Hygiene Theater Is a Huge Waste of Time

As a covid-19 summer surge sweeps the country, deep cleans are all the rage.

National restaurants such as Applebee’s are deputizing sanitation czars to oversee the constant scrubbing of window ledges, menus, and high chairs. The gym chain Planet Fitness is boasting in ads that “there’s no surface we won’t sanitize, no machine we won’t scrub.” New York City is shutting down its subway system every night, for the first time in its 116-year history, to blast the seats, walls, and poles with a variety of antiseptic weaponry, including electrostatic disinfectant sprays. And in Wauchula, Florida, the local government gave one resident permission to spray the town with hydrogen peroxide as he saw fit. “I think every city in the damn United States needs to be doing it,” he said.

Cicadas Are Being Infected With Fungus That Makes Them Zombies

Cicadas are succumbing to a parasitic infection that basically turns them into zombies.

You read that right. The fungus scientifically known as Massospora has been infecting male cicadas for years, according to a journal from PLOS Pathogens as reported by LiveScience. It doesn’t end there though. Much like a zombie army, the male cicada zombies begin to work toward growing their numbers by luring in other male cicadas using a flickering wing movement traditionally used by female cicadas to lure in male mates.

Brain Gain: A Person Can Instantly Blossom into a Savant—and No One Knows Why

Savant syndrome comes in different forms. In congenital savant syndrome the extraordinary savant ability surfaces in early childhood. In acquired savant syndrome astonishing new abilities, typically in music, art or mathematics, appear unexpectedly in ordinary persons after a head injury, stroke or other central nervous system (CNS) incident where no such abilities or interests were present pre-incident.

A Warning from the Chickens of the World

IN 1997, Lam Hoi-Ka, a previously healthy three-year-old boy, died of multiple organ failure in Hong Kong. When a team of virologists from the Netherlands declared that the death-dealing agent had been H5N1, a virus that was previously known to infect only birds, scientists were shocked. The theoretical possibility of a deadly global pandemic, similar to the 1918 flu that killed millions of people, was suddenly made real.

Giving Facebook less data is a good idea. Even better: Just use it less

The past several months have served up many reasons to see Facebook as the antisocial network.

It lets political candidates lie in paid ads that they can then microtarget to the easily duped. It tolerates fake pages until outside watchdogs call them out. And it’s chosen—in contrast to Twitter—to look past President Trump lying about mail-in ballots or endorsing extrajudicial executions by U.S. troops in U.S. streets.

The F-16’s Replacement Won’t Have a Pilot at All

The U.S. Air Force plans to have an operational combat drone by 2023. The service plans to build out a family of unmanned aircraft, known as Skyborg, capable of carrying weapons and actively participating in combat. The Air Force’s goal is to build up a large fleet of armed, sort-of disposable jets that don’t need conventional runways to take off and land.

Critical Illness Insurance Definitions Will Change in 2020 – How This Could Affect New Policies

When a friend or schoolmate you haven’t heard from for more than a decade contacts you out of the blue, there can only be two reasons: they’re trying to recruit you to MLM or they’re trying to sell you insurance.

Health Check: What Are ‘Coffee Naps’ and Can They Help You Power Through the Day?

Caffeine and napping have something in common. Both make you feel alert and can enhance your performance, whether that’s driving, working or studying. But some people are convinced that drinking a coffee before a nap gives you an extra zap of energy when you wake up.

The Fall and Rise of M. Night Shyamalan

Call it a surprise twist, if you must: Early one Monday morning in November 2018, M. Night Shyamalan turned on his shower, and no water came out. The writer-director has come to believe that the universe is fundamentally benevolent, and as it happens, the universe — not to mention the vast success of his initial run of movies, beginning with The Sixth Sense — provided him with a 125-acre country estate west of Philadelphia, where he’s lived with his family since 2007. So he simply popped into another building on his sprawling property, terrifying a cleaning woman in the process. He grabbed a shower there, mussed his thick black hair up as usual, and managed to get his youngest daughter to school, prepping her for a French quiz on the way.