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10 Things About Living in England as an American that Surprised Me
Aside from sharing English as a predominant language, England and the US have more cultural differences than author Jennifer Still expected before she packed her bags and moved across the pond. Here are 10 things about living in England as an American Still wasn’t prepared for.
Business Insider Lifestyle
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12 Things to Prepare for a Winter Storm
Are you expecting some bad winter weather in the coming weeks? Have you been hit by surprise storms in the past and want to be prepared for the next winter storm? It's important to make sure that your house is ready ahead of time for winter's worst. Here are the best ways to prepare your home.
The Family Handyman Lifestyle
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Vanessa Lachey warns parents about dangerous virus that hospitalized son
Actress and mother of three, Vanessa Lachey, sits down with Fox News’ Dr. Manny Alvarez to talk about the other dangerous seasonal virus many parents may not know about, Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). Lachey’s youngest child, 1-year-old Phoenix, developed the disease last winter and was hospitalized for 6 days from it.
FOX News Health & Fitness
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15 of the Best Pumpkin Patches in the Country
Fact: Fall is the greatest season of them all. The food is delicious, the weather is mild and the gourds are everywhere. Here, 15 of the best places around the country to find the perfect pumpkin. (And while you’re there, why not get lost in a corn maze or hop on a hayride, too?) RELATED: 26 Amazing Pumpkin Recipes to Make All Fall Long
PureWow Travel
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Visit This Food-Loving Small Town in California Before Everyone Else Does
When I tell people that I’m taking a trip to Los Alamos, they respond in one of two ways: Either they have never heard of it or they assume I mean Los Alamos, New Mexico (infamous for its national laboratory and the Manhattan Project).
Food52 Travel
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15 Unexpected Ways to Keep Your House Warm This Winter
As the temperature starts to take a dip, there are some simple things you can do to cut back on heating bills. Beyond replacing old windows and increasing insulation, here are 15 unexpected ways you can keep your house warm this winter.
The Family Handyman Lifestyle
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Halloween Costumes for the Whole Family
Halloween can be fraught with endless searching to find the perfect costume for your tiny monster (pun fully intended.) Checking every store, every Pinterest board, every mommy blog, finally finding the exact one your child wants (located three towns over, of course) only to have them change their mind the night before when they discover all their friends are being unicorns. Let's just skip all that, shall we? Having a family costume makes...
SheKnows Lifestyle
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19 Unconventional Spin-Offs of the Iconic Tan Trench
Ah, the iconic neutral hued trench. It’s a staple—an outerwear classic that transcends seasonality, seamlessly transitioning from month to month as the rest of our wardrobes changes. Even more incredible: Despite its timelessness, the trench coat always manages to look modern, fresh and totally on trend. MORE: Cutting-Edge Ways to Style a Muted Autumn Wardrobe Tan trenches are so versatile we could practically live in them. But sometimes, we crave something different. Sometimes, we want to inject a little flair into an otherwise routine outerwear selection. Sometimes, we wish our go-to trench came in a variety of colors, textures and silhouettes—rather than just the one. Whenever this desire arises in us, we turn to our favorite designers and retailers—crossing our fingers that they’ve offered unconventional spins on tried-and-true outerwear basics. And this season, they definitely have. So if you’re looking to add some flavor to the standard trench template, there are plenty of revamped spin-offs to shop. MORE: How to Take Your Favorite Jumpsuit from Season to Season Now, we’re certainly not advocating for abandoning the flagship neutral toned trench altogether. (We’d never!) But these reimagined descendents of the classic design offer the same wearability, with just a touch of unconventionality. From luxe satin fabrics in of-the-moment colorways to patent designs and embossed textures, these trench coats give the quintessential staple a contemporary makeover. This is e-commerce content. If you purchase something by clicking on a link within this story we may receive a small commission of the sale.
StyleCaster Lifestyle
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Halloween Myths and Facts
Photograph by Twenty20 Why do we dress up for Halloween? How did carved pumpkins become so important? And why does a random night in October matter so much, anyway? These are all questions you've probably asked yourself from time to time. Well, fear not! We've tackled those mysteries for you. The myths and facts that surround Halloween and the way in which we currently celebrate the holiday are rooted deeply in the past. We thought it was time...
Mom.me Lifestyle
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Italian food guide names best Italian restaurants outside Italy
Italian restaurant guide Gambero Rosso has released their picks of the best, most authentic Italian restaurants outside Italy, from Paris to Toronto, Hong Kong and Sydney. More than 500 restaurants from 35 countries are included in the online selection of the top Italian restaurants in the world, with a few special mentions. LuMi in Sydney, Australia, for instance, was named Restaurant of the Year for its Japanese-influenced Italian fine dining ...
Relaxnews (AFP) Food & Drink
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Spooky animal x-rays are exactly as cool as you'd imagine
They’re spooky-scary. As part of an animal’s routine check up, the veterinarians at the Oregon Zoo send each “patient” through an x-ray machine. The zoo also recently tweeted out a compilation of their spookiest x-ray pictures as an early Halloween celebration. We talked to a veterinarian at the zoo, Richard Sim, about some of the wild anatomy in each image. “They have a lot of strength in their hands,” says Sim. “Often when gripping a branch,...
Popular Photography Lifestyle
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10 Photos of the Royal Family Dressing Up in Costume
The royal family has lots of rules and protocol about how to dress up for formal occasions. But when it comes to dressing up in costume, there's more room to have a little fun. Here are a few of the times that royals wore costumes or masks.
INSIDER Lifestyle
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I Tried Amazon Prime Wardrobe and Here's What Happened
We tried on the Amazon Prime Wardrobe service on for size and found it might not be a good fit for everybody. While it does have convenience on its side in many ways, when it comes to selection, size, and even price, the try-before-you-buy perk from Amazon Prime didn't always deliver.
Cheapism Lifestyle
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These bird feathers are so black your eyes can't focus on them
It's like, how much more black could this be? What do birds and aerospace engineers have in common? Both have invented incredibly dark, “super-black” surfaces that absorb almost every last bit of light that strikes them. Of course scientists worked intentionally to devise these materials. It’s evolution that brought this amazing trait about in birds. My co-lead author Teresa Feo, our colleagues Todd A. Harvey and Rick Prum and I recently investigated the super-black feathers in some of the most outlandish animals on earth: the Birds of Paradise. These are resplendent birds native to Papua New Guinea and surrounding areas. Males are brilliantly colored, with complicated mating dances. Females, who are drab and brown in comparison, carefully inspect the ornaments and dances of males before choosing their mate. We wanted to know more about these birds’ super-black plumage and how it works. What mechanism do these feathers employ to be so effective at absorbing light? Fanciest feathers, under the microscope The Birds of Paradise have evolved many remarkable traits, but none are more mysterious than the males’ velvety black plumage. This black is so dark that your eyes cannot focus on its surface; it looks like a cave, or a fuzzy black hole in space. Using optical measurements, we found that these feather patches absorb up to 99.95 percent of directly incident light. That’s comparable to human-made very black materials such as solar panels, the lining of space telescopes, and even the “blackest black” material: Vantablack, which absorbs 99.96 percent of light. Normal feathers are flat, and look like fractals; when you zoom in using a microscope, each branch of the feather looks like a tiny, flat feather. Under a powerful scanning electron microscope, we were surprised to see that the super-black feathers look like miniature coral reefs, bottle brushes, or trees with tightly packed leaves. These tiny, specially shaped bits stick up to form a jagged, complex surface; together they act as microscopic light traps. When light rays strike these surface microstructures, they repeatedly scatter around the shapes and are absorbed, rather than being reflected back to an observer. It’s an iterative process: Each time a scattering event occurs, a portion of the light is absorbed until it’s almost completely absorbed. Human-made super-black materials such as “black silicon” also rely on what materials scientists call structural absorption. Like the super-black feathers, their microscopic “light traps” are due to a rough surface that scatters light repeatedly, but the actual surface shapes they use are different. Rather than the feathers’ bottle brush shapes, human engineers designed regularly spaced microscopic cones and pits. With almost no exposed flat surface, these structurally black materials are the opposite of a mirror. MORE ON ANIMALS: The Birds of Paradise’s super-black feathers are so good at absorbing light that even when we coated them in gold, a shiny metal, they still looked black. That’s because it’s not the inside of the feather making the color via pigment or ordered nanostructures; instead, just as with human-made black silicon, the super black comes from the physical surface structure. Evolution and human ingenuity arrived at the same solution. Advantages of super-black feathers But why do these birds have such incredibly dark black patches? What selective advantage caused this trait to evolve? It’s tempting to think that super black somehow helps with camouflage, to keep predators away. In fact, some snakes have super-black scales that mimic shadows between leaves, helping them blend into the forest floor. The snake example illustrates evolution by natural selection—“survival of the fittest.” But other factors can also influence evolution’s course, including random chance or sexual selection. As my colleague Rick Prum points out in his new book “The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World – and Us,” mate choice is a powerful force driving evolution. In Birds of Paradise, super-black feathers help male birds look more beautiful to a female’s eye. To understand how, it helps to look at Bird of Paradise mating dances. Males vigorously display their super-black patches to females, making sure that females can’t get a view from the side. This is because these feathers are highly directional, and they look darkest from straight ahead. And super-black patches always sit around or next to brilliant color patches. A super-black, anti-reflective frame makes nearby colors appear brighter, almost glow. In other words, super black is an evolved optical illusion that relies on the way animal eyes and brains adjust our perceptions based on ambient light. In the high-stakes game of choosing a mate, a single feather that isn’t quite blue enough could be enough to turn off a female Bird of Paradise. Clearly, female Birds of Paradise prefer males with super-black plumage. As females pick the most impressive males to mate with, those dazzling feather genes are passed on to future generations while the genes of less splendid males, overlooked by females, are not. Sexual selection drove evolution toward super-black plumage. Evolution is not an orderly, coherent process; evolutionary arms races can produce great innovation. Perhaps these super-black feathers with their unique microscopic structure could eventually inspire better solar panels, or new textiles; super-black butterfly wings already have. Evolution has had millions of years to tinker; we still have much to learn from its solutions. Dakota McCoy is a PhD Student in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. This article was originally featured on The Conversation.
Popular Science Lifestyle
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10 Things to Know About Winter Power Outages
Between the wind, heavy snow and ice, power outages are common during the winter months. Winter power outages cause several inconveniences, but there are some things you can do to better weather the storm. Here are 10 things to know about winter power outages.
The Family Handyman Lifestyle
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The Craziest Things You Can Buy for Your Kitchen
Food lovers and amateur chefs can go crazy when confronted with gadgets in a home store, from the pasta makers and brie bakers to three-tier fondue fountains, automated espresso machines, and robot bartenders. But most of these pricey devices become useless clutter for the 99 percent of the year they're not in use.
Cheapism Lifestyle
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Here's Why We Celebrate Halloween
The history of Halloween goes all the way back to a pagan festival called Samhain. The word "Halloween" comes from"All Hallows' Eve" and means "hallowed evening." Hundreds of years ago, people dressed up as saints and went door to door, which is the origin of Halloween costumes and trick-or-treating. Although it's fun to dress in disguise and collect treats, there's much more to Halloween than many realize. The history of the holiday goes back...
WPTZ Plattsburgh-Burlington Lifestyle
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These Men Get Real About How To Be Good Allies To Women
Since the words "me too" overtook our national cultural dialogue this time last year, dynamics between men and women — and, indeed, across the gender spectrum — have intensified. In some cases, rifts between genders have deepened, in others, bridges of solidarity and genuine allyship have been built. And, though some have openly expressed a weariness with the #MeToo movement, this conversation is still just beginning. In the past year,...
Refinery29 Lifestyle