Your smartphone is making you stupid, antisocial and unhealthy; Making School Lunch Edible Again...more

Your smartphone is making you stupid, antisocial and unhealthy. So why can’t you put it down? ...Add it all up and North American users spend somewhere between three and five hours a day looking at their smartphones. As the New York University marketing professor Adam Alter points out, that means over the course of an average lifetime, most of us will spend about seven years immersed in our portable computers.

These companies have persuaded us to give over so much of our lives by exploiting a handful of human frailties. One of them is called novelty bias. It means our brains are suckers for the new. As the McGill neuroscientist Daniel Levitin explains, we're wired this way to survive. In the infancy of our species, novelty bias kept us alert to dubious red berries and the growls of sabre-toothed tigers. But now it makes us twig helplessly to Facebook notifications and the buzz of incoming e-mail. That's why social media apps nag you to turn notifications on. They know that once the icons start flashing onto your lock screen, you won't be able to ignore them. It's also why Facebook switched the colour of its notifications from a mild blue to attention-grabbing red...

Making School Lunch Edible Again 
...The Act’s directives called for lowering calories, portions and sodium through whole grains and non-fat milk and increasing fresh veggies and fruit — a one size fits all approach that resulted in the first decrease in the $13.6 billion National School Lunch Program participation in decades. Although the Obama administration never published the number of schools dropping the program, the media was full of such reports and social media exploded with memes, tweets and videos made by disgusted, hungry children.

It ignored schools’ regional and cultural differences. Asian students didn’t like brown rice and Hispanic children wanted normal tortillas that didn’t crack when rolled. It set the same calorie limits for an 85 pound gymnast and a 250 pound linebacker. Its sodium restrictions were too low for athletes or a child in Texas walking home in June. The student in East L.A. does not necessarily share food favorites with a kid in Manhattan or one in rural Tennessee. Cafeteria creativity and local food preferences flew out the window with its mandates...

Snow is falling in the Sahara desert for the third time in 40 years

Massive 7.6 magnitude earthquake strikes in the Caribbean
Islands escape major damage after one of the most powerful tremors ever to hit the region...