Android: If you're a fan of the flat, minimalist aesthetic that seems to be all the rage these days, Nice Weather delivers. Simple icons for the current weather conditions, a line graph for temperature over time, and a single color to give you an instant idea of the forecast. It's simple and sharp with no added fluff.
    
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Once you've squeezed all the juice out of a lemon, resist the urge to toss it out or down the garbage disposal (although that'll keep it fresh too). Instead, toss them in the freezer, and when you need to keep other foods fresh and bright, you'll already have a little acid water on hand for the job.
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Everyone has a favorite desktop music player. For some of us, it's the one that just plays our music fast, with no fuss or hassle. For others it's a tool that organizes your playlists, syncs with your smartphone, makes your music collection easy to dig through, and looks good while doing it. This week we're going to look at five of the best desktop music players, based on your nominations.
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If you’re going to be digging around in the yard, you’ll want to make sure you’re using the right shovel for the job. Digging isn't an easy task, and depending on what you’re digging up and working with, the right shovel can help you do a lot less work.
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Whether we like to admit it or not, many of us depend heavily on Google accounts to make our way around the web. If you got locked out, you'd be in a lot of trouble—so if you haven't already, here's everything you should do right now to make sure it's recoverable.
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So long, plastic bags. With less than a yard of fabric and a little bit of time, you can make your own reusable containers for snacks and sandwiches.
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Dear Lifehacker,
I've heard that Google now lets you send money to people with an email address. It sounds pretty neat, but is that really the best way to send money? Is PayPal any better? Are there other ways?
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Your phone will not fill that void.
How can one video clip encompasses the evils of driving while texting, humankind’s collective soul-crushing loneliness and our attempts to assuage it through technology and also trying to parent mini-consumers in such a landscape? By the very fact that it’s Louis C.K. talking, of course. Also Bruce Springsteen is involved.
“He really gets it, man!” you’re probably saying while watching C.K.’s Conan O’Brien appearance on your iPad while texting your friend in the car (please don’t do that).
On kids with smartphones: “Some parents really struggle with ‘You know… all the other kids have the terrible things so my kid has to…” Yes, let your kid go and be a better example to the s**tty kids. Just cause the other stupid kids have phones doesn’t earn that otherwise my kid has to be stupid or she’ll feel weird.”
“I think it’s just toxic — they don’t look at people when they talk to them and they don’t build the empathy.”
On personhood: “You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That’s what the phones are taking away. The ability to just sit there. That’s being a person.”
On using technology to fill the void: “Underneath everything in your life there’s that thing, that… forever empty, you know what I’m talking about? [Editor's note: Yes.] That knowledge that it’s all for nothing and you’re alone. It’s down there. Sometimes when things clear away, and you’re in your car, and you’re like ‘Ohh, here it comes, that I am alone…’ “
And then how that leads to texting and driving: “People are willing to risk taking lives and ruining their own because they don’t want to be alone for a second.”
Free yourselves! Unless you’re reading this on your phone and in that case, awesome, but just don’t be driving.
Watch the full clip below:
At the intersection of bad marketing, inept regulation, and unwitting consumers, you’ll find the graves of young children, just some of the infants who, according to a new report from ProPublica, have become ill over the decades because Johnson & Johnson and other makers of acetaminophen-based painkillers insisted on selling two youth-targeted varieties of the drug while the FDA did what it does best — nothing.
Until 2001, Johnson & Johnson’s McNeil Consumer Products sold two types of Tylenol for parents and caregivers to use with children: Children’s Tylenol and Infant Tylenol. The two products contained different levels of acetaminophen and, surprising to some, the Infant formula actually had a higher concentration of acetaminophen than the Children’s version.
Making matters more confusing, FDA regulations meant that neither product contained specific dosing information for children under two years old, leaving that amount in the hands of the child’s physician. Which would have been fine, if there weren’t two similar products on the market that could be easily confused by doctors and patients alike.
See, if a child’s doctor or nurse assumes that the parent was using Children’s Tylenol, they would likely have suggested a larger dose than if the stronger Infant Tylenol was being used. But when the parents unwittingly bought, or were given, Infant Tylenol and used that higher dose, they put their child at risk for severe, possibly fatal, liver damage.
Between 2000 and 2009, the FDA received reports of 20 children dying from acetaminophen toxicity – a figure the agency said likely “significantly underestimates” the problem. Three deaths were tied directly to mix-ups involving the two pediatric medicines. Such errors may have caused some of the other deaths, but the agency has acknowledged that its data lacks sufficient detail to determine the precise cause….
[O]ne small study found that confusion between the two pediatric products was the most common reason for overdoses among kids with acetaminophen-related liver damage. A study conducted by McNeil found that about one child a year on average was hospitalized because of mix-ups involving its drugs.
Such tragic accidents are among the reasons that between 2001 and 2010, there were about twice as many deaths annually associated with acetaminophen than with all other over-the-counter pain relievers combined, according to data from the American Association of Poison Control Centers.
McNeil had asked the FDA for permission to put specific dosing instructions for infants on these products. Without this approval, it had to continue telling customers to get this guidance from their physicians.
Even after it became so clear that confusion over these dueling products were killing and injuring children that McNeil and others switched to a single-product system, the FDA has yet to allow clear dosing instructions for children two and under.
“It’s just not as straightforward as folks think,” a former FDA official explained — in 2002 — about why the agency had yet to approve infant dosing instructions for acetaminophen products, even though it had done so with ibuprofen-containing drugs. “But it is a priority to get done.”
Again, note that he said this in 2002. Eleven years ago.
Of course, instead of waiting for the FDA to do something about dosing instructions, McNeil could have ditched one of the two products. If there was only one product to choose from, then there can be no mix-up between doctors, nurses, parents, and retailers.
Testifying in a lawsuit brought by the parents of a child who died from acetaminophen toxicity, McNeil’s former medical director, Anthony Temple, admitted that he knew confusion between the two products had led to “maybe a couple of dozen, maybe a little more, where incidents of significant liver injury has occurred, and there’s probably a handful of those cases that were fatal.”
The plaintiffs’ attorney then asked, “And for 25 years you’ve elected to continue to offer Infants’ Tylenol in the concentrated form that has led to the death of babies, correct?”
To which, Temple replied, “Yes, we’ve continued to do it.”
Temple has said that the two versions of Tylenol remained on the market for years for the benefit of the children, and that switching to a single product for kids was “a second-best option” to getting those darn dosing instructions from the FDA.
“One death is too many,” PeterMax Miller, pharmaceutical marketing ethicist at the University of Colorado in Denver, and former exec at a competitor to J&J, tells ProPublica. “I would not have had any hesitation at all about yanking it off the shelf overnight. Everywhere. And Johnson & Johnson knows how to do that.”
You can check out the entire ProPublica story here, as well as the site’s even larger investigation into all-things-acetaminophen here.
Enter the Guiding Stars nutrition guidance program, which rates the nutritional quality of food using information from the Nutrition Facts Panel and ingredients list. Using an scientific algorithm that evaluates beneficial nutrients such as vitamins, minerals, fiber and whole grains vs. ingredients you want to limit—added sugar, cholesterol, saturated and trans fat—foods are ranked from one to three stars.
“It’s a simple rating system: one star is good, two stars are better, three stars are best,” says Sue Till, the client services manager for Guiding Stars, in Scarborough, Maine. Stars are displayed on a product’s unit pricing price tag.
Some foods don’t get any stars. Soups don’t fare well; only 11 percent earn stars because they generally contain too much sodium. Still, 36 percent of all foods in supermarkets that participate in the Guiding Stars program receive at least one star. “The goal is to fill your cart with as many three-starred foods as possible,” Till says.
An of course, 100 percent of the produce section earns three stars. A study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, which analyzed purchasing data from 168 stores in northern New England and New York, found that shoppers can make better food choices when using the Guiding Stars Program.
The Guiding Stars program is designed so that anybody can understand it at the point of purchase, even kids. It crosses language barriers, too. Unfortunately, none of the supermarkets in my neighborhood participate in the Guiding Stars program. But 1,800 grocery stores in 26 states do, such as Hannaford, which launched the Guiding Stars program in the Northeast in 2006, then began licensing it in 2008 to supermarkets, food service and health care providers.
To learn more about the Guiding Stars program and find a Guiding Stars supermarket in your area, visit www.guidingstars.com.
Which Northern Virginia Schools were not fully accredited this year? Washington Post The number of schools in Northern Virginia that fell short of full state accreditation more than doubled in the past year from 14 to 36. Education officials say the drop-off is largely a result of harder state math and reading tests, not lower ... |
We can barely handle the cuteness of one cub, so can you imagine having so many in one place?
A high school in Orange County, California selected a transgender teenager as its homecoming queen.
Many driven from Skid Row to Pasadena say they were unpaid and stranded after Apple Store halted scheme.
'We overbought,' expert says. 'We always do when we go to war.'
The Arlington Public Library is trying to solve a mystery regarding 13 men in football gear standing outside a doorway with the words "Public School."
A 43-year-old man from Virginia has been arrested and charged after he raped a minor who had been missing, police said.
The U.S. Postal Service is planning to add soul singer Ray Charles to its "Music Icons Forever" stamp series.
When the new bills arrive when on Oct. 8, some will actually be worth $1,000 ... or more.
