Abetrujillo

Parents looking to share their love of 'The Office' with their kids (minus Michael Scott's inappropriate jokes) can do so later this year when a new children's book, 'The Office: A Day at Dunder Mifflin Elementary,' arrives.

Some people bite their nails out of habit, to ease anxiety, or just to calm themselves down. But biting your nails can cause injury, and in some cases, get you straight to the operating room. If you’re a nail biter, here’s one story that can hopefully convince you to stop the habit. Lauren Nichols stopped biting her nails after a cuticle infection, when she almost had to get her fingertip amputated. Buzzfeed has more details: 

she woke up one morning with red swelling around a green spot on her cuticle. She went to the doctor and found out she had paronychia, aka a cuticle infection.

Nichols eventually had to have a type of surgery called a therapeutic washout to remove the infection. Her doctor told her that she needed to stop biting her nails. "He told me that he has to amputate the tips of people's fingers because the infection gets too bad, and that I'm lucky I came when I did," she told BuzzFeed.

image via Buzzfeed

You know the bares bones story of how Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer came to be. First it was a story in a promotional booklet given to kids by Montgomery Ward in 1939. Then it became a simple song written by Johnny Marks and sung by Gene Autry in 1949. And then in 1964, the story was again fleshed out, this time for a TV special that is still broadcast 55 years later. But there's more to the story. Johnny Marks had a hard getting anyone interested in his Christmas song about a reindeer.

It was off to a slow start. Marks had pitched a demo for his new song but the biggest stars weren’t interested. Both Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby turned him down before Marks got a foot in the door with Gene Autry. The “Singing Cowboy” himself didn’t actually like the song, but his wife loved it, and she talked her husband into recording it as the B-side to another Christmas single he was recording for Columbia Records. By the end of the year, Marks’ little ditty about a flying red-nosed reindeer named Rudolph was the biggest song in the country.

Crosby released a new version the following year. Then Sinatra, and then the Supremes and the Temptations. By 1980, more than 500 different renditions had been commercially released. By the end of the century, it was the biggest Christmas song ever written, and so closely identified with the holiday that it is hard for subsequent generations to imagine the holiday without it. No one since Charles Dickens had so profoundly altered the mythology of Christmas itself.

Read how the different iterations of Rudolph and his red nose captured the public's imagination at HuffPo.

(Image credit: Rankin Bass)

Hey, good morning! You look fabulous. Before we take a quick Thanksgiving break (yes, The Morning After will return for Black Friday) it's time for an extremely normal newsletter filled with Star Wars cookware, VR-equipped cows and auto execs feedin...

Scientists studying the ecology of the Wolong National Nature Reserve in southwest China found a curious shot when they checked a camera trap in April. It was a juvenile giant panda, estimated to be between a year and two years of age. But this panda had no black fur! Even its claws are white. More scrutiny revealed that the animal is an albino, and has the distinctive pinkish eyes that confirm the condition.

Because albinism is a hereditary condition—it comes from a recessive gene—there’s “a ‘whitening’ mutant gene in the giant panda population in Wolong,” as noted in the Sichuan press release. As the Wolong conservationists pointed out, should this panda grow to maturity and mate with another albino with the same mutated gene, it could result in yet another albino giant panda, or further propagation of the albino gene at the very least. The conservationists are planning to step up their monitoring of the area to learn more about this possibility, and to study other animals in the region.

Read more about the discovery at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: Wolong National Nature Reserve)

Between 1975 and 2016, the prevalence of worldwide obesity nearly tripled up in number. According to the World Health Organization, in 2016, over 1.9 billion adults (aged 18 and above), were overweight, while more than 650 million of them were obese. 

This begs for a question: what makes us gain weight? We might answer that fatty or sweet or salty foods make us gain weight, but that might not be the case. Researchers from the National Institute of Health conducted a study that suggested that it’s not just salt or sugar or fat that makes us gain weight — it is the quality of food we are eating, if they are processed or not.

The study, conducted by researchers at the National Institutes of Health, is the first randomized, controlled trial to show that eating a diet made up of ultra-processed foods actually drives people to overeat and gain weight compared with a diet made up of whole or minimally processed foods. Study participants on the ultra-processed diet ate an average of 508 calories more per day and ended up gaining an average of 2 pounds over a two-week period. People on the unprocessed diet, meanwhile, ended up losing about 2 pounds on average over a two-week period.

"The difference in weight gain for one [group] and weight loss for the other during these two periods is phenomenal. We haven't seen anything like this," says Barry Popkin, a nutrition professor at the University of North Carolina who has studied the role of ultra-processed foods in the American diet but was not involved in the current research.

Dariush Mozaffarian, dean of Tufts University's Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, agrees that the findings are striking. He says what was so impressive was that the NIH researchers documented this weight gain even though each meal offered on the two different diets contained the same total amount of calories, fats, protein, sugar, salt, carbohydrates and fiber. Study participants were allowed to eat as much or as little as they wanted but ended up eating way more of the ultra-processed meals, even though they didn't rate those meals as being tastier than the unprocessed meals.

"These are landmark findings that the processing of the foods makes a huge difference in how much a person eats," says Mozaffarian. That's important, because the majority of foods now sold in the U.S. — and increasingly, around the globe — are ultra-processed.

And ultra-processed foods include more than just the obvious suspects, like chips, candy, packaged desserts and ready-to-eat meals. The category also includes foods that some consumers might find surprising, including Honey Nut Cheerios and other breakfast cereals, packaged white bread, jarred sauces, yogurt with added fruit, and frozen sausages and other reconstituted meat products. Popkin says ultra-processed foods usually contain a long list of ingredients, many of them made in labs. So, for example, instead of seeing "apples" listed on a food label, you might get additives that re-create the scent of that fruit. These are foods designed to be convenient and low cost and require little preparation.

(Image Credit: Christopher Flowers/ Unsplash)

In some cultures, the colour orange is considered a sacred hue, while in others it is a symbol of royalty. Traditionally, if saffron wasn't available, turmeric powder was used as a dye for Buddhist priests for their robes.

Interestingly, in Europe, the color orange didn’t have a name until the 16th century. Prior to that time it was simply called yellow-red. Before the word orange came into common use in English, saffron was sometimes used to describe the deep yellow-orange color. This changed when orange trees were brought to Europe from Asia by Portuguese merchants. The color was then named after the ripe fruit, which carries through many different languages. Orange in English, naranja in Spanish, arancia in Italian, and laranja in Portuguese.

Learn more about the colour here!

Image Credits: Tarapong Srichaiyos/Shutterstock

If you took a look at newer Roombas and wondered why that clever mapping couldn't be used to cut your lawn... well, you're not alone. iRobot has unveiled the Terra, a robotic lawn mower that uses the company's mapping tech to trim your grass with min...

If you happen to be in Tokyo for the Olympic Games in 2020 and dig giant robots, it might be worth paying a visit to nearby Yokohama. A project called Gundam Factory Yokohama is working with the city to create a life-size, moving Gundam statue to hel...

Rapper Lushlife's new book can properly teach your kids the alphabet: P Is for Pterodactyl: The Worst Alphabet Book Ever

Let's get real―the English language is bizarre. A might be for apple, but it's also for aisle and aeons. Why does the word "gnat" start with a G but the word "knot" doesn't start with an N? It doesn't always make sense, but don't let these rule-breaking silent letters defeat you!

This whimsical, funky book from Raj Haldar (aka rapper Lushlife) turns the traditional idea of an alphabet book on its head, poking fun at the most mischievous words in the English language and demonstrating how to pronounce them. Fun and informative for word nerds of all ages!

Take a peek inside the book

If you love J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and LEGO, then The Brothers Brick blog has a feature that's perfect for you.

Behold The Third Age: Journey Through Middle Earth, a collaboration amongst 10 builders to create 13 iconic scenes from the the fantasy movies in LEGO.

Above is the Bag End, as built by Northern LEGO.

Goblin Town by Mountain Hobbit.

View the rest over at The Brothers Brick.