Health Tips Line

’Tis the season for spring cleaning, which means it’s time for me to muster up the enthusiasm for a deep clean of all the nooks and crannies I neglect the rest of the year. Cleaning while listening to an audiobook makes it all more palatable, although I have caught myself vacuuming the same spot on the carpet for too long when I get distracted by the story. Speaking of books: That’s the one project I look forward to tackling. Once a year, I take down every book, thoroughly dust the shelves, then reorganize my library. The shelves and spines get some extra love when I dust weekly. But is this cleaning routine really keeping my collection in good shape? I don’t have any truly priceless books that would require the care of a book conservator, but I consulted one anyway. Hey, book lovers will do what it takes to ensure their treasures are clean and preserved. If you’re an avid reader like me, you’re going to want to bookmark this. Ahead, I’m laying out expert-backed steps to keep yo...

Be honest: On a scale of unbothered to pure panic, how would you feel if you were traveling in an unfamiliar place and your phone died? Most of us would probably be uneasy, at best. We rely on our phones for navigation, communication, restaurant recommendations, transportation booking, boarding-pass storage and more. But it wasn’t always this way. I started traveling just before tech took over, and at the risk of sounding ancient, I miss those days! Sure, mobile phones and apps have made travel easier in many ways (printing maps and lugging around an actual guidebook could be a hassle), but not being tethered to a device or always knowing where we were going was truly half the fun. Some of my favorite travel experiences have sprung from moments when I allowed myself to get lost. Stumbling upon the tastiest curry of my life—cooked to order in a local home and served at a tiny roadside table—while wandering in rural Thailand. Sloth-spotting and toucan-watching while ...

If it feels like every headline lately is bullish on gains or bearish on what’s next, you’re not imagining it. Between inflation squeezing wallets, interest rate hikes putting markets on edge and roller-coaster swings in tech stocks, these animal-coded market moods have been everywhere—from financial news to your group chat. They’re not just colorful metaphors; they’re steering the herd, shaping sentiment and, in many cases, moving real money. But beneath all that chatter is a question most of us rarely stop to ask: Why are we talking about money in the language of animals at all? Why not something more straightforward, like “up markets” and “down markets”? As it turns out, the story of bulls and bears isn’t just financial; it’s historical, linguistic and, at times, a little brutal. These phrases trace back centuries, long before modern Wall Street, revealing how metaphor, instinct and storytelling became baked into the way we understand money . To get a clearer read on where thes...

For better or worse, artificial intelligence (AI) is inescapable. Depending on who you ask, it’s either the best technological development of our time or part of a dystopian future where robots are taking our jobs and running the show. But while everyone’s arguing about the rise of the machines, those machines are buzzing away in AI data centers, processing our queries and potentially doing some serious harm to the environment. And the number of data centers is increasing rapidly. In 2021, there were approximately 8,000 worldwide. Just five years later, that number has jumped to more than 12,000, and there’s no slowdown in sight. These centers are massive, ranging in size from 100,000 square feet to millions of square feet. (The largest in the U.S., located in Nevada, is whopping 7.75 million square feet.) With that immense size comes immense processing power—and substantial energy consumption, pollution and resource depletion, says John Oppermann, executive director of the Earth Da...