Every year, billions of dollars in public and private benefits go unclaimed by older Americans who are eligible but never apply. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB)– a U.S. government agency created to protect Americans from unfair financial practices and to help them make smarter money decisions – has consistently flagged this gap as one...

Food safety researchers have identified a specific group of foods that can cause serious illness, hospitalization, and in some cases death when eaten past their expiration or use-by dates. While the U.S. food labeling system is widely misunderstood, except for infant formula, product dating is not required by federal regulations. That matters because most labels...

People who score high on measures of prosocial behavior (meaning acts that benefit others without expectation of reward) and who also maintain relatively small social circles share a set of remarkably consistent behavioral patterns, according to a growing body of social psychology research. A 2024 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by...

The search for a safer opioid has followed pain medicine for decades. Doctors still need strong drugs for surgery, major injury, cancer pain, and severe flare-ups. Yet the same medicines can slow breathing, increase tolerance, and pull some patients toward dependence. That is why any claim of non addictive pain relief deserves close attention. A...

Dozens of Walmart stores across the United States have quietly begun capping self-checkout lanes at 12 items, a move that is catching shoppers off guard and generating significant frustration online. The change is not coming from Walmart’s corporate headquarters as a nationwide order. Instead, individual store managers are making the call based on their own...

For many people, happiness does not move in a straight line. It dips, strains, and then often rises again. Researchers often describe that arc as a U-shaped curve, with midlife serving as the low point. Economist David Blanchflower found that the pattern appears across many countries and many measures of well-being. That finding does not...

Pope Leo XIV began his pontificate under a spotlight no previous pope had faced. He was born in Chicago, which made an American visit look almost inevitable. Vatican watchers expected an early homecoming. Some reports even floated a September stop tied to the United Nations. Then the Vatican ended the guessing. In February, the Holy...

Millions of Americans deal with a plugged-up nose day after day, season after season. For many, the culprit is not a common cold or seasonal allergies. There is a range of non-infectious causes of nasal congestion, from what you eat and where you live to the structural shape of your nasal passages and the health...

We’ve all been there. You’re standing in the grocery store aisle, staring at a literal wall of green and amber-colored bottles of olive oil. Some labels look like they belong in a rustic Tuscan farmhouse, while others look like they were designed by a Silicon Valley tech firm. The range in price is even more...

The Artemis II mission made headlines around the world when it achieved human spaceflight farther than ever before. As conversations grew online, people kept asking about the salary that the Artemis II astronauts received for the flight, and whether it reflects the scale of what they achieved. After all, this wasn’t just another space mission....

On December 18, 2025, President Donald Trump signed the fiscal year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) into law, and tucked inside that sweeping piece of annual defense legislation was a provision that will fundamentally change how the US government tracks young men. Starting in December 2026, the Selective Service System (SSS) – the federal agency responsible for maintaining...

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) publishes wage data for hundreds of occupations every year through its Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program, and tucked inside that data is something worth paying attention to: a collection of careers that pay $120 an hour or more without being the kind of work that makes headlines. These...