31 life skills

Most adults know most of these. Just in case, here’s a list of skills you should probably know. Details in the article…

1. How to tip without doing panicked math
2. How to unclog a toilet
3. How to make an actual appointment on the phone
4. How to spot an obvious scam
A lot of scam emails say they’re from your bank, Amazon, PayPal, etc., but the real address is something completely different and gives the game away.
5. How to do laundry without ruining your clothes
6. How to replace the battery in a smoke detector or carbon monoxide alarm
Most importantly, do not spend six months living with the chirp… chirp… chirp because you’ve decided that’s simply part of your home’s personality now.
7. How to reset a tripped circuit breaker
8. How to use a fire extinguisher
And if the fire is spreading, forget being a hero and get out.
9. How to know when NOT to DIY something
10. How to make a basic meal without a recipe
11. How to cook eggs
12. How to cook rice without creating either soup or concrete
13. How to safely use a chef’s knife
Keep your chef’s knife properly sharp, stabilize the cutting board so it doesn’t slide around, curl the fingers of your non-knife hand into a “claw,” and cut away from yourself. A dull knife usually requires more force and is more likely to slip, which is why a properly sharp knife is actually safer to work with.
14. How to tell when meat is safely cooked
“It looks done-ish” is not a temperature.
15. How to read a nutrition label
Start with the serving size, because everything else on the label is based on it.
16. How to remove a stain without making it worse
17. How to sew a button back on
18. How to iron or steam a wrinkled shirt
19. How to jump-start a car
First, check your owner’s manual, especially if you have a hybrid, EV, or a car with designated jump points. If its instructions differ from these, follow the manual…
20. How to change a flat tire
21. How to check your tire pressure
…Use a tire-pressure gauge when the tires are cold, then add or release air as needed until you reach the recommended PSI.
22. How to check your car’s oil
23. How to understand a credit-card statement
Here’s my most important “nagging Dad” tip: Paying only the minimum can keep you in debt for an extremely long time. Whenever possible, pay your full statement balance by the due date.
24. How to create a basic budget
…Once you’re sitting there, it’s simple: write down your monthly take-home income, then list your fixed bills; necessities that change month to month, like groceries and gas; debt payments; savings; and money you spend on fun or other non-essentials. If the money going out is consistently greater than the money coming in, congratulations: you have identified the central plot problem.
25. How to read your paycheck stub
26. How to understand what the heck a 401(k) actually is
27. How to write a check
Checks are increasingly becoming one of those things from the olden days, like fax machines and Blockbuster, but every once in a while a landlord, government office, contractor, or other institution will still demand one. Here’s what you do…
28. How to address and mail an envelope
29. How to keep your important documents organized
30. How to make a basic first-aid kit — and actually use it
…And for anything serious — major bleeding, trouble breathing, loss of consciousness, etc. — stop playing Dr. House and call emergency services.
31. How to stop minor bleeding

3,700 words: https://www.buzzfeed.com/mikespohr/31-basic-adult-life-skills-everyone-over-18-should-know.

Good news from Fix the News:

Mexico’s murder rate has halved in two years. Homicides averaged 40.8 a day in August 2026, down from 86.9 in September 2024, the month before Claudia Sheinbaum took office. Killings fell in 30 of 32 states, and the preliminary annual rate is 12.9 per 100,000, down from 25.4 in 2024. The government credits closer coordination with the states and a crackdown on violent crime (although critics argue some murders are being recorded as lesser crimes). Mexico News Daily

And an image from my collection:

Pelican asks scientists for help

A recent quiet morning at a Florida marine research facility was interrupted by tapping at the back door. A biologist walked over to investigate and found a brown pelican standing on the stoop and pecking at the glass with its long beak… Fishing line was wrapped around the pelican’s right wing, and a double-barbed treble hook was stuck in the wing, restricting the bird’s ability to fly. About a dozen cactus spines were lodged in its left foot.

Scientists at the facility study fish and sharks, but they quickly helped the pelican after discovering it on Sept. 8….

The pelican was calm throughout the procedure, which Hilton said took about five minutes but felt like an hour because of the unusual nature of the situation… Gerald Hough, a professor who studies bird behavior at Rowan University in New Jersey, said the pelican might have previously seen researchers carrying fish in and out of the facility. In its desperation, the pelican might have visited in hopes of finding food. Pelicans associate people and docks with food, Hough said, so when they’re hungry, they sometimes spend time near people.

About 850 words: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2026/09/20/scientists-heard-knock-door-it-was-pelican-need-help.

Good news from Fix the News:

China has finished phasing out ozone-depleting HCFCs from its solvent industry. It’s the last stage of a project running since 2016 that forced 53 enterprises to move to substitutes (a nationwide ban on HCFCs in cleaning agents took effect on 1 July 2026). Since accepting the Kigali Amendment in 2021, China has cut HFC-linked emissions by 759 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent — roughly equal to 13% of the United States’ annual greenhouse gas footprint, or the same as taking about 175 million average passenger cars off the road for a year. China Daily

And an image from my collection:

The closest thing we have to alien technology

How do they make the fantastically tiny components of modern computer chips? It took years to figure out multiple layers of technology to accomplish this. For example… hitting 50,000 droplets of molten tin three times each, per second, to produce the necessary amount of light of the proper wavelength. (“How often do you miss a droplet?” “Never.”)

55 minutes long but fascinating (to me, anyway): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiUHjLxm3V0.

Good news from Fix the News:

Self-driving cars are dramatically safer than human drivers, not just marginally. Waymo’s robotaxis have covered 220 million paid miles and post 92% fewer fatal or serious-injury crashes than human-driven cars. An independent July 2026 study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found Waymo vehicles involved in 68% fewer crashes overall, though the gap varied by city, 76% lower in Phoenix, just 35% in San Francisco. IEEE Spectrum/IIHS

☝️ Reminder: around 39,000 people die on US roads every year.

And an image from my collection:

20 photos

Well, Buzzfeed headlines this as “20 Photos That Are So Accidentally Dirty, There’s No Way You’ll Be Able To Keep A Straight Face,” but I’m pretty sure that several of them are not accidental.

Warning, NSFW: https://www.buzzfeed.com/ajanibazile/accidentally-dirty-photos.

Good news from Fix the News:

Iceland ends its blanket ban on gay blood donors. We noted voluntary blood donation supplying 85% of the world’s blood in Edition 345; now Iceland has expanded the range of people who can give it. Starting this month, the Icelandic Blood Bank has replaced sex- and orientation-based restrictions with individual risk screening, deferring anyone reporting unprotected sex with new or multiple partners in the past four months. Iceland Review

And an image from my collection:

California survived record summer heat without blackouts

Battery storage makes a big difference:

During the August heat wave of 2020, the California Independent System Operator, which manages the flow of electricity for most of the state, declared a Stage 3 Emergency and hundreds of thousands of households lost power in rolling outages.

At the time, the system had less than 100 megawatts of battery storage available. Today, it has more than 17,000 megawatts available.

Californians just made it through the hottest August on record without having to endure any rolling power outages….

900 words: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-09-11/how-california-survived-hottest-august-ever-without-flex-alerts.

Good news from Fix the News:

AI-equipped drones are helping Indigenous rangers clear ghost nets from northern Australia’s coast. AI-equipped drones are now spotting abandoned fishing nets from the air, letting Anindilyakwa and Dhimurru ranger teams remove about 15 nets within the course of a single four-hour flight, up against about three nets a day pre-drone. Abandoned “ghost nets” trap and kill shore life, including an estimated 4,000 to 14,000 turtles a year, and a $25 million commitment will now fund cleanup work with Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Timor-Leste, aiming to clear Australian beaches entirely by 2030. Mongabay

Removing a ghost net on an Australian beach. Photo courtesy of Timothy Hillier/Agency Project.

And an image from my collection:

2026 Ig Nobel Prize winners

This is amusing, but what won the LaughLearnLinks Award was the use of “pneumotachometers (instruments to measure volume flow of respired gases)… to determine the velocity, volume, and time scale of blowing through each side of the nose.”

Established in 1991, the Ig Nobels are a good-natured parody of the Nobel Prizes; they honor “achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think.” The unapologetically campy awards ceremony features miniature operas, scientific demos, and “24/7 lectures,” whereby experts must explain their work twice: once in 24 seconds and the second in just seven words.

This year’s awards go to…

Biomechanics: Matilda Brindle, Catherine Talbot, and Stuart West for devising a more precise definition of kissing—“non-agonistic interactions involving directed, intraspecific, oral-oral contact with some movement of the lips/mouthparts and no food transfer”—in ants, birds, polar bears, and humans.
Economics: Paul Piff, Daniel Stancato, Stéphane Côté, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, and Dacher Keltner, for amassing evidence that upper-class people are more likely to snatch from a children’s supply of candy, and engage in other kinds of unethical behavior.
Chemistry: Sanchari Banerjee, Nathan Coussens, François-Xavier Gallat, Nitish Sathyanarayanan, Jandhyam Srikanth, Koichiro Yagi, James Gray, Stephen Tobe, Barbara Stay, Leonard Chavas, and Subramanian Ramaswamy for discovering that milk proteins from viviparous cockroaches pack three times as much energy as milk proteins from cows.
Medicine: The late Tokuji Unno, for the study called “How to Blow the Nose—An Aerodynamic Study of the Nose Blowing.”
Biology: João Miguel Alves-Nunes, Adriano Fellone, Selma Maria Almeida-Santos, Carlos Roberto de Medeiros, Ivan Sazima, and Otavio Augusto Vuolo Marques, for gently stepping on various parts of various venomous snakes—repeatedly, at various temperatures at various times of day—to try to learn what does and does not induce a venomous snake to bite a human.
Physics: Randy Hurd, Zhao Pan, Tadd Truscott, Kaveeshan Thurairajah, for theoretical and experimental attempts to design a splash-free urinal. ((Note: I checked the original paper… it has a surprising amount of math.))
Technology: Justin Puma, Zhen Yang, Evan Johnston, Zixin Zhang, Xiaoyi Lan, Lingzhi Zhang, Hongyu Hou, Zixin He, Ali Afify, Megan Creighton, Jianyu Li, and Changhong Cao, for pioneering the use of mosquito proboscises as high-resolution 3D printing nozzles, a process called “Necroprinting.”
Olfaction: Ilona Croy, Tomasz Frackowiak, Thomas Hummel, and Agnieszka Sorokowska, for collecting evidence that babies smell wonderful to their parents but teenagers do not.
Peace: Jaimie Arona Krems, Rebecka Hahnel-Peeters, Laureon Merrie, Keelah Williams, and Daniel Sznycer, for documenting that we value friends who are vicious to people we dislike.
Soil science: Franz Bender, Marcel van der Heijden, Atlant Bieri, and Pia Viviani, for burying 1,000 identical pairs of underpants in more than 25 countries and then digging them up after two months.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/09/meet-the-2026-ig-nobel-prize-winners. 3,100 words.

Good news from Fix the News:

The pancreatic cancer pill that got a standing ovation now has full FDA approval. In Edition 341 we told you about daraxonrasib, a pill that doubles median survival for deadly pancreatic cancer, with some patients living for years. Now the FDA has approved it, compressing a process that normally takes months into weeks because the benefit was so large, and the need so urgent. “We can now envisage a future with no chemotherapy needed.” NYT

And an image from my collection. Well, it makes at least as much sense as anti-vaxxers:

Climate change and your lungs

We didn’t evolve to deal with today’s levels of CO2 in the air… and it’s not good for us:

During the early rise of Homo sapiens, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere measured a consistent 280 parts per million (ppm). Those conditions prevailed until roughly the middle of the 18th century when the Industrial Revolution began pouring greenhouse gasses into the air from factory smokestacks. By 1900, CO2 levels had risen to nearly 300 ppm; by 1980, that figure had jumped to nearly 330 ppm. Since then the numbers have exploded, standing at 425 ppm today….

“From short-term studies at moderately elevated CO2 (the sort of levels common in poorly ventilated rooms), that means headache, tiredness, and declines in concentration and decision-making. Over longer periods, animal studies raise the possibility of oxidative stress, inflammation, tissue calcification in the kidneys and arteries, and effects on bone.”…

Most projections call for atmospheric CO2 concentrations to reach 500-plus PPM by mid-century, a level that will exceed tolerable carbon dioxide levels in the blood.

930 words: https://time.com/article/2026/08/19/climate-change-impacting-blood-carbon-dioxide-levels/

And related good news from Fix the News:

Children’s lungs in London are getting healthier thanks to its low emissions zone. A Lancet Public Health study followed 3,400 children aged six to nine, comparing central London to Luton, which has no clean-air zone. The lungs of London’s children had been developing more slowly than Luton’s, but within four years they had caught up, and the share with impaired lung function fell from 14% to 9%. Euronews

And an image from my collection:

“Murder capital of Europe” down 56%

Between 2003-2005, the city Glasgow had the highest murder rate of any in Europe. The United Nations declared Scotland the most violent country in the developed world, with Scots almost three times as likely to be assaulted as Americans. Newspapers were routinely filled with reports of gruesome murders and bloody gang fights.

Over the following decade, the homicide rate would fall by 56% in Glasgow and 38% in Scotland more widely….

How did a nation once beleaguered by knives, gangs and slayings make such a decisive change?

In short, it changed the way it saw violence as a problem – shifting it from being solely a criminal justice issue to one that was also about public health.

A project to reduce violence in Chicago led to a project to reduce violence in Cincinnati, which was adapted for local use. Doctors started referring violence victims to sources of help (including dentists, who informed patients while they were still in the dentist’s chair), schools excluded far fewer students, peer support groups were organized, and a Violence Reduction Unit was created in the police department.

2,400 words: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260626-how-scotland-changed-the-way-it-tackled-violence.

Good news from Fix the News:

Malaria prevalence in Zanzibar has fallen from 40% in mid-2001 to 0.04% today. AI-guided drones are now mapping standing water in a few hours, a process that used to take health teams days. Once identified, these mosquito breeding habitats are mapped by GPS and targeted for immediate treatment with insecticide. Thus far, there have been no malaria deaths in Zanzibar in 2026, and the island is on the brink of eliminating the disease entirely. Streamline Feed

And on the funny side… You may remember a song Hocus Pocus from a band called Focus, way back in 1971. Genius.com describes it thus: “An iconic and unusual song, “Hocus Pocus” consists of a guitar riff, broken up by varied interludes of yodeling, organs, accordions, and even more.” I was particularly taken by the lyrics:

[Interlude 1]
Ôi orôrôi rôrôrôi rôrôrôi rôrôrôi rôrôrôi ohrorô poPÔ
Yôi orôrôi rôrôrôi rôrôrôi rôrôrôi rôrôrôi ohrorô
PoPÔ
Aaaah aaah aaah aaah
Uuuh oooh oooh ooooooooh

[Interlude 2]
Ôi orôrôi rôrôrôi rôrôrôi rôrôrôi rôrôrôi ohrorô poPÔ
Yôi orôrôi rôrôrôi rôrôrôi rôrôrôi rôrôrôi ohrorô
BoumPÔ
Aaaah aaah aaah aaah
Uuuh oooh oooh ooooooooh

…etc. Click here to listen to the song on YouTube, 6 minutes 42 seconds.

What Happened to al-Qaeda?

Twenty-five years after 9/11, analysts can’t decide if the terrorist organization is all but defunct or more threatening than ever…

The group yearned to attack America again after 9/11 and had considered several schemes, but only on three occasions before Pensacola had it actually tried to execute an operation. All three plots had failed. ((Pensacola: “On December 6, 2019, in Pensacola, Florida, a 21-year-old Royal Saudi Air Force officer took out a legally acquired Glock pistol and killed three U.S. sailors at a naval air base.”))

A 2021 Brown University report put the cost of the War on Terror at more than $8 trillion. This unfathomable investment succeeded in removing al‑Qaeda from the little camps it once controlled in Afghanistan. But these havens have been replaced by large ones elsewhere, including in parts of the Horn of Africa, Yemen, and the Sahel, the arid region of West Africa just south of the Sahara. The al‑Qaeda franchises in those places are ruthless and rich. The East African branch fields a force that has been estimated at 10,000 men and pulls in about $100 million in revenue annually through taxation, smuggling, and outright theft.

On the other hand, these franchises are not attacking the US.

Bin Laden left 6,000 pages of notes about his actions and plans, and apparently believed that the 9/11 attacks would make the US completely withdraw from the Middle East:

For good or ill, American Middle East policy during this period was roughly the opposite of what bin Laden expected and intended. Rather than withdrawing, U.S. forces surged into the region. The United States has troops, and friends, in Syria, Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates… Privately, bin Laden bemoaned his network’s impotence, lack of money, and inability to mount even small operations.

By now the rhythm of terrorism analysis should be familiar: For every piece of evidence that makes al‑Qaeda’s leaders look like evil geniuses, there is counterevidence that makes them look like hopeless bumblers.

It’s complicated, and even the experts hesitate to make predictions. 6,700 words: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/09/al-qaeda-25-years-post-9-11/687965/. If this is paywalled, send me a note.

Good news from Fix the News:

Türkiye votes in favour of amnesty to end its 40-year war. On Monday this week, Türkiye’s Parliament passed a law (with almost 80% support) offering conditional amnesty offering conditional pardons and legal protections to thousands of rank-and-file members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, in return for full disarmament. This builds on the ceasefire that saw the group lay down its arms last year. The insurgency, one of the world’s longest, has killed tens of thousands across Turkey, Iraq and Syria since 1984. Bloomberg / WSWS

And an image from my collection:

Pirates vs metric system

In 1793, the brand new United States of America needed a standard measuring system because the states were using a hodgepodge of systems.

“For example, in New York, they were using Dutch systems, and in New England, they were using English systems,” says Keith Martin, of the research library at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

This made interstate commerce difficult.

Briefly, Thomas Jefferson asked his friends in France for help. They sent a scientist with a one-kilogram standard weight to the new USA… but his ship was blown to the Caribbean by a storm, and was then captured by pirates…

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/12/28/574044232/how-pirates-of-the-caribbean-hijacked-americas-metric-system. 725 words.

Good news from Fix the News:

HIV infections and AIDS deaths down to their lowest level in 30 years. UNAIDS counted 1.2 million new infections last year, down from a peak of 3.3 million in the 1990s. There were an estimated 570,000 deaths in 2025, down from roughly 2.1 million in 2004. New forms of prevention are coming – lenacapavir gives people almost perfect protection, and researchers believe mRNA is close to delivering a working HIV vaccine. Everyone is worried about money though: international funding fell 18% last year. UNAIDS / Vox

And an image from my collection: