Queen Anne's Lace, a pretty, lacy-looking plant, may have white flowers in its natural state, but with your help, it can make an amazing transformation. Prepare some Queen Anne's Lace and cut off several blossoms with scissors, placing the flower stems directly into a jar with a little water in it. Next, gather some small containers and various shades of food coloring. In each container put about one part food coloring and two parts water. Once you've mixed the food coloring and water, place the stems of several blossoms of Queen Anne's Lace into each container of colored water and let them stand for several hours. Once the flowers are colored, you can make a bouquet by arranging your colored flowers in a vase with clear water.
A Japanese airline, All Nippon Airways(ANA), has started asking its passengers to visit the bathroom before boarding. ANA reasons that it can make passengers lighter, which in turn means lighter aircraft and reduced fuel use. The airline started the unusual policy on October 1st. ANA says that the policy was initially intended as an experiment lasting one month but it may expand the trial if results are positive. Flying is the fastest-growing source of carbon dioxide emissions, accounting for more than 600 million tons of the greenhouse gas per year. A flight between London Heathrow and New York's John F Kennedy airport creates around 1.35 tons of CO2 per passenger–more than one-third of the yearly emissions of an average person worldwide.
How do you measure the value of a candle? You can't measure its value by light output, since the candle has lost its function as a means of lighting a room. The years that followed Thomas Alva Edison's invention of the lamp might have been called "the fall of the candle and the rise of the light bulb." Yet every night all over America millions of candles are burning. No romantic dinner is complete without candles on the table. Individual candles are sold for $20 or $30 each, much more than a light bulb. Unlike an electric bulb, the value of a candle has no relationship to its light output. Like the fireplace and the sailing ship, the candle has lost its function and turned into art.
Everyone knows a school bus when they see one ― mainly by its color. That particular yellow has been the official school bus color for quite a long time. It dates back to 1939, when a professor named Frank W. Cyr, of Teachers College in New York City, organized a conference. His mission was to establish national safety standards for school buses. At that time, children were being transported to school in all sorts of vehicles, including trucks and horse-drawn wagons. Cyr's conference attracted transportation specialists from all across the country. Specialists from some paint companies came as well. After a week of discussion, the participants agreed on standards for bus construction and safety—and also for color. They determined that a particular shade of yellow-orange with black letters was the most visible combination in the early morning and late afternoon hours. They named that yellow color National School Bus Chrome.
"How can we provide the best health care for our people?" This is a question that every responsible society is attempting to answer. Advances in drugs and medical technology have made possible new treatments for diseases that medical science could not hope to cure before. In the wealthy countries, doctors and patients expect the latest drugs and technology. In the countries of the Third World, however, the health problems that have priority are very different. Here over 9 million children die annually from curable respiratory infections and from measles that has almost disappeared in the developed countries. In those countries, it is believed that about 80 percent of all cases of illness are the result of contaminated water and inadequate sanitation.
Once there was a poor man who had only potatoes to eat. Each dinner he would sit beneath his wealthy neighbor's kitchen window and breathe in mouth-watering aromas coming from the window. This seemed to lend flavor to his own plain meal. The wealthy man eventually discovered the poor man's habit. "This theft will not be tolerated!" he thundered. He dragged the poor man to a village elder for advice, and insisted that his neighbor pay for the privilege of enjoying the smells. The poor man said, "I cannot pay because all I own is my dog." "An equal exchange is a solution," said the village elder. "From now on, you shall be free to smell his dog whenever you wish."
Coconuts are said to be used in India to catch monkeys. People take a coconut and make a little hole just big enough for a monkey to put its paw through. And inside the coconut, which is nailed to a tree, they put something sweet. So the monkey smells something nice inside, and puts his hand in. He catches hold of the sweet inside, so now he has a fist. But the hole is too small for the fist to get out. When the hunters come back, the monkey's caught. But of course, all the monkey has to do is let go. Nobody's holding the monkey except the monkey's grasping greedy mind.
Russia thinks it can claim a huge chunk of the Arctic Ocean's floor by flying a flag at the North Pole. However, the Canadian prime minister said: "We've established a long time ago that this is Canadian property. You can't go around the world these days dropping a flag somewhere. This isn't the 14th or 15th century." This dispute is, of course, regarding oil. Experts believe about a quarter of the world's untapped oil and natural gas lies under the Arctic Ocean. Under the law of the sea agreement, a country can claim a larger section of the ocean bed if it can prove that it is an extension of its continental shelf. Russia says that the North Pole is an extension of the Eurasian continent. In 2001, this claim was rejected by the United Nations, but Russia is preparing to resubmit its claim.
According to a recent study, people who get a temporary or part-time job after retirement are more satisfied with their lives than those who stop working altogether. In the study, the retirees answered a basic mental health questionnaire. The findings showed that people whose post-retirement jobs were related to their previous careers reported better mental health. However, these mental health improvements were not found among people who worked in jobs outside their career field after retirement. This may be because retirees who take jobs not related to their career field may need to adapt to a different work environment and, therefore, become more stressed.
Recently, we had interviews with young men and women who talked about their most significant romantic relationships. An analysis of the interviews suggests that in well over half of the cases, the romance started between two people who had known each other previously. More often than not, the initial acquaintance was through work—"we worked at the same coffee shop," through school — "we sat next to each other in class," or through the place of residence — "we lived on the same floor." As the geographic distance separating potential couples decreased, the probability of their marrying each other increased.
Use it or lose it" is an old admonition. And it is also the conclusion of a new study by researchers at Stanford University. In the study the researchers studied 500 older runners, all of whom were in their 50s at the start of the project. The scientists tracked them for more than 20 years, comparing them to a similar group of non-runners. 19 years into the study, 34 percent of the non-runners had died compared to only 15 percent of the runners. Both groups became more disabled with age, but for the runners the onset of disability started an average of 16 years later. The study showed that the health gap between the runners and non-runners continued to widen even as the subjects entered their eighties.
Mistakes are a sign of life lived to the fullest. However, many people are fearful of taking action in their lives because they fear it will be a mistake. The paradox here is that you cannot avoid mistakes in life. The most successful people in the world have failed over and over again until they achieved their dream. Thomas Edison reportedly tried over 1,000 times to make the light bulb. When he was told that he had made 1,000 mistakes, he simply replied "I never failed. I just discovered 1,000 ways not to make a light bulb." A woman who moved to another town realized after a month that she had made a bad choice. However, the same situation could be looked at like this: She now had the opportunity to look for another, better position.
In recent years, I've learned that a failure to take regular breaks is an enormous mistake that not only wears you down over time, but actually makes you less productive. I assumed that by skipping my breaks, I'd be able to save a great deal of time and get more work done. Now I have an idea that more isn't always better. While you may not even feel it at the time, slowly but surely your exhaustion will sneak up on you. You'll become less patient and attentive, and your concentration and listening skills will suffer. You'll burn out much more quickly, and your creativity and insights will slowly fade away. You'd better push the "pause button" once in a while, and push the "replay button" returning to your work feeling refreshed.
In a research examining students studying for midterms and coping with stressful events, a psychologist Shelley Taylor compared the students who practiced mental rehearsal and focused on what they needed to do to succeed with those whose mental rehearsal focused strictly on the outcome they desired. Students who rehearsed the steps that they needed to take in order to get good grades and to deal with stressful experiences enhanced their performance more often than students who imagined themselves getting good grades and alleviating stress. So, when you focus on the process of achieving your goal rather than imagining the end product of your efforts, your chances of success will increase.
I know a teacher who once told her class, on the first day of school, that at the end of the year she would take them on a very exciting trip. Practically every day, students who were not behaving properly were threatened with the punishment of not going on the special trip. Many students even did extra work to make sure they would be included. During the last week of school, the teacher announced to the children that she was moving away and would not be able to take them on the trip after all. This betrayal not only ruined anything good she had done with the kids that year, but soured many of them on school and adults in general. A broken trust has to be avoided at all costs.
We are what we eat. The diet of the animals we eat has a connection with the nutritional quality of our food itself. This should be self-evident, yet it is a truth often overlooked by the food industry in its desire to produce vast quantities of cheap animal protein. That greed has changed the diet of most of our food animals from plants to seeds, because animals grow faster and produce more milk on a high-energy diet of grain. But some of our food animals, such as cows and sheep, are ruminants that evolved to eat grass. If they eat too many seeds, they become sick, which is why grain-fed cattle have to be given antibiotics. In their natural state, cattle spent their lives grazing on local grasses. Do not force them to eat against their natural preference.
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