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How Bubbles Help Kids with Cleft Conditions
For thousands of children born with cleft conditions, Operation Smile provides simple, playful tools—like bubbles—to strengthen the skills they need to speak and thrive.
While a bottle of bubbles might seem out of place in a hospital setting, you might be surprised to learn that, for thousands of children around the world born with cleft lip and palate, they can be a helpful tool in comprehensive cleft care. Lilia, who was born with cleft lip and palate in 2020, is one of the many patients who received this care.
As a toddler, Lilia underwent two surgeries to treat cleft lip and palate with Operation Smile’s surgical program in Puebla, Mexico. Because of Operation Smile’s comprehensive care, it wasn’t long before her personality transformed: Lilia went from a quiet and withdrawn toddler to an exuberant, curious explorer, babbling, expressing herself with a variety of sounds, and engaging with others like any child her age.
Lilia is now a healthy five-year-old, with the same cheerful attitude and boundless energy. Her progress is the result of care at every level, from surgery to speech therapy to ongoing support at home—but it’s also evidence that small, sustained interventions throughout it all can make a meaningful difference.
Lilia at age 1, before surgery, and at age 5, 4 years post-surgery Cleft Conditions: A Global Problem
Since 1982, Operation Smile has provided cleft lip and cleft palate surgeries to more than 500,000 patients worldwide with the help of generous volunteers and donors. Cleft conditions are congenital conditions, meaning they are present at birth. With cleft lip and palate, the lip or the roof of the mouth do not form fully during fetal development. Cleft conditions put children at risk for malnutrition and poor weight gain, since their facial structure can make feeding challenging. But cleft conditions can have an enormous social impact as well: Common difficulties with speech can leave kids socially isolated and unable to meet the same developmental milestones as their peers.
Surgery is a vital step in treating cleft conditions, but it’s also just one part of a much larger solution. Organizations like Operation Smile emphasize the importance of multi-disciplinary teams that provide comprehensive, long-term care to patients across many years. This approach, which includes oral care, speech therapy, nutritional support, and psychosocial care, not only aids in physical recovery from surgery but also helps children develop the skills and confidence to eat easily, speak clearly, and engage in everyday life. This ensures that each patient receives the full range of support they need to thrive.
Marie, 11 months, with her mother at Operation Smile Madagascar before her cleft surgery (Operation Smile Photos) A Playful (and Powerful) Solution
Throughout a patient’s care, simple tools like bubbles can play a meaningful role from start to finish.
Immediately before surgery, children are often in a new and unfamiliar environment far from home, some of them experiencing a hospital setting for the first time. When care providers or loved ones blow bubbles, it’s a simple yet effective technique: Not only are the children soothed and distracted, the bubbles also help create a sense of joy and playfulness that eases their anxiety.
Milagros Rojas, a volunteer speech therapist in Peru, using bubbles in a screening with a patient. (Operation Smile Photos) In speech therapy, bubbles can take on an even more important role. Blowing bubbles requires controlled airflow, as well as the ability to form a rounded “O” shape with the lips, which are skills that children with cleft conditions may struggle to develop. Practicing these skills with bubbles allows children to gently strengthen their facial muscles, improve breath control, and support the motor skills needed for speech development. Beyond that, blowing bubbles can help kids connect with their parents or providers in a way that’s playful, comforting, and accessible even for very young patients.
Finally, bubbles often follow patients with cleft conditions home in the “smile bags” that each patient receives when the surgical procedure is finished. Smile bags, which help continue speech therapy outside of the hospital setting, can contain language enrichment booklets, a mirror, oxygen tubing, and bubbles. While regular practice with motor skills can help with physical recovery, small acts of play help as well, giving kids space to simply enjoy themselves and join in on what peers are able to do.
Bubbles at Home and Beyond
Today, because of Operation Smile’s dedication to comprehensive cleft care, Lilia is now able to make friends and speak clearly, all things that could have been difficult or impossible before. Instead of a childhood defined by limitation, Lilia—and others around the world—can look forward to a childhood filled with joy, learning, discovery, friends, and new possibilities.
CTA: Lilia’s life was changed for the better with the care she received through Operation Smile. Find out how you can make an impact in other children’s lives by visiting operationsmile.org today.
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A doctor says there’s finally a clear winner in the morning or night shower debate
There’s one that definitely has more “things going for it.”
Dr. Jason Singh, who has all kinds of medical insights on TikTok, weighed in on the topic he joked was “more debatable than pineapple on pizza.” That debate would be whether it’s better to shower in the morning, or at night.
You would think the “right answer” would be largely up to personal preference, much like which way to face while showering and whether or not to snack in the shower…two previous hot button issues online. But according to Singh, there are definitive pros and cons to each option, which could settle the debate once and for all.
Here is what the doctor actually found
Singh says in the clip that overnight, “your body can accumulate germs such as bacteria and fungus” through “processes like sweating and shedding skin cells,” all of which help create odor. When you shower off this residue in the AM, it brings your “skin microbiome back to a more hygienic baseline.”
Makes a pretty compelling case for morning showers, doesn’t it? Just wait.
Singh went on to say that nighttime showering has three things going for it.
One, it helps release melatonin to help induce sleep. Plus, when your body adjusts from a warmer temperature to a cooler temperature, that also helps your body prepare for a good night’s rest.
The second benefit is that it washes away “the entire day’s grime.” Which, let’s be honest, can be very therapeutic sometimes. And lastly, showering at night is the ‘better way to help hydrate your skin,” making it a better option for those with sensitive or dry skin.
Singh’s bottom line: “Overall night-time showers have more benefits to it but morning showers have really one benefit and that’s better hygiene.”
The comments had strong feelings about this
Singh encouraged viewers to weigh in with their own opinions, and they didn’t hold back.
“You will never convince me to go to bed dirty,’ one person wrote. Another argued “The worst part about night time showers is long, wet hair. I hate going to bed with wet hair!”
There ended up being some pretty funny responses as well. One person joked that they opted for morning showers since it helps them “Get my head together. Generate a to-do list. Fight with pretend people.”
Another person noted that timing preferences can be dictated by their schedule, commenting, “night showers during the work week and morning showers on the weekends.”
Woman takes an outdoor shower during the day. Photo credit: Canva Some people said two showers was the answer
Many argued that two showers a day was the actual best option. That way you don’t go to bed dirty, and you’re fresh for the morning.
Obviously, showering at any time consistently is perfectly fine, but Dr. Singh offered some valuable food for thought.
Of course, you could always follow in this viewer’s footsteps, who wrote:
“I prefer to roll around in dust like a chinchilla.”
This article originally appeared two years ago. It has been updated.
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Iconic writer Kurt Vonnegut’s simple graphs show how to write the 3 stories everyone loves
“There’s no reason why the simple shapes of a story can’t be fed into computers.”
To be a great fiction writer requires understanding basic story structures and being clever enough to disguise them so your audience doesn’t know they’re watching or reading something they’ve seen before. Academics suggest that there are only a finite number of plots and structures, but that number varies based on who’s doing the talking.
Writer Kurt Vonnegut, best known for his satirical works on American politics and culture, including “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Cat’s Cradle” and “Sirens of Titan,” was obsessed with the shapes of stories and summed up his views in one powerful sentence: “The fundamental idea is that stories have shapes which can be drawn on graph paper and that the shape of a given society’s stories is at least as interesting as the shape of its pots or spearheads.”
What are the shapes of stories?
In the video below, Vonnegut explains the shapes of three different types of stories. The first one he starts with is “person gets into trouble.”
The first question is where the main character or protagonist starts their journey. Are they in a state of good or bad fortune, and how does that change from beginning to end? The arc of this story is simple, someone starts off in good fortune, they get into trouble, and then find their way out. “Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. People love that story. They never get tired of it,” Vonnegut says with a smirk.
The second is called “boy gets girl,” which is the basics of the story: someone finds something “wonderful,” their life is on an upward trajectory, then they trail downwards until they can get the girl or boy back. He finishes with the “most popular story” of Western civilization, and that is “Cinderella.”What’s interesting about the story is that it’s about a poor little girl whose mother has died, and her life is pure misery. But her story has a massive upswing when she meets her fairy godmother and can go to the ball. But once the clock strikes midnight, her life crashes down in a matter of seconds.
Vonnegut’s eerie prediction about AI
What’s interesting is that at the beginning of the video, Vonnegut notes that stories are relatively “simple” and that they should be able to be plugged into computers that could then regurgitate the same story over and over again. It almost feels like an eerie predictor of artificial intelligence. “There’s no reason why the simple shapes of a story can’t be fed into computers. They are beautiful shapes,” Vonnegut says. “Now this is an exercise in relativity, really. It’s the shape of the curves are what matters, and not their origins.”
After seeing Vonnegut map out the basic plotlines of stories, it’s hard not to see them every time you watch a movie or TV show. It is amazing that, because there are so few characters and plot arcs in modern storytelling, anyone can create anything that feels new.
This story originally appeared three years ago. It has since been updated.
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The surprisingly mysterious reason we use the $ symbol for the U.S. dollar
The U.S. dollar and its symbol have an international origin story.
We see many symbols in our everyday lives that we likely don’t pay much attention to: the @ in our email addresses, for instance, or the % in our weather forecasts. But do we ever wonder where these symbols came from? Why they look like they do? Or how they came to mean what they mean?
One of the most commonly used symbols that most of us are clueless about is the dollar sign ($). Why does it have an “S” if there’s no “s” in “dollar”? Is there supposed to be one line or two? And where did the $ symbol even originate?
As educator and etymology enthusiast Rob Watts (better known as RobWords on YouTube) explains, the answers to those questions are surprisingly complicated.
The first written use of the dollar sign as we know it appeared in a handwritten letter sent by a man in New Orleans in 1778. Some may be under the impression that the $ is an amalgamation of “U” and “S,” as in United States, but nope. Its origin isn’t actually from the United States at all.
The international origins of the U.S. dollar start in Spain
In fact, we have to take a whole international tour through hundreds of years of currency history to arrive at what we think is the origin of the $. As Watts shares, we don’t know with 100% certainty.
The story begins with the Spanish real, the silver coin that served as the currency of Spain in the 14th century. A larger coin, worth eight times the value of the real, became known as a “piece of eight” in English. Those pieces of eight made their way to the Americas through colonialism in the 15th and 16th centuries.
“The discovery of huge, gleaming reserves of silver in Central and South America meant that they could also be made there, too,” Watts shares. “At the local mints, they took on a new name as well, based on the fixed weights of silver they were made from. They became known as the ‘peso,’ meaning ‘unit of weight.’”
A Spanish piece of eight dating between 1651 and 1773. Photo credit: Portable Antiquities Scheme/Wikimedia Commons Because of their reliability and divisibility into smaller units, these pesos started being used not just in the Spanish-speaking colonies, but in British colonies in the Caribbean and North America as well.
Hold the peso thought. We’ll come back to it momentarily.
The word “dollar” can be traced back to the German Joachimsthaler coin
In the meantime, another coin of similar value from the German town of Joachimsthal had gained traction in Europe.
“In precisely the same way that a round slab of beef from Hamburg became known as a hamburger, this round slab of silver from Joachimsthal became known as a Joachimsthaler,” Watts explains. “And in exactly the same way that a hamburger is sometimes just called a ‘burger,’ a Joachimsthaler was sometimes just called a ‘thaler.’”
A Joachimsthaler coin from 1525. Photo credit: TommyG/Wikimedia Commons “Thaler” became “daalder” in the Netherlands, “daler” in parts of Scandinavia, and “dollar” in the English-speaking world.
But that dollar wasn’t the dollar we ended up with.
“By 1700, the thaler had been adapted to have almost exactly the same silver content as another coin that was competing for usage in Europe: the ‘piece of eight’ or peso,” says Watts. “And so, to help differentiate between the two similarly valued coins, people started referring to the peso as ‘the Spanish dollar.’ This Spanish dollar was the de facto currency of the Americas right up until the American Revolution.”
A Spanish dollar from Mexico circa 1771. Photo credit: Heritage Auctions/Wikimedia Commons The dollar sign actually comes from the peso symbol
Prior to declaring independence from Britain, the U.S. used the British pound for accounting. But the Spanish dollar, or peso, was the coin most often used as currency, so post-Revolution, the U.S. adopted the dollar as its own. (The first official U.S. dollar coin was minted in 1792.)
So, long story short, the Spanish dollar, or peso, was the basis for the U.S. dollar. Which finally leads us to where the $ came from.
The symbol used for pesos way back when was “ps,” with the “s” written like a superscript. When written with a pen in one stroke, the “s” ended up with a line through it. And when someone wanted to indicate plural pesos, they would write the symbol twice. The second instance, written more quickly, ended up blending the “p” and “s” together to look more like a $.
Essentially, the evolution looked like this:
Theories of where the dollar sign came from. Photo credit: JesperZedlitz/Wikimedia Commons What about the double-lined dollar sign?
How did the $ with two lines come about? As shown in the image above, the two lines often lead people to the “U” plus “S” theory. However, Watts points out that the first printed version of the dollar sign appeared in 1797. That dollar sign actually had two lines, with no indication that “U” and “S” were the reason. Both versions of the symbol were in use by the close of the 18th century.
Watts goes into some of the other theories about where the double-lined dollar sign comes from. However, there doesn’t seem to be solid evidence to back any of them up.
Isn’t that wild? Who knew that our currency had such a complicated origin story? Or that we don’t even really know for certain why we use $ for the almighty dollar?Thanks, Rob Watts, for making us all a little bit smarter. You can follow him on YouTube for more word fun.
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From ‘acoustic guitar’ to ‘landline phone’: 18 retronyms that reveal how English evolves across eras
The term “retronym” first appeared in 1980.
As the world evolves, so does the English language, which has nearly one million words, per Merriam-Webster.
And they are being added all the time. (Although some words nearly go extinct.)
From newly formed generational slang words created by Gen Z and Gen Alpha to technology that continues to change the world and the objects in it, there is a term that allows English to “keep up with the times”: retronyms.
What is a retronym?
Retronyms are a relatively new vocabulary term. The word was first used in 1980, according to Merriam-Webster. It was coined by writer William Safire, who used “retronym” for the first time in his “On Language” column in The New York Times about Frank Mankiewicz, then the president of National Public Radio.
According to Merriam-Webster, a retronym is defined as “a term (such as analog watch, film camera, or snail mail) that is newly created and adopted to distinguish the original or older version, form, or example of something (such as a product) from other, more recent versions, forms, or examples.”
Cameras are a great example of retronyms in use.
“Remember way back when cameras used film? Back then, such devices were simply called cameras; they weren’t specifically called film cameras until they needed to be distinguished from the digital cameras that came later,” Merriam-Webster added.
How retronyms are formed
Linguist Adam Aleksic broke down how retronyms are created in a helpful video.
“A retronym is a new name given to an old thing to help differentiate it from a recent invention,” he said. “Like the way we use ‘acoustic’ guitar to differentiate from ‘electric’ guitar, even though ‘acoustic’ guitars use to just be ‘guitars’ because there were no ‘electric’ guitars.”
He offers a few more examples:
“Or when you have to say ‘analog’ watch to specify that what used to actually just be a regular watch is not in fact digital. That’s why ‘World War I’ is no longer ‘The Great War.’ We had to make a retronym for it once we had a second Great War. If you put ‘whole milk’ in ‘regular coffee,’ those are both retronyms because we’ve since invented things like ‘almond milk’ and ‘decaf coffee.’”
Aleksic explains that geography also has retronyms:
“The ‘East Indies’ used to just be the ‘Indies’ until Columbus rediscovered the ‘West Indies.’ And ‘Baja California’ used to just be ‘California’ until the Spaniards sailed a little further north and named what we now think of as ‘California.’ The ‘Continental U.S.’ was just the ‘U.S.’ until we added a few states.”
Finally, he explains another type of retronym: one that is a reduplication of an original word.
“If I want the ‘regular salad’ and not the ‘tuna salad,’ I can ask you to pass the ‘salad salad’ and you’ll know what I mean,” he said.
Examples of retronyms
The words below are a helpful list of retronyms:
- British English (distinguished from American English, Australian English, Indian English, etc.)
- Outdoor rock climbing (distinguished from indoor rock climbing)
- Acoustic guitar (distinguished from electric guitar)
- Cloth diaper (distinguished from paper diapers and disposable diapers)
- Manual typewriter (distinguished from electric typewriter)
- Scripted show (distinguished from reality show)
- Rotary phone (distinguished from touch-tone phones and landline phones)
- Combustible cigarette (distinguished from electronic cigarettes, e-cigarettes, etc.)
- Whole milk (distinguished from skim milk, 2% milk, etc.)
- Corn on the cob (distinguished from corn cut off the cob)
- Live music (distinguished from recorded music)
- Silent film (distinguished from sound films and talkies)
- Brick-and-mortar store (distinguished from online stores)
- Bar soap (distinguished from liquid soap and body wash)
- Old World (distinguished from New World)
- Analog watch (distinguished from digital watch)
- Film camera (distinguished from digital cameras, instant cameras, etc.)
- Snail mail (distinguished from email, etc.)
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23, 11, 17.3: Why oddly numbered speed limit signs are on the rise everywhere
They look like typos, and that’s the point.
Ever heard of “highway hypnosis”? If you never went over it in American Driver’s Ed, it’s the phenomenon during which we tend to zone out while driving on long, repetitive stretches of highway or on routes we’ve taken a thousand times. It’s that feeling of pulling into your driveway and having very little recollection of actually getting there.
Suffice it to say, going into pure autopilot mode on the road isn’t ideal. It’s not safe, and we tend to ignore important signage, like speed limits.
One high-traffic area in Wisconsin just debuted a new, eye-catching speed limit
The Outagamie County Recycling and Solid Waste facility in Appleton gets a lot of through-traffic. Big trucks, commercial haulers, and plenty of civilian cars make their way through the facility on any given day.
Keeping a low posted speed limit helps keep everyone safe. Usually, in places like this, you’d see speed limits of 15, 10, or even 5 miles per hour.
Outagamie County went in a slightly more offbeat direction: 17.3 mph. No, it’s not a typo. See for yourself:
17.3 mph: Not a typo, not a joke
The sign isn’t just for laughs. It’s not a temporary fixture meant to get a few likes on social media or encourage people to stop for photo ops.
Its purpose is far more important: to get people to pay attention. The unusual number causes people to do a double-take. Instead of eyes glazing over at yet another 15 mph limit, the 17.3 sticks out like a sore thumb and makes drivers’ brains perk up—and hopefully, their feet ease off the gas.
Kraig Van Groll, the site’s solid waste superintendent, said the sign is working, per Supercar Blondie:
“We’ve definitely seen positive engagement and behavior changes across the site. That includes residents using the site daily, people visiting on tours, and commercial users operating here regularly. If nothing else, it’s really opened the door for more conversations around overall site safety and awareness for all users of the site.”
Jordan Hiller, recycling and solid waste program coordinator, told WBAY-TV that the sign has caused a bit of an “uproar” on social media—in a good way. People get a kick out of it, and it has ultimately done its job: drawing more attention to road safety around the facility.
Not just Wisconsin: Odd speed limits are becoming more common
While major roads and highways will probably stick with nice, round speed limits, smaller areas—shopping centers, parking lots, private facilities—are turning more and more to eye-catching numbers like Outagamie’s 17.3.
A shopping center in Colorado Springs, Colorado, features an 8.2 mph speed limit:
Another user on Reddit spotted an 18 mph speed limit:
Some areas are resorting to even more unusual and eye-popping methods, with speed limits that include fractions. This one was featured on Denver local news: a parking lot with an official posted speed of 6 and 7/8 mph:
Safety officials have all kinds of methods to try to keep distracted drivers focused
The science of being behind the wheel is fascinating and often studied. Tons of experiments and studies were conducted on how to get drivers to slow down in certain areas before we came up with radar signs that tell drivers their speed in real time, for example. That visual feedback has been shown to be effective at reducing speeds.
Roads in America are also full of speed bumps, rumble strips, and reflectors designed to break drivers’ autopilot patterns.
It’s part psychology and part neuroscience; a big reason we slip into autopilot mode, or highway hypnosis, has to do with the way our brain waves work. According to Radar Sign, “Shifting a driver from a Theta ‘autopilot’ state to a Beta ‘engaged’ state requires a trigger, identified by the Reticular Activator (RA), responsible for categorizing sensory input.”
Simply put, one of the best ways to keep drivers safe on the road is to present them with something unusual: an input that disrupts the expected pattern. It could be a radar sign, a strip in the road that causes your tires to gently buzz, or now, a speed limit sign so bizarre you can’t help but look twice.
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Brits give some hilariously unique homespun flu remedies in resurfaced footage from the 1950s
Socks, goose grease, and onions are popular home remedies for illness.
Nearly everyone has suffered from the dreaded flu and can agree that the hacking coughs, achy bones, and sneezing are more than just a tad miserable. The silver lining, if there can be one, is that the flu (and colds in general) brings out some old remedies that some might find rather charming. Even better, some of them may actually work.In a clip from the late 1950s on the BBC Archive Facebook page, a random assortment of men and women are asked for their personal “flu cures.” Their answers ranged from typical homespun ideas like hot tea and plenty of water to more curious alternative remedies. But many were eager to share their personal treatments and seemed sure of their effectiveness.
Shot on black-and-white film, British interviewers Fyfe Robertson and Alan Whicker ask people what they do or take when they have the flu. One woman answers, “Well I take Vitamin C and lemon, barley, and whiskey.” The next man agrees that he can “defy the virus” with whiskey and tea, but adds bacon, porridge, and eggs.In fact, quite a few included whiskey in their flu routine. “I’m a great believer in whiskey,” one man proudly shares. “I’m like a Scotch man. I believe in a drop of whiskey, warm, and it sort of kills the germs.”
In keeping with the alcohol angle, another Brit answers, “A jolly good hot rum punch. And a jolly good sweat, and stop in bed until it’s all over.”
“Elderflower wine,” says an older woman. “If you take a good glassful tonight, and you go to bed, and you sweat it out, you know, and you’re alright in a day or two.”
Not everyone used alcohol in their remedies. One woman swaps the whiskey for water: “Rinse your inside out continually with boiled water. About four or five half-pint glasses a day, boiled water.”
But then things get interesting. A woman clad in an oversized sweater coat shares this trick: “Well my remedy for the flu is to get a small Spanish onion, chop it up finely, and put some brown sugar over it and a little vinegar. And then when it turns into a syrup, take a spoonful before you go to bed. It’s a very good remedy.”
A man, seemingly eager to share his mother’s recipe, steps in: “Well my mother recommends an old sweaty sock with salt right round your throat. A good pullover and a good hot water bottle. Sweat it out.”
Now things take a turn for the more unique. “There is a good cure in mustard and lard,” one woman says. “And you rub the two well together and get a good blend. I don’t know how to do it, but my father does.” After the interviewer asks if one should eat it or rub it on one’s chest, she clarifies: “Rub it on your chest, on the front and the back, and it’s a good cure.”
Just when it seemed that possibly “mustard and lard” were the most interesting answers, the woman next to her takes the cake: “Goose grease. You can rub that on your chest. You know, after you’ve been cooking the goose, then keep the grease and run it on your chest.”
This next idea is a bit complicated, but it also involves goose grease: “A large piece of brown paper and cut it to go under the arms and you warm it first, and get hot warm goose grease and then spread mustard over the brown paper first. Get warm goose grease, which most people have got in the house. You spread it over the mustard on the paper to avoid burning of the skin. And should inflammation be setting in, as the doctor says does sometimes, you boil the elderflower and give the patient a dose of elderflower water.”
Understandably, the reporter pushes back: “But then do you go to bed with this brown paper? Don’t you find it a bit messy?” She answers with a resounding yes, adding, “And the goose grease avoids it from burning.”
And just when it seems like someone is going back to a more popular cure, it takes a turn: “I take a nice big tumbler full of hot lemonade. Put in about three teaspoons full of rum. Two aspirin. Get into bed and cover myself well. Tie the stocking that I’ve been wearing around my feet. One of them around my throat with a safety pin, and stay in bed and sweat it out.”
Finally, a younger gentleman is asked his “best way to cure the flu.” His answer is rather philosophical: “Well, just think that you haven’t got it.” He adds a few other ideas about onions and then shocks the interviewer with this final thought: “I’ve still got it now, and I’m about.”
“You’ve got the flu now, have ya?” the interviewer asks. “Well in that case, I won’t keep you another minute.”
Reactions
Just this clip has 35,000 likes and over a thousand comments. And perhaps not super surprisingly, many Facebook users back up the remedy claims:
“After all, where do people think ‘medicine’ comes from? My Hungarian grandfather would eat raw garlic if he felt under the weather. Drank tea daily with a little red wine in it. Lived to be 101.”
“Whiskey and stinky socks are to men as goose grease and mustard are to women.”
“How Alan Wicker (sic) kept a straight face to these people being interviewed is amazing.”
Putting some of these cures to the test
Onions
According to the National Library of Medicine, onions do in fact contain antibacterial properties: “Onion skin possesses various health benefits due to its phenolic and antimicrobial components.”
Time published an entire piece called “Medicine: The Healing Onion,” where they discuss the roots of this theory:
“The onion, at one time or another, has been enthusiastically recommended as a remedy for colds in the head and worms in the intestines. For centuries, the onion’s medicinal value has been praised by witch doctors, old wives, and bartenders. Rome’s Pliny the Elder listed the onion as a cure for 28 diseases. Early New England settlers believed that the onion would prevent fits; Neapolitans of the Middle Ages thought it averted the evil eye. A 16th Century French surgeon, Ambroise Parè, used it instead of ointment to heal powder burns.”
While they have more recently found that the onion itself doesn’t create health benefits, cutting the onion actually does, according to Time:
“Food Chemist Edward F. Kohman has found that the active chemical agent in onions is a thioaldehyde, a close relative of the common antiseptic, formaldehyde. Chemist Kohman put raw onions through an ordinary household meat grinder, distilled the onion vapors, put them through a series of chemical tests. In a recent issue of Science, he reported finding about 1/20 of a gram of thioaldehyde in a pound of raw onions.
The germ-killing thioaldehyde, Kohman said last week, probably does not exist as such in the onion. More likely, it is produced by the complicated enzyme activity that goes on in the onion when it is cut. Cooking would eliminate it completely; a boiled onion is no more good for a cold than a boiled turnip. But chewing a raw onion might help a cold (it would undoubtedly prevent the spread of colds by keeping non-onion eaters away from the cold sufferer).”
Socks
Healthline put the socks theory to the test:“Although no clinical research supports their claims, advocates of wearing wet socks to bed to cure a cold are convinced that the practice is effective. Here’s their explanation: When your feet begin to cool, the blood vessels in your feet contract, sending good nutrients to your tissues and organs. Then, when your feet begin to warm up, the blood vessels dilate, which releases the toxins in the tissue. The technique most recommended includes two pairs of socks: one pair of thin cotton socks and one pair of heavy wool socks.”
And while they can’t claim it works completely, they note that many believe it does, which can be enough:
“There’s no scientific evidence that wearing wet socks to bed will cure your cold. But there’s anecdotal evidence. One explanation for people believing that it works could be the placebo effect.”
Whiskey and other alcohol
Since so many mentioned whiskey (and rum), we took a look at that claim too. Sad news: this one appears to be nothing but a myth.Again, turning to Healthline, they take the claims step by step to debunk them. Some believe that because alcohol is a “disinfectant,” it should help kill viruses and bacteria:
“It’s true that alcohol is a key component of hand sanitizers, which help kill germs that you may pick up when you touch contaminated surfaces. However, alcohol is only effective as a topical disinfectant. In other words, it works on the surface of your skin, but not as a disinfectant when you drink it. This means alcohol doesn’t help kill cold viruses or other germs inside your body.”
In fact, though many believe it helps open up the sinuses, it’s not accurate.
“Alcohol is rumored to work as a decongestant, but actually, the reverse is true,” the Healthline article noted. “Small amounts of alcohol can cause vasodilation — a widening of blood vessels — which can worsen a runny nose or congestion. Medicines with pseudoephedrine will tighten blood vessels (vasoconstrict), which is why they can help relieve congestion.”
This doesn’t stop people from sharing their flu-fighting whiskey recipes. Perhaps these, too, create a placebo effect. At least they might be more fun than wet socks.
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Woman lives on a cruise ship for free, but says there are 4 things she’s not allowed to do
Living the high seas life.
Upworthy has covered a few stories about people who decided to live permanently on cruise ships because it’s cheaper than living on land or in a nursing home. These stories have connected with millions because they say a lot about the modern cost of living but are also aspirational.
Christine Kesteloo has become popular on TikTok with over one million followers because she shares what living on a cruise ship is really like. Kesteloo is the wife of the ship’s Staff Chief Engineer, so she gets to live on the boat for free. She only has to pay for alcohol and soda, which she gets for half off according to Business Insider.
So what is life actually like on board?
“I live on a cruise ship for half the year with my husband, and it’s often as glamorous as it sounds,” she told Business Insider. “After all, I don’t cook, clean, make my bed, do laundry or pay for food.“
Kesteloo’s life seems pretty stress-free. After all, she’s basically on a permanent vacation. However, even though she lives on a cruise ship as a “wife on board,” there are a few things she either can’t or shouldn’t do.
Here are the four things she cannot do
She shared these four things in a TikTok video with nearly 10 million views.
1. Gambling
Kesteloo says she cannot sit at a slot machine and “play my heart out until I win.” She believes it would “look a little weird if I, as the wife of the staff chief engineer, won a big jackpot.”
2. Leaving the ship with the guests
When the ship arrives at a destination, she can’t get off with the guests. She must wait about an hour and exit the vessel with the crew. When returning to the ship, she also has to be on time. “No, they will not wait for us,” she says. And the same goes for her husband, if they “miss the ship, someone else will take over the role.”
3. Sitting in a crowded pool
Although Kesteloo has access to the pool, gym, and all the ship’s amenities, she’s cautious not to interfere with the guests’ good time. She’ll exit the pool if it’s busy because “it’s just the right thing to do.”
4. Traveling without international traveler insurance
She must have insurance in case of a misfortune on the ship. But as a citizen of the Netherlands, they already have coverage and just have to pay a few extra dollars a month.
The comments had one big question
Though folks generally welcomed Kesteloo’s advice, some of the most popular commenters on the video were from women regretting that they married men who aren’t chief engineers on cruise ships or those who want to know where to find a single one.
“OK, can you explain how to marry a cruise ship engineer?” one female commenter wrote.
“How. in. the. H E double hockey sticks do I become the wife of a cruise ship engineer???? I don’t have to work AND cruise for free!” another added.
“Does he have any single friends with same job??? Asking for me,” one more asked.
For even more tips on living this charmed life, follow Kesteloo on TikTok. Who knows, by now she might even have some advice for landing your own cruise ship engineer spouse.
This article originally appeared three years ago. It has been updated.
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Linguist clearly demonstrates how ‘thinking is walking’ in English and it’s just so cool
You’ll never see “by the way” and “of course” the same way again.
Language is fascinating. The way humans have come up with literally thousands of languages to communicate with one another, the grammatical structures we’ve concocted, the fact that we learn our native tongues so naturally, and how powerful words can be are all testaments to how cool language is. But when you drill down even further, language gets even cooler, and in ways that most of us aren’t even aware of.
Linguist and self-professed “etymology nerd” Adam Aleksic shared a video on TikTok explaining how many common phrases we use for thinking directly reference walking. We often use metaphors in our speech, of course, but there are many that we likely don’t even recognize as metaphors.
Once you hear this, you can’t unhear it
He starts with “by the way,” which literally means being next to the way, or the path we’re supposed to be on. It indicates that we’re taking a mental detour from the path we were supposed to be on to introduce something unrelated. On the other hand, when we’re talking about something that is actually on the path we’re meant to be on, we say, “of course,” which literally means “of the path.”
“We use this metaphor all the time when we say, ‘you’re on track’ or ‘you’re way off,’ literally implying that you’re not where you should be on the ‘path’ of thinking,” Aleksic says, explaining that there’s a greater metaphor at play here that “thinking is walking.”
Once you see some examples, it becomes so clear. Our minds “race” or “wander,” our thoughts “stray,” and we “arrive” at conclusions.
“All this relies on physical motion, even though your mind is stationary,” says Aleksic. “But it’s from that idea (that thoughts can walk) that we can then go ahead and make statements about our own cognition. Like how I just used ‘from,’ originally a preposition for motion, and ‘go ahead’ to indicate continuation. Once you know thoughts can walk, you can ‘follow’ them down ‘a line of thinking’ until you ‘come to’ a resolution.”
Here are a few more you’ll recognize
Even a saying as common as “Way to go!” is a metaphor indicating that you are on the correct path.
Once you start thinking about it, it’s easy to come up with many more examples of how we conceptualize thinking as walking:
“Let’s circle back.”
“Walk me through your thinking.”
“I’m backtracking here.”
“The thought crossed my mind.”
“No way.”
“Let’s move on.”
Other languages do the same thing
Some commenters shared that their languages use similar metaphors:
“In Norwegian you can say ‘du er på helt på bærtur’ when someone is way off, and it means that you are on a berry trip, specifically blueberry trip.”
“In Czech, you say btw as ”mimochodem’, while mimo means outside and chodem means a step or a walk, so literally meaning by the walk.”
“En passant in french is the same way. It’s like ‘I passed near this thought’ while on my way to another thought.”
True to form, Aleksic even has a video commenting on comments:
There’s something to be said for “thinking is walking” even beyond the metaphorical way we describe our thoughts. Many of the world’s greatest thinkers were also obsessive walkers.
Science backs this up, too
In 2014, Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz of Stanford University conducted a foundational series of studies on 176 people, mostly college students, to see if walking had any effect on different types of thinking. In one test, they had some people walk outside and others walk on a treadmill to see if the environment made a difference.
It didn’t. Wherever people walked, their answers were more creative than those who sat or were pushed in a wheelchair. Participants consistently came up with more creative responses on tests commonly used to measure creative thinking, such as thinking of alternate uses for common objects or coming up with original analogies to capture complex ideas.
“Incorporating physical activity into our lives is not only beneficial for our hearts but our brains as well,” Oppezzo said. “This research suggests an easy and productive way to weave it into certain work activities.” Could we perhaps say, “walking is thinking” in addition to “thinking is walking”?
A 2021 study of students in Japan found similar correlations between walking and strong responses on alternate use tests that measure divergent thinking.
So it appears at least some types of thinking are enhanced by walking, which of course makes it all the more fun that we use so many walking metaphors to describe our thoughts.
You can follow Adam Aleksic for more on TikTok here or check out his book, Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language, here.
This article originally appeared one year ago. It has been updated.
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