While some of us might simply be stressed or concerned about the war, it can be clinically traumatic for others. To medically count as trauma, an event has to involve “actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence,” according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Experiencing multiple traumas at once, or repeated trauma—as many are right now—is “complex trauma.” Such layered traumas are linked to increased emotional problems, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)....

Just how cautious you need to be depends on your risk tolerance, and your family and community. “One layer is just: are you in like an emerging hotspot, where you’re seeing these sort of sharp, sharp increases,” says Natalie Dean, an infectious disease modeller at Emory University in Georgia. “The other layer is your own personal risk and risk tolerance. And so that reflects your vaccination status and your age and if there’s immunocompromised people in your circle....

Create desktop folders The desktop acts much like your computer’s other storage locations, which means you can organize it with folders and subfolders. So take a look at the types of items you drop on your desktop and see if they fall into categories like internet downloads, documents from colleagues, application shortcuts, and so on. Then set up folders for the most common ones. This should significantly cut down the number of icons on your desktop....

Disable your activity status Many social apps will show your friends a notification when you’re active, and even when you’re offline, they can display the last time you visited. If you’d rather not broadcast your presence, many social networks will let you turn off this display. As a general rule, if you don’t want your nearest and dearest to know what you’re up to every minute of every day, you can try posting less frequently....

Luckily, Puente-Martinez has had a lot of practice figuring how to remove cactus needles from different body parts. “You could see that they were really deep inside his lip,” he recalls. “Every time I pulled one, there was this little stream of blood coming out of the hole; that was pretty bad.” Most encounters with cacti aren’t quite that harrowing. But the plants are ubiquitous in some parts of the desert, and are also highly popular (and useful) as home decor....

However, if you have an older PC that doesn’t meet the system requirements, the situation is more complicated. Those requirements include a 1Ghz or faster 64-bit Central Processing Unit (CPU), with 2 or more cores, as well as what’s known as a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) version 2.0 installed on the motherboard. Microsoft has also provided a more comprehensive list of compatible CPUs. But instead of checking lists and researching the exact version of your components, there’s an easier way to know if your computer measures up—Windows Update will tell you....

Instead of waiting for your IT guy to find, pack, and ship a new laptop, you can take matters into your own hands and give your work laptop an overhaul to get it back into tip-top shape. Before you begin Don’t even think about doing anything to your work laptop before checking your company’s IT and device policies. Depending on their concerns, and what contracts they’ve signed with clients, you might be limited in what you’re allowed to do....

These days, the big G is in the midst of rolling out emoji reactions on Google Docs, which allows users to respond to specific chunks of body text with smiley faces and or Spanish dancers. You may think there’s no use for emojis in text processing tools, but the collaborative nature of Docs actually warrants the ability to easily show how much you like your colleagues’ additions or passive-aggressively request changes....

We imagine this is not lost on Google, which may be why they’re currently rolling out Search Chips, a feature that promises to help you hunt down that deeply buried document you so desperately need on Google Drive. The good news is that the new tool is easier to use and find than the classic Advanced Search filters, though these will remain available to further refine your query. The bad news is that currently, you’ll only see Search Chips if you’re a paying GSuite customer or your employer uses Workspace....

Folder actions is a little-known Mac feature that dates back to the 90s. You can use it to set any folder on your computer to automatically do tasks like converting a file from one format to another or even extracting all the text from a PDF. All you have to do is drag documents to the automated folder. It’s called working smarter, not harder. Pick a script and set your choice by clicking Attach....

“Something that’s really striking in a museum collection [of hummingbirds] is that you can pull out a drawer and all the throats, or gorgets, flash,” says Chad Eliason, an evolutionary biologist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago who studies hummingbirds. “[At] the right angle there’s this maybe 5 to 10 degree window where you just get this really bright flash of color, you get the light just right....

But Mark Bourassa, a meteorology professor at Florida State University, says the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration based this window on observational evidence accumulated over decades—and it’s not binding. Meteorologists had been observing hurricanes since the mid-19th century, so when the U.S. Weather Bureau (now the National Weather Service) set up a network of stations to monitor them in 1935, they had the telegraph lines between them operate June 15 through November 15....

For the first 10 months of Christine’s gender transition, a progressive LGBT health clinic in Boston made getting on hormones easy. But after a year or so on estrogen and a testosterone-blocker, she found herself in financial trouble. She had just recently moved to the city, where she was unable to find a job, and her savings were starting to wear thin. Finding employment as a transgender person, she says, was overwhelmingly difficult: “I was turned down for more jobs than I can count—20 or 40 different positions in a couple of months....

Catastrophic tsunamis result from undersea earthquakes or landslides, and when earthquake-generated tsunamis occur off the coast of Indonesia, the waves can reach the coast in as little as twenty minutes — leaving little to no warning time for residents in high-risk areas. The 2004 tsunami reached the province of Banda Aceh just a quarter of an hour after a magnitude-9.1 earthquake struck, resulting in 140,000 deaths in that region alone....

It’s worth noting that one colloquial definition of intelligence is the capacity to learn from one’s mistakes. By that yardstick, I—and I’ll risk including many of you with me—apparently am just a few clicks north of Forrest Gump territory. Time and time again I fall prey to naïve wishful thinking when updates to my favorite products are due. I somehow have the nonsensical expectation that product X will finally have all the wonderful abilities and specs it logically should, only to be crestfallen when product X comes out and is somehow still crippled, or underpowered or missing some obvious, easy-to-implement feature....

Several companies now sell cannabis-based products intended for our best friends, according to a New York Times report. It seems pet owners are administering these products to relieve pain, limit seizures, and even reduce anxiety (however that’s measured) in dogs, cats and other species. But does it work? “People ask me about it all the time,” says Lisa Moses, a veterinarian at MSPCA-Angell Animal Medical Center in Boston, who runs a pain clinic for animals....

Is holiday travel safe? Fully vaccinated individuals who are traveling are much less likely to get COVID-19 and spread the virus when traveling domestically or internationally than those who remain unvaccinated. The CDC recommends delaying travel until full vaccination status is achieved. For unvaccinated individuals, including children who are not-yet-eligible for the vaccine, the safest travel options are short road trips or flights with minimal stops or layovers. Travelers should wear masks regardless of vaccination status on all forms of public transportation....

We already know that climate change causes bounds of anxiety in some of today’s youth, but a new preprint in The Lancet also brings up a specific type of anxiety—whether or not to have kids amid some horrific climate change-induced disasters. “I meet a lot of young girls who ask whether it’s still OK to have children,” 25-year-old climate activist Luisa Neubauer told the Guardian. “It’s a simple question, yet it tells so much about the climate reality we are living in....

The group also issued what they called a “weak recommendation” with “low-certainty evidence” that adults stick with the amount of meat they usually eat. “There’s nothing there on the direct effects of red meat, really,” says Chris D’Adamo, director of research for the University of Maryland Center for Integrative Medicine, who was not involved in the research. The analysis, which included five individual studies published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, was published Monday evening and quickly criticized by experts and medical groups....

All hail the king (rex), queen (regina), and emperor (imperator) of the prehistoric kingdom? Not so fast, say other researchers, who argue would-be differences in the fossil specimens are too minor to support such a dramatic rift. To divide an extinct organism into species A, B, and maybe even C, there needs to be “enough separation” between the groups in the fossil record, says Ashley Poust, a paleontologist at the San Diego Natural History Museum who wasn’t involved in the study....