Research shows this one interaction will help decrease stress

This One Small Gesture Will Make You -- and the People Around You -- Happier | Thrive Global

New research, out of Carnegie Mellon University and published by PLOS ONE, looks into how hugs impact your negative feelings. The results are promising: One small hug can have a big impact on your stress.

These results are significant whether your interpersonal conflict tends to center around life with a romantic partner, friendships, or work relationships: wherever it happens, conflict with the people in your life is deeply stressful, and can drag down your daily happiness.

There are a broad range of tactics that can help you work through that stress: science has suggested everything from ASMR videos to writing down happy thoughtsto avoiding artificial urgency. But the Carnegie Mellon study authors’ suggestion is perhaps the simplest tactic of all: just give someone a hug.

Wandering mind not a happy mind

Wandering mind not a happy mind – Harvard Gazette



The researchers estimated that only 4.6 percent of a person’s happiness in a given moment was attributable to the specific activity he or she was doing, whereas a person’s mind-wandering status accounted for about 10.8 percent of his or her happiness.

FDA Bans 7 Cancer-Causing Food Additives

You know this is still such a scam, like MSG can be listed on food as nearly 50 different things, as it is used for flavor, and texture, and addiction, and many other things.  And worse still many similar chemicals are derived from GMO Corn, so they can be listed as "natural flavors" because they come from the nature corn products. . .

FDA Bans 7 Cancer-Causing Food Additives Found in Popular Foods

These food additives are most commonly used to enhance the flavor of baked goods, ice cream, candy, chewing gum and beverages. The newly banned flavors are benzophenone, ethyl acrylate, eugenyl methyl ether, myrcene, pulegone, pyridine and styrene

"Consumers will never know which foods were made with these chemicals, since manufacturers have been allowed to hide these ingredients behind the vague term 'flavor,'" said Dawn Undurraga, EWG's nutritionist. "This is a positive step forward, but the FDA should empower consumers to make their own fully informed decisions by requiring full ingredient disclosure."

The ban on styrene was also supported by a petition from the food industry. But the FDA acted on the other six after public interest groups filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit petitioning the FDA to make a final decision whether to prohibit the seven cancer-causing artificial chemicals from use in food.

Earthjustice represented the petitioners, including Breast Cancer Prevention Partners, the Center for Environmental Health, Center for Food Safety, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Environmental Defense Fund, the Environmental Working Group, Natural Resources Defense Council, and WE ACT for Environmental Justice.

Climate Change Could Completely Transform Earth’s Ecosystems

Climate Change Could Completely Transform Earth’s Ecosystems where the earth's entire terrestrial biome is 75 percent likely to change completely, impacting biodiversity and making life difficult for anyone whose livelihood is based around an ecosystem as it exists now.

Forty-two scientists contributed to a study published in Science Friday that examined how land-based plants had responded to temperature changes of four to seven degrees Celsius since the height of the ice age in order to predict how land-based ecosystems might respond to similar temperature changes predicted for the future. 

Not All Organic Milk Is the Same; Here Are the Best Dairies

Not All Organic Milk Is the Same; Here Are the Best Dairies

Smaller farms tend to fare better than large ones; Aurora and Horizon, two of the largest organic dairy producers in the country, both scored a big fat 0, meaning they do the bare minimum to get certified and don't go beyond the letter of the law at all. But plenty of larger farms are rated highly, including Maple Hill Creamery, Stonyfield Farms and Organic Valley, all of which distribute nationwide.

Organic is not all equal; certainly, the regulations for organic are tougher than for conventional, but sometimes you might be presented with multiple organic options. Why not choose the option that really tries to do the right thing?

The Cornucopia Institute, a watchdog group that monitors ethical agriculture in the U.S., issues periodic scorecards for organic producers. This week, they released their dairy scorecard.

A Toxin in Every Household

A Toxin in Every Household



The report links PFAS exposure to liver toxicity, immune disruption, and developmental problems. In court cases against chemical manufacturers, plaintiffs and medical studies have also linked PFAS in drinking water to kidney cancer, testicular cancer, thyroid disease, ulcerative colitis, pancreatic cancer, and birth defects. "It's an unusual list of chemical effects," says Sonya Lunder, Senior Toxics Policy Advisor at Sierra Club. "It's hard to tie that all together—it's affecting multiple parts of the body in different ways."



The solution to PFAS regulation should not hinge on the outcome of case-by-case litigation. As high as DuPont's $671 million settlement with West Virginia sounds, it was a drop in the bucket compared to the company's $79.5 billion revenue for the year of 2017. Regulating PFAS by individual chemical, and not class, is also untenable: GenX was created by DuPont directly in response to the EPA banning production of PFOA, the main chemical in Teflon; the new class is just different enough from PFOA to escape regulation, but with all the same side effects. "PFAS has to be regulated as a group; we can't just ban one or two chemicals, and watch the industry shift to another similar one," says Lunder. "We need to stop all unnecessary uses of these chemicals in new products. It's not for [city and state] water districts to go bankrupt cleaning up the water[of contaminated regions]."

American History Can Be Used As A Weapon : NPR

'Lies My Teacher Told Me,' And How American History Can Be Used As A Weapon : NPR



what it does to the high school student. It says you don't need to protest; you don't need to write your congressman; you don't need to do any of the things that citizens do, because everything's getting better all the time.



So it encourages passivity.