The TV Treasure Chest Moment occurs when you stumble upon an elusive rerun of your favorite TV show just as it’s about to start. This champion channel-flip happens in two big ways: 1. The Missing Link. This is when  you suddenly realize you haven’t seen this episode before — ever! You love the show, you’re […]

The post #540 That TV Treasure Chest Moment appeared first on 1000 Awesome Things.

Read time: 8 mins

With a stranger, there are so many empty spaces we get to fill with our imagination, but as we get to know a person better, there are less blanks.

Peele has managed to map an enemy that exists in all of “us.”

The rapper is trying to trademark the word, but its complicated history touches drag culture, ballroom, and the Kardashians.

Plus other things that you can claim on your Canadian taxes that you probably don’t know about.

Genre veteran and Behemoth frontman Nergal watched the Norwegian black metal drama unfold as a teen, while German actor Wilson Gonzalez Ochsenknecht plays the accomplice of Euronymous’ murderer in the Mayhem biopic. Here’s how their meeting went.

Sending fans to the literal ends of the Earth to find them.

The Alberta candidate, who made transphobic and Islamophobic statements in the past, said she was being “bullied” by someone threatening to smear her.

A new study reveals that science is on our side.

Forget Walter White, the temp from ‘The Office’ truly showed us the evil modern man is capable of.

Ross Ulbricht is serving a life sentence for creating the world’s first online drug marketplace. We spoke to his mum Lyn about their journey.

Devon Island in the Canadian High Arctic is the largest uninhabited island on Earth and the most Mars-like environment on our planet, which is why NASA has chosen it as a base for its research and planning for a future mission to the red planet.
(Photo: Google)

Devon Island in the Canadian High Arctic, the planet’s largest uninhabited island and the closest thing to Mars on Earth, can now be explored virtually via Google Street View.

So it wasn’t a randomized trial, but the results were interesting nonetheless.

In the UK, a number of supermarkets electively decided to stop the sale of impulse buy small pack checkout aisle junk food. Researchers curious about the impact had a peek at their sales date.

What they found was encouraging and they detailed their findings in their article Supermarket policies on less-healthy food at checkouts: Natural experimental evaluation using interrupted time series analyses of purchases. Plainly put, when compared with purchases from supermarkets still selling checkout aisle small pack junk, shoppers purchased 16% less small pack junk food from supermarkets that didn’t offer checkout aisle junk food temptations.

Given the ubiquity of junk food in checkout aisles, and here I’m not just talking about the supermarket, but pretty much any and every checkout aisle, cleaning them up is a very real target in improving our food environment. And before you say it can’t be done, it’s been done with tobacco’s “Power Walls” (but some irony here in that at least some of the new walls hiding cigarettes are being used to advertise junk food)

       

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“Honey, have you seen my measuring tape?” “I think it’s in that drawer in the kitchen with the scissors, bobby pins, scotch tape, nail clippers, barbecue tongs, extra buttons, old birthday cards, stained take-out menus, thick rubber bands, matches, garlic press, stack of Christmas napkins, old cell phone chargers, instruction booklets for the VCR, some […]

The post #541 Stashing everything in a junk drawer appeared first on 1000 Awesome Things.

first spring rain i am certain the bright sun must be rising stoic, somewhere out there, just past the tawny deer grazed field- but here it hides shy, cloaked in damp layered cloud let it linger,…

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Read time: 5 mins

A simple and quick video tutorial on How to Make a Bunny Napkin (Bunny Napkin Fold).  So cute for an Easter table setting! I really love Easter.  Everything about it feels fresh and hopeful.  It’s the time of year when the sun seems to shine brighter, the birds are singing and the air smells like rain.  This is such a welcome relief after our long winter.  All of this sunshine has inspired me to start planning for Easter with some decorating, menu planning and table setting ideas for our scrumptious Easter feasts! This year for Easter we are hosting a […]

The post How to Make a Bunny Napkin (Bunny Napkin Fold) appeared first on A Pretty Life In The Suburbs.

Read time: 4 mins

Elizabeth Weil, in The New York Times Magazine, with a long read on former artist colony cultivator, and now on trial (starting in April) for 36 deaths, Max Harris.

John Coggon, John Middleton, Farhang Tahzib, and A.M. Viens, in the BMJ, on the “nanny state” logical fallacy.

Lindsay Zoladz, in The Ringer, on Van Morrison’s masterpiece Astral Weeks and how at age 50, it’s still finding new fans.

       

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Read time: 7 mins

Green icebergs might be feeding the southern ocean

How our switch to soft foods has affected our speech

Dreams only happen at some points during sleep

Your brain and belly are in fact, connected

Unearthing a treasure trove of Cambrian era fossils in China

A visit to an asteroid may reveal the secrets to life on Earth

A Johnson Sea Link research sub 500 metres under the Gulf Stream off the east coast of Florida. (Photo: Triton Submarines LLC)

Canadian Space Agency astronaut David Saint-Jacques looks through a window in the cupola of the International Space Station. (Photo: Canadian Space Agency/NASA)

Believe it. There’s something great about eating foods that aren’t the color they’re supposed to be. When you chomp on those deliciously mutant creations, it’s a feast for all your senses. Since the days of cavemen eating albino monkeys, we’ve been loving the unexplainable brain-jarring jolts of happiness that come with eating foods so wrong […]

The post #542 Wrong-colored foods appeared first on 1000 Awesome Things.

Nettilling Lake on the south end of Baffin Island in Nunavut is the largest freshwater ecosystem in the Canadian Arctic archipelago. (Photo: Reinhard Pienitz/Can Geo Photo Club)

March 22nd is World Water Day, a United Nations-led initiative to provoke conversation and action on water issues around the globe. The theme for 2019 is “Water for All.” Goal number six of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals envisions a world where everyone has access to clean, safe water — but billions of people around the world still live without it in their households, schools, and places of work.

Millions of sharks are killed each year for their fins. A bill currently before the House of Commons proposes to ban the import and export of shark fins in Canada. (Photo: Albert Kok/Wikimedia Commons)

There is a crisis in oceans around the world….

I’ve long called for a rebranding of exercise to promote it on the basis of all of its incredible benefits, and explicitly not in the name of weight loss.

While on paper there’s no doubt that people can lose weight through exercise (and in research studies too), in practice they generally don’t. And though there’s also definitely the suggestion that exercise helps to keep weight off (or serves as a marker or inspiration for maintaining a whole slew of weight responsive behaviour changes), when it comes to public health, I believe focusing on weight loss as the outcome of choice in exercise interventions risks those interventions’ dissolution when weight loss doesn’t occur.

Helping to make my point is a recent study published in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine. The study, Implementing School-Based Policies to Prevent Obesity: Cluster Randomized Trial, looked at the impact school based nutrition and physical activity policies had on weight.

The study found that while school based nutrition policies seemed to have an impact on weight over time, school based physical activity policies didn’t.

Not measured of course, or at least not mentioned, were the impacts those physical activity policies might have had on other health related parameters (blood pressure, blood sugar, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, mood, sleep, attention, learning, physical literacy, and more) – things that I think the literature would support as being far more likely to see exercise-related improvements.

But it’s the study’s abstract’s conclusion that got me, as I think it does a great job of highlighting the risk of clinging to exercise as an important driver of weight loss. Here it is in its entirety (highlighting mine),

“This cluster randomized trial demonstrated effectiveness of providing support for implementation of school-based nutrition policies, but not physical activity policies, to limit BMI increases among middle school students. Results can guide future school interventions.”

Suffice to say I think it’d be an incredible shame if results like these guide any future school related physical activity interventions, as the benefits of exercise are myriad, something these results wholly ignore, and if these results guide anything, they’d guide the avoidance or elimination of school based physical activity policies which would let kids down on so many levels.

       

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My parents drove downtown last week. They cruised along wet highways onto narrow streets to catch up with me over dinner. We walked a block from my apartment to a small restaurant where we squeezed into a booth and squinted at the small-font menu under the dim lighting. Wedged between a couple holding hands and […]

The post #543 That separate compartment in your stomach just for dessert appeared first on 1000 Awesome Things.

Read time: 6 mins

Aili Keskitalo, the president of the Sami Parliament of Norway, speaks at the “State of the Arctic” session at the Arctic Frontiers conference in Tromsø, Norway. (Photo: Terje Mortensen/Arctic Frontiers 2019)

After two months of Arctic night, bracketed by brief windows of expanding twilight, the sun makes its annual return above the crest of the mountains surrounding Tromsø, Norway, on January 21. Locals mark the occasion with a traditional treat of “sun cakes,” a kind of raspberry-filled Norwegian doughnut.

Read time: 7 mins

Make this Simple Succulent Wreath for Spring for less than $20 and with just a few simple supplies! Today I’ve joined a talented group of bloggers, and we are sharing 28 pretty spring wreaths with you!  Thank you to Krista of Happy Housie for organizing.  Make sure to check out all the wreath tutorials in the links at the bottom of this post!  xo I seem to have a theme going on this early spring.  I’m all about plants…plants, succulents and cacti everywhere!  And this Simple Succulent Wreath is just an extension of that.  In case you missed my previous spring decorating […]

The post Simple Succulent Wreath for Spring appeared first on A Pretty Life In The Suburbs.

Cover options for the May/June issue of Canadian Geographic.

There’s a general rule at Canadian Geographic that readers love polar bears. More than practically any other animal, they stir feelings of awe in nature. People travel thousands of kilometres and at great expense to see them in the wild. They inspire calls for habitat conservation and climate action. They sell covers.

It all starts with a poster board. Getting mom to drive to the drug store to load up on the thick flimsy is a great start to a great project. Grab a sheet of white, a sheet of neon pink, and if you’re lucky one of those thick cardboard three-folds. Come on, we both know […]

The post #544 Science fairs appeared first on 1000 Awesome Things.