potentially dangerous topic.

Telling your partner you find someone else attractive shouldn't be about making them feel jealous. It's probably also best that if you're attracted to a coworker, friend, or their sibling, that you keep it to yourself.

But, being open about your sexual feelings, can be a way to spice things up in the bedroom and to let your partner know what you like.

Actress and mental health advocate Kristen Bell admits that she and her husband, actor Dax Shepard, have learned how to be open about their attraction to other people. The couple believes that being able to talk about such taboo topics without making each other jealous is a great way to preserve their relationship.

"He can tell me someone he finds attractive, female or male, 'cause he pauses the Olympics on a lot of runners, but it doesn't make me feel like he's going to leave me for that person because I'm not allowing my self-esteem to be affected," she explained.

Bell believes that it's completely normal and healthy for people in monogamous relationships to be attracted to other people.

"I know there are people on planet Earth that are more attractive than me, and well, we're not dead. I have to acknowledge we're monkeys," Bell said. As an attractive, famous couple working in Hollywood, there is extra pressure for them to be able to handle their jealousy.

The couple has also done a good job at accepting the fact that Bell is the primary bread-winner in the family. Studies show men have higher levels of stress if their wives earn more than 40% of their home's combined income.

About a third of women in the U.S. make more than their husbands.

While Shepard has had a successful career, acting in films such as "Idiocracy" and "Without a Paddle," Bell has starred in some major hits including, "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" and the "Bad Moms" films.

She's also made a pretty penny voicing Princess Anna in Disney's "Frozen" franchise.

"I think I've always out-earned him," Bell said about their careers. "I got a lot of opportunity, you're sharing in it, we're able to provide for a ton of our family members who may or may not be struggling," she continued, as if addressing Shepard. "I don't look at it like, 'This is mine and this is yours.' I'm like, 'This is ours. Get over it.'"

Bell believes that the couple's ability to get over petty jealousy is one way to make sure their unique relationship stands the test of time.

"Do you want to be on the porch with someone when you're 80?" Bell asked. "We both want that."


This article originally appeared on 5.6.21

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Mental Health

13 powerful therapy 'one-liners' everyone needs to hear

If you can remember just 3 of these, your life will get dramatically better.

Photo by Anthony Tran on Unsplash

You know how you can hear a million songs about love, or grief, or anger, but there's one in particular that somehow captures it in a way that resonates perfectly with you, and you can never forget it?

The same goes for good advice.

There's a different between intuitively knowing what you should do, and having it presented in a way that energizes you to your very core and inspires action.

A Reddit thread titled: "What's one thing a therapist has said to you that you will never forget?" aimed to capture some such advice.

It was chock full of good quick wins for how to approach problems, reframe our thinking, and get out of our own way.


One-liners like these aren't a replacement for proper therapy, of course, but they are great reminders for almost all of us.

I reached out to a few mental health professionals, too, to hear about the things they end up telling patients over and over and over. Here are the best responses.

1. Feelings follow action.

"My most common advice to my clients is to start doing things before they feel better. Feelings follow actions, not the other way around," says Thomas Banta, a clinical mental health counselor.

"If you wait until you're no longer depressed to do things you used to enjoy, you won't be doing the things that make you feel better!"

2. Are you mapping or trapping?

"When I work with couples something I always encourage people to notice if they are 'mapping or trapping'," says Alex Banta, Clinical Director and therapist at Thriveworks.

"This means are you actively helping your partner know how to love and support you or 'mapping'. Or are your waiting for your partner to read your mind ultimately leading to them falling into a 'trap'."

3. Pain is necessary, suffering is optional.

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"Few people enjoy cleaning a toilet, but it has to get done. Cleaning the toilet might be a pain, but ruminating on how much you hate doing it before, during, and after is suffering," Audrey Schoen, licensed marriage and family therapist.

"I often encourage clients to find the line where pain ends and suffering begins, because suffering is the only part you have any control over."

4. How would ___ tell this story?

"One question that I tend to ask my clients when they're telling a story about how someone behaved that offended them is 'If [blank] were in this session with us, how do you think they would tell this story?'" recommends Paris Smith of Mending Minds Mental Health Collective.

"I see it helps with challenging my clients' perspectives and taking into consideration how many assumptions we make about situations and others. More often than not those assumptions are negative. Taking into consideration that there are things we might be missing, helps us to not take things so personally. It's typically less about us and more about them."

5. If you did know, what would the answer be?

"One of the most effective reframes I use, with my younger clients in particular when asking a difficult question, and getting the answer 'I don't know' [is], 'I understand that you don't know, and that's OK. But if you did know, what would the answer be?'" says author and coach Mark Papadas.

And here are the best self-reported answers from Reddit.

6. "You're a people pleaser. And, aren't you a people? So, when is it YOUR turn?"

This one must have hit u/Darkm0or like a ton of bricks.

7. "Acknowledge your feelings, let them go, and move on."

aerial photography of body of water with trees around Photo by Jessica Furtney on Unsplash

"Notice the feelings, like leaves on a river. Call them what they are, then let them go, let them float down the river past you. Don't judge yourself for having them, and don't engage with them. Simply acknowledge them, let them go, and move on." - obligated_existence

8. “When you stop making yourself small, some people will no longer fit in your life.”

- gethee2anunnery

9. “Just because someone is trying their best that doesn’t mean it’s okay.”

u/myrtlebarracuda was dealing with a difficult family member, and the therapist's advice helped them realize they didn't have to accept the bad behavior.

10. "Believe everyone."

"Let’s pretend that everyone says exactly what they mean. Don’t try to figure out the subtext. Take it at face value. Believe them." - FutureGhost24

11. "Depression is in the past. Anxiety is in the future. Stay in the present."

"It sounds so simple but really hit hard given what I was going through." - katosucks

12. "Unspoken expectations of others are just future resentments"

- LethalMindNinja

13. "You don’t have to fix everything at once. Just start somewhere."

My personal favorite in the whole thread comes from u/ReporterFamous3631, who writes:

"It helped me let go of the pressure to be perfect and focus on small steps. It made the bigger issues feel less overwhelming."


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Sustainability

Scientists tested 3 popular bottled water brands for nanoplastics using new tech, and yikes

The results were alarming—an average of 240,000 nanoplastics per 1 liter bottle—but what does it mean for our health?

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Columbia University researchers tested bottled water for nanoplastics and found hundreds of thousands of them.

Evian, Fiji, Voss, SmartWater, Aquafina, Dasani—it's impressive how many brands we have for something humans have been consuming for millennia. Despite years of studies showing that bottled water is no safer to drink than tap water, Americans are more consuming more bottled water than ever, to the tune of billions of dollars in bottled water sales.

People cite convenience and taste in addition to perceived safety for reasons they prefer bottle to tap, but the fear factor surrounding tap water is still a driving force. It doesn't help when emergencies like floods cause tap water contamination or when investigations reveal issues with lead pipes in some communities, but municipal water supplies are tested regularly, and in the vast majority of the U.S., you can safely grab a glass of water from a tap.

And now, a new study on nanoplastics found in three popular bottled water brands is throwing more data into the bottled vs. tap water choice

Researchers from Columbia University used a new laser-guided technology to detect nanoplastics that had previously evaded detection due to their miniscule size.

The new technology can detect, count and analyze and chemical structure of nanoparticles, and they found seven different major types of plastic: polyamide, polypropylene, polyethylene, polymethyl methacrylate, polyvinyl chloride, polystyrene, and polyethylene terephthalate.

In contrast to a 2018 study that found around 300 plastic particles in an average liter of bottled water, the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in January of 2024 found 240,000 nanoplastic particles per liter bottle on average between the three brands studied. (The name of the brands were not indicated in the study.)

As opposed to microplastics, nanoplastics are too small to be seen by microscope. Their size is exactly why experts are concerned about them, as they are small enough to invade human cells and potentially disrupt cellular processes.

“Micro and nanoplastics have been found in the human placenta at this point. They’ve been found in human lung tissues. They’ve been found in human feces; they’ve been found in human blood,” study coauthor Phoebe Stapleton, associate professor of pharmacology and toxicology at Rutgers University’s Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy told CNN Health,

We know that nanoplastics are making their way into our bodies. We just don't have enough research yet on what that means for our health, and we still have more questions than answers. How many nanoplastics does it take to do damage and/or cause disease? What kinds of damage or disease might they cause? Is whatever effect they might have cumulative? We simply don't have answers to these questions yet.

That's not to say there's no cause for concern.

We do know that certain levels of microplastic exposure have been shown to adversely affect the viability of cells. Nanoplastics are even smaller—does that mean they are more likely to cause cellular damage? Science is still working that out.

According to Dr. Sara Benedé of the Spanish National Research Council’s Institute of Food Science Research, it's not just the plastics themselves that might cause damage, but what they may bring along with them. “[Microparticles and nanoparticles] have the ability to bind all kinds of compounds when they come into contact with fluids, thus acting as carriers of all kinds of substances including environmental pollutants, toxins, antibiotics, or microorganisms,” Dr. Benedé told Medical News Today.

water plastic bottle on seashorePhoto by Brian Yurasits on Unsplash

Where is this plastic in water coming from?

This study focused on bottled water, which is almost always packaged in plastic. The filters used to filter the water before bottling are also frequently made from plastic.

Is it possible that some of these nanoplastics were already present in the water from their original sources? Again, research is always evolving on this front, but microplastics have been detected in lakes, streams and other freshwater sources, so it's not a big stretch to imagine that nanoplastics may be making their way into freshwater ecosystems as well. However, microplastics are found at much higher levels in bottled water than tap water, so it's also not a stretch to assume that most of the nanoplastics are likely coming from the bottling process and packaging rather than from freshwater sources.

assorted bottled waters on shelfPhoto by Giuseppe Famiani on Unsplash

The reality is, though, we simply don't know yet.

“Based on other studies we expected most of the microplastics in bottled water would come from leakage of the plastic bottle itself, which is typically made of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic,” lead author Naixin Qian, a doctoral student in chemistry at Columbia University, told CNN Health. “However, we found there’s actually many diverse types of plastics in a bottle of water, and that different plastic types have different size distributions. The PET particles were larger, while others were down to 200 nanometers, which is much, much smaller.”

We need to drink water, and we need to drink safe water. At this point, we have plenty of environmental reasons for avoiding bottled water unless absolutely necessary and opting for tap water instead. Even if there's still more research to be done, the presence of hundreds of thousands of nanoplastics in bottled water might just be another reason to make the switch.


This article originally appeared on 2.2.24

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Joy

London street artist has a hilarious year-long battle with a graffiti-removal crew

It was a true chess match.

via YouTube

History is full of great stories about bitter battles between loyal opposition. In basketball, there was Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. In the '80s, harsh political battles were fought between Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill. But all of these rivals respected their opposition as competitors in their respective fields. Now, a year-long battle between a cleaning crew and a street artist can be added to history's legendary battles between loyal opposition.

Mobstr is a London-based street artist famous for the sarcastic typographic-based graffiti he's written across London's walls and billboards. His cat-and-mouse relationship with an unidentified city worker began on July 17, 2014, and would continue for an entire year.

"I cycled past this wall on the way to work for years," Mobstr wrote on his website. " I noticed that graffiti painted within the red area was 'buffed' with red paint. However, graffiti outside of the red area would be removed via pressure washing. This prompted the start of an experiment. Unlike other works, I was very uncertain as to what results it would yield.”

Watch the video below and see what happens:

This article originally appeared on 09.23.17.

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A gay man was confused why women act differently around him and it's a must read for straight men

"What you're seeing is them relaxing."

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A 30-year-old gay man took to r/NoStupidQuestions with, one could argue, a question that put the name of the subreddit to the test.

"Why do women behave so strangely until they find out I'm gay?"

User u/taco_nacho_burrito wrote that when he talks to women, they start off "super quiet, reserved, uninterested in making any sort of effort into whatever the interaction is."

Once he turns on the more flamboyant side of his personality, or mentions his boyfriend, the interactions do a 180 and women become "bright, bubbly and conversational."

Why is that?

Women were quick to chime in with the obvious answer. And more than a few stories.

man and woman facing each other at a bar Photo by LexScope on Unsplash

User sunny_hill_1 put it the best and most succinctly:

"Many times if a girl is bright, conversational, nice, and kind to a straight man, these straight men will take it as flirting. So women act reserved and uninterested to not invite romantic attention. Once they realize that you aren't going to be interested in them, they relax and can act bright and bubbly without it being taken the wrong way."

As if there was any doubt, the women in the comments came with receipts.

User S0baka wrote how they once touched a guy friend on the forearm and he went on have a relentless and aggressive crush on her for two years. Two years for a friendly forearm touch!

u/premadecookiedough writes: "Had a coworker of about 3 days once break up with his gf because I'm a totally easy lay and have been all over him at work. He bragged about it to multiple coworkers. Someone had to break it to him that I am both gay and in a relationship and I really was just being friendly."

u/Saturniids84 added: "The years I spent working retail/waitressing taught me men will convince themselves you are into them if you give them nothing more than a polite smile and friendly customer service. Just about every young female coworker I ever had ended up with a stalker or two. You learn young not to give men anything they could remotely misinterpret as interest."

"The potential threat disappears with your assumed heterosexuality. What you're seeing is them relaxing," explains u/pootles_carrot

How straight men can make women more comfortable in conversation

woman in black and white crew neck shirt smiling Photo by Megan Bucknall on Unsplash

The explanation makes total sense. It's not that women are suddenly excited about the (problematic) prospect of having a "gay best friend," it's that they feel safe enough to actually let their personality out without repercussions.

But where does that leave heterosexual men who want the women they interact with to feel safe? What do you do if you don't want someone to feel uncomfortable talking to you, but you don't know how to counteract the years of conditioning that have led them to that survival instinct?

Some of the Reddit commenters had some good ideas, and I reached out to a few experts, as well. Here are some tips — not for dating or flirting — but for how to have better and more positive human interactions.

Be mindful of proximity and touch.

Don't stand too close or attempt any physical contact, even if it's friendly.

"It’s much better to get to be too impersonal early on than coming off too strongly," says Thomas Banta, a clinical mental health counselor.

Talk to women like men

"Pay attention to how you talk to women vs the other men in your life," adds Banta. "If you’re saying [something] to a woman you’d never say to a guy, there’s a good chance that what you’re saying can be interpreted as flirty or boundary pushing."

Avoid physical compliments

"Compliments or observations should center around shared experiences, ideas, or interests, rather than anything that could be misinterpreted as personal or suggestive," suggests Joseph Cavins, a licensed marriage and family therapist.

"When a woman feels like she is being appreciated for her thoughts and perspectives, it fosters a sense of ease and mutual respect.

Be clear about intentions, but don't overexplain

Being explicit in the fact that you're not flirting can be reassuring, but don't overdo it.

Cavins adds that trying too hard to prove you're a good guy can come across as manipulative.

Be woman-approved

"Women trust 'straight' men that have been verified by other women. You having a baby is enough signal for women to feel safer around you and let their guard down" writes reddit user a_chill_transplant.

If you're really just looking for a friendly chat, bringing along a female friend or going out of your way to mention your spouse could help lower a person's guard.

If you can't be gay, be old!

The general consensus seems to be that the older the man, the less likely he is to get weird.

"Men absolutely become safer with age and the exact same compliments go from hackles up to, 'oh, thank you'." - breadystinellis

Although, commenters in the thread point out, be extra careful here. The betrayal and disgust when a so-called "safe" older guy turns creepy can be devastating.

It's heartbreaking to read how young the conditioning starts for most women. By the time most are 13 or so, they're already starting to learn how to suppress their personalities in certain situations so as not to give men "the wrong idea."

Straight guys can help by a) not being creeps and b) not getting upset when women we don't know are cold or standoffish. They have a lifetime of data that says they probably can't trust us.

Trust is something that has to be earned.

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