Health Tips Line

I travel a lot, so it’s always a challenge to keep up on my favorite shows—especially if the Wi-Fi at my destination is a little iffy. (To say nothing of the potentially sketchy public Wi-Fi networks on the way there.) Sure, today’s streaming services give us tons of options for watching on the go, but there’s just one problem: You need a reliable internet connection to stream, and that’s not always an option when you’re away from home. Thankfully, Netflix has a solution to ensure your next work trip or vacation doesn’t get in the way of your must-watch TV . It’s a little-known Netflix trick that you’re probably not taking advantage of, and it lets you binge even without Wi-Fi or a data network. Read on for all the details. Get  Reader’s Digest ’s  Read Up newsletter for more entertainment, tech, humor, travel and fun facts all week long. What little-known trick should you use for your favorite Netflix series? It’s called Smart Downloads, and if you haven’t tried it ye...

Housework isn’t just about what gets done. It’s about who does it, and how often. Between the dishes, the laundry, the dust bunnies and the ever-returning to-do list , the upkeep required to keep a home running isn’t always a clean divide: Across the United States, men and women still spend their time differently at home. Some of that gap has narrowed over the years, but not by as much as you might think, and not in the same ways across every task. New data from the Pew Research Center takes a closer look at how those hours break down, tracking how much time men and women spend on housework each day. And no, it doesn’t all come out in the wash . Get  Reader’s Digest ’s  Read Up newsletter for more cleaning, humor, travel, tech and fun facts all week long. How did Pew researchers determine time spent doing housework? To get a clear picture of daily life, researchers at Pew analyzed data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), a long-running dataset from the U.S. Bureau ...

Mattresses Here’s a tempting secondhand purchase. The best mattresses are expensive new, and it’s not uncommon to see “barely used” options for sale online or at resale shops. The problem: Mattresses are extremely difficult to clean thoroughly. Maldonado, who is also a chemist and biologist, says old mattresses can harbor everything from allergens to bacteria to pests (I mean, just think of the possibilities!). Dust mites—microscopic creatures linked to allergies, asthma and skin conditions like dermatitis—thrive in mattresses because they provide an ideal habitat: warm temperatures, humidity and a steady supply of their favorite food, human skin cells. Mattresses can also harbor bed bugs, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says can cause severe itching, sleep loss and secondary infections from scratching. And once you have bed bugs, you are in for a massive amount of time and expense getting rid of them. If you absolutely must buy a used mattress, inspect it c...

Last Labor Day, 30-year-old Emily Del­Favero was enjoying a rare day off from her job as an auto mechanic. She was puttering around her house in Syracuse, New York, when she paused to check her Facebook feed. To DelFavero’s delight, there was a new post from one of her favorite Facebook groups , Weird (and Wonderful) Secondhand Finds That Just Need to Be Shared. The latest find, spotted at a shop in Baltimore by Thea Lenna, was a chair beyond compare, and when DelFavero saw it, she just about fell out of hers. It had pastel polka dots along its frame, bright stripes on the seat cushion and, at its back, two giant fish carved out of wood. She recognized it right away. This was the hand-painted handiwork of well-known designer Victoria MacKenzie-Childs. More relevant, it was the image inked onto Del­Favero’s own right calf. On a whim, she had gotten a tattoo of this exact chair nearly two years earlier, based on a dollhouse version of it that caught her eye at the MacKenzie-Childs stud...

For Jenny Lynn Anderson, traveling solo for the first time wasn’t just about seeing the world—it was about rediscovering herself in her mid-50s. “After 30 years of marriage and a few years post-divorce, I found myself standing at a crossroads. I had gone back to work full-time and needed a mental vacation from my busy job in marketing,” explains the 62-year-old travel expert behind the blog Jenny Lynn on a Journey. “I went to New York City for a long weekend , acted like a tourist and did everything from booking a trolley tour of the city to seeing Hamilton on Broadway. It met every expectation that I had dreamed of, and I felt like a bird being released from a cage.” And she isn’t alone. Solo travel has surged in popularity in recent years, with the global solo travel market projected to reach $1 trillion by 2030, according to Solo Traveler World. In fact, according to Airbnb’s 2026 travel predictions, “solo travel is experiencing a renaissance, fueled by online conversations that ...