At first, the upcoming operating system for iPhones and iPads, iOS 9, looks the same as before.

But there are a lot of tiny differences coming that'll make your device easier to use. In the iOS 9 beta, which anyone can test now, there's a new feature that makes it easy to go back to the last app you were using.

Let's say someone emails you a link to an article. After you read the article, you may want to go back to your email app. In earlier versions of iOS, you'd have to close your Safari browser and open up your email app again. But in iOS 9, a new "back" button appears at the top left of your screen that takes you back to the last app you were using.

It looks like this:

It's pretty handy.

The final version of iOS 9 will be available for most iPhone and iPad users this fall. You can try the beta version now, but just know it might have some bugs and glitches. Most people are better off waiting for the final version.

SEE ALSO: Apple made a tiny change to the iPhone keyboard that everyone has been begging for

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NOW WATCH: The 6 best new features coming to Apple computers

The US has an epidemic brewing within our borders, and the problem is much more serious than most people realize.

Lyme disease is spreading fast, and it only takes the bite of a poppy-seed-size tick to contract. Even after treatment, symptoms can be difficult to shake.

Those infected can develop severe, rheumatoid arthritis-like joint and muscle pain. Fatigue and neurological disorders — such as numbness, tingling, weakness, and cognitive impairment — can set in too.

Left untreated, infections can lead to brain inflammation or heart problems. At least a handful of such cases have proven fatal.

A recent study goes beyond human suffering inflicted by Lyme disease to estimate the monetary cost of this "hidden epidemic," as some call it. Researchers sifted through the health-insurance claims of 47 million people and discovered a staggering financial burden incurred by tens of thousands treated for Lyme disease — possibly more than $1 billion a year in the US alone.

What's more, the mountain of data chips away at some longstanding mysteries surrounding Lyme disease: What kinds of symptoms people seek treatment for after a standard course of antibiotics, and how much diagnosis and treatment might predict these later symptoms.

"Our study doesn't tell us anything about what better treatments are — but it tells us there's a big problem," says Dr. John Aucott, an author of the study and director of Johns Hopkins University's new Lyme Disease Clinical Research Center. "We hope it changes the conversation. People, even five or 10 years ago, didn't think there was a problem."

Portrait of a 'hidden epidemic'

Looking only at the chart below, it's easy to think Lyme disease isn't a big deal.

After all, the CDC logs about 35,000 confirmed cases of Lyme disease per year out of more than 300 million Americans:

Thing is, those are just the reported cases. Actual infection rates are likely five to 10 times the reported cases. Some studies, which examine lab-test orders for Lyme disease, argue it's up to 12 times higher.

This translates to roughly 300,000 new Lyme disease cases annually, according to the CDC's latest data, from 2013. One study estimates as many as 440,000 new infections occurred in 2008.

So many cases go unreported and there's such a drastic range in the numbers because it's so easy to miss the signs of infection. Early symptoms are also often dismissed as something more benign.

"The longer you go without treatment, the more serious your symptoms can be," says Emily Adrion, a public-health researcher at Johns Hopkins University and lead author of the new study.

Even then, she told Business Insider, there's "a lot of overlap" with other conditions — so doctors don't always think to order a test for Lyme disease. That's why Lyme disease is sometimes called the "great imitator" or "great masquerader."

Here's a chart adjusted to reflect unreported cases, extrapolated from the lab-test orders for Lyme disease:

Meanwhile, Lyme disease infection rates in the US continue to rise. Cases in the US have more than tripled since 1995, according to CDC data.

Accounting for unreported cases, the numbers suggest as much as 1% or more of the population in some eastern states is infected.

Here's an animation showing the recent spread of the problem:

Europe — especially eastern countries full of prime tick habitat — also faces a similar predicament with its own variants of Lyme disease:

Again, all of these statistics regard new cases.

Infections don't just go away on their own. And even though "the vast majority of cases are treatable and short-lived," says Dr. Paul Mead, chief of epidemiology and surveillance for the CDC's Lyme disease program, symptoms don't always vanish with treatment.

Lyme disease is a magnet of controversy

More and more doctors now acknowledge a link between infections and something called post-treatment Lyme disease symptoms, or PTLDS. It can be a painful, debilitating, and — some argue — chronic condition.

Here's science writer Brian Palmer in a piece he wrote for Slate about that dispute (emphasis added in bold):

A small subgroup of patients treated for the disease experiences aches, fatigue, and other nonspecific symptoms more than a year after the infection clears. Whether these symptoms have anything to do with the initial infection or treatment is a subject of controversy among mainstream doctors, because we don't have enough data to make a judgment.

Then there are patients with no proven history of actual infection, who represent the overwhelming majority of people claiming to suffer from chronic Lyme. This form of chronic Lyme is controversial in the same sense that rhinoceros horn therapy is controversial: There's no reliable data to support it.

This has led to an often toxic and sometimes litigious dynamic between researchers, doctors, and patients.

Researchers turn up seemingly conflicting results, hampering consensus and revision of the latest treatment guidelines, which the CDC adopted in 2006. Meanwhile, most doctors stick to these guidelines, which don't mandate follow-up care. (Lyme disease is supposed to be easy to treat.)

So patients who don't meet the stricter working definition of PTLDS (more on this later), yet deal with stubborn symptoms, can get desperately lost in the shuffle.

"Doctors want to help these patients, but they don’t know what to do," Adrion says. "As a result, patients are suffering. They can’t get the help they want." And even when someone does meet PTLDS criteria, she added, there's still confusion about how to treat the condition.

Some patients insist on long-term and expensive antibiotic injections, which are expensive, frequently harmful, sometimes deadly, and only rarely help someone feel better. Others turn away from licensed doctors altogether and pursue dubious alternative treatments.

Pinning a number to a shadowy problem

The new study— by Adrion, Dr. Aucott, and others at Johns Hopkins University and published in PLOS ONE — tries to suss out a better view of what happens after people are treated for Lyme disease.

Adrion and other researchers at Johns Hopkins University set out to tally the costs in the first year following treatment, i.e. the medications, doctor's appointments, emergency room visits, hospital stays, etc.

First, they rounded up the anonymized health-insurance-claim records of 47 million people under age 65 in the years 2006-2010 — one of the largest data sets ever thrown at questions about Lyme disease, Adrion says.

Then they started sorting the data.

In one group, they corralled people diagnosed with or tested for Lyme disease. They also needed to have received treatment for the illness. What's more, this group also had six months of Lyme disease-free records beforehand, plus 12 months of continuous health-insurance enrollment afterward (to look for long-term consequences and costs).

This gave the researchers nearly 53,000 patients and their claim records to work with.

Next, they compared those records to those of a control group (about 264,000 people) with no signs or symptoms of Lyme disease over 18 months. The researchers also accounted for costs associated with unrelated, expensive-to-treat conditions.

If you have Lyme disease and get treated, the study found, insurance providers are likely to pay about $8,205 in the first year. That's nearly double the annual healthcare costs of a typical patient.

And if you have something like PTLDS, the estimated annual costs are even higher.

A big reason why is that Lyme disease is tough to diagnose and hard to treat. PTLDS is possibly even worse, since it's still so poorly understood. Patients may try many things and see many doctors without getting relief.

How Lyme disease works

The cause of Lyme disease is a corkscrew-shaped bacteria called Borrelia burgdorferi, highlighted in green and red-orange in this image:

This microscopic parasite hitches a ride inside the guts of deer ticks, also called black-legged ticks. As adults, these arachnids are incredibly difficult to see, since they grow to only about one-quarter of an inch long (about the size of a sesame seed).

Young ticks, called nymphs, are even smaller, about the size of a poppy seed, and are the top transmitters of the disease.

When infected ticks feed, they can spew what's in their stomach — including any B. burgdorferi bacteria — into a victim.

It's generally accepted about 1% of all infected tick bites lead to Lyme disease, primarily by nymph ticks that aren't removed within 24 to 48 hours.

If an uninfected deer tick feeds on an infected host, e.g. a mouse, deer, squirrel, dog, cat, or even a human, the tick can become a vector and transmit the disease to new hosts. (Note: Lyme disease only seems transmissible by ticks; there's no credible evidence humans can transmit it to one another.)

Early symptoms resemble those of a cold or flu: aches, chills, fever, and swollen glands. Even if you're attuned to the signs, who wouldn't shrug them off as something benign?

About three in four people are "lucky" enough to develop a red bull's-eye-like rash, called erythema chronicum migrans — a "smoking gun" sign of Lyme disease — days to a week afterward an infectious bite.

But it can take nearly a month to appear, and it might go unnoticed if it's a small rash.

The best, first-line treatment is two to four weeks' worth of antibiotics, usually doxycycline or amoxicillin, within a few days of infection — before B. burgdorferi can get too cozy in joints, nerves, and other tissues.

Manufacturers of these drugs charge anywhere from $20 to thousands of dollars per treatment, according to Wired.com.

The cost depends on classic market forces, i.e. supply and demand, and Lyme disease peaks like crazy in spring and summer months. That's when tick populations soar and people rush headlong into the great outdoors:

Still, it's often hard to know you have Lyme disease in the first place. It's equally easy to delay treatment.

Even a medical doctor who lived in a town where Lyme disease is endemic, for example, went undiagnosed and untreated for years. (Read his Q&A with New York Magazine; it's as harrowing as it is informative.)

In addition to the challenges of catching a tick and any signs of infection, taking a diagnostic blood test too early can give false-negative results.

The tests screen for specific antibodies, which your body creates to fight the bacteria. Thing is, it can take weeks for these to build up to detectable levels. In the aforementioned doctor's case, it took three tests to confirm it was Lyme disease.

"Borrelia is also very difficult to culture from blood," says James Meek, a public-health researcher at Yale University who studies Lyme disease. "Evolutionarily, it's a great little creature, but for us it's a terrible thing."

Long-lasting symptoms are a chronic mystery

About 10% to 20% of Lyme disease cases lead to PTLDS, according to the CDC. But that's something the new study calls into question.

The CDC's working definition for PTLDS requires an unambiguous diagnosis, symptoms that persist for at least six months, and functional decline.

So you could have a miserable symptom, e.g. fatigue, arthritic pain, or fuzzy memory. But if you're not functionally impaired, as measured by a special quality-of-life assessment test, or you feel better after treatment but symptoms return many months later, then you're not a clear-cut case of PTLDS.

Dr. Mead, of the CDC, says the agency's 10% to 20% figure "is a generous estimate," since it captures any sort of lingering symptom, not only severe impairment. "The rate of those truly impaired tends to be a lower percentage, closer to 5%, which is still an enormous number of people," he says.

Still, the new study suggests 36% of people treated for Lyme disease struggle with at least one lingering symptom, compared to the control population. That's roughly double the CDC's upper estimate, and it could mean more people suffer from the fallout of an infection in the months, and possibly years, after treatment than is widely known or accepted.

Ultimately, it's very difficult to know if PTLDS-like symptoms are or are not related to a Lyme disease infection.

Some researchers suspect residual tissue damage or immune systems gone awry after an infection.

"You can think of it as the immune system being hyperactive — basically, a post-infectious complication," says Dr. Mead.

Others implicate stubborn "persister" bacteria that evade antibiotics. Still others blame confusion with "the aches and pains of daily living" rather than anything related to Lyme disease at all.

There's also this: Ticks can carry multiple diseases and transmit them at the same time, called coinfections, as journalist Michael Specter described in a 2013 New Yorker article:

[A]t least four pathogens, in addition to the Lyme bacterium, can be transmitted by the black-legged tick: Anaplasma phagocytophilium, which causes anaplasmosis; Babesia microti, which causes babesiosis; Borrelia miyamotoi, a recently discovered genetic relative of the Lyme spirochete; and Powassan virus. Some of these infections are more dangerous than Lyme, and more than one can infect a person at the same time. Simultaneous infection, scientists suggest, may well enhance the strength of the assault on the immune system, while making the disease itself harder to treat or recognize.

Although the new study didn't address other pathogens, it did find a strong link between Lyme disease and symptoms related to PTLDS.

On almost every PTLDS-related symptom, ranging from fatigue and joint problems to arthritis and chronic pain, Lyme disease was a solid predictor.

Symptoms like arthritis and neurological problems, in fact, were several times more likely in the months after diagnosis.

Accounting for both the reported and estimated unreported cases, according to the study, the financial toll of treating Lyme disease and PTLDS-related symptoms could range anywhere from $712 million to $1.3 billion per year.

"If we can find a way to control Lyme disease, then perhaps we could reduce these excessive costs," Meek says. "Maybe we could really learn what's going on" with stubborn symptoms.

The increased use of medical care among the Lyme group "seems at odds with the community standard of care and the Infectious Disease Society [of America] Guidelines for the treatment of Lyme disease, which do not call for follow up visits to document response to treatment in early Lyme disease," the study authors wrote.

In other words: The high number of Lyme patients seeking additional treatment long after an initial course of antibiotics suggests that so-called best practices for Lyme are inadequate.

The CDC would not comment on the PLOS ONE study or its results, telling Business Insider it has a policy against doing so "on papers with which we weren't affiliated." But responding to a general question about Lyme disease, the CDC's Dr. Mead told Business Insider that, after treating other kinds of major infections, it's not unusual for people to take weeks or months to get back to feeling normal. That perspective suggests that, among serious infectious diseases, Lyme may actually be perfectly ordinary, and that perhaps at least some cases that seem like PTLDS proper are just an expected part of the recovery process.

Dr. Gary Wormser, a Lyme disease researcher at New York Medical College and a primary author of the CDC's treatment guidelines, formally declined to speak with us about this study or the results. Many other clinicians and epidemiologists cited in the study didn't return our repeated phone calls and emails.

Adrion told us she wasn't surprised by the silence.

"It’s a very controversial subject and few researchers want to talk about it publicly," she says. "Which is unfortunate, because what we really need is to have an open and honest dialogue about PTLDS and Lyme disease generally."

Meek wasn't involved in the study but described it as good, important, and necessary, since previous studies relied on much smaller data sets or only examined the cost of lab tests.

"Being able to put a price tag on Lyme disease is very helpful," Meek says. "But they didn't look at people aged 65 and older. There's lots of money being spent on caring for [seniors] with Lyme disease, or who might have Lyme disease."

Since most people 65 and older use Medicare, not private insurance, Adrion says "it would have been an enormous undertaking" to merge the two data sets — but hopes to analyze that and other data in the future "to get a more complete picture of what is happening."

Can we prevent Lyme disease?

There's an effective way to fight Lyme disease and its growing human and financial ledger — a vaccine.

The first one was called LYMErix. Made by SmithKline Beecham (now GlaxoSmithKline), it hit the market in 1998, cost about $50 per dose, and was 80% effective in adults after two boosters within one year.

But you can't get it anymore.

Several forces led the manufacturer to stop selling that first vaccine in 2002 — not the least of which were outspoken antivaccine groups and their lawyers. Plaintiffs in one case claimed the vaccine caused Lyme disease-like symptoms in some people. GlaxoSmithKline eventually settled out of court, but an official follow-up study found nothing abnormal about the vaccine.

The US government also withheld approval to administer the vaccine to kids, even though younger people are one of the biggest demographics for infection. As any parent knows, most kids love to play in leaves, fields, forests, and other habitats crawling with ticks.

There was also strange professional disregard for Lyme disease during its initial rise, especially for the vaccine itself.

At an important CDC meeting to establish guidelines for LYMErix, for example,"a noted infectious diseases physician said 'this is a vaccine for yuppies,'" wrote Dr. Stanley A. Plotkin, an emeritus pediatrics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, in a hindsight analysis of what went wrong with the vaccine.

Another manufacturer had developed a second promising vaccine at the time, but it never pursued licensing following the lawsuits. At least one new vaccine is in development, Dr. Plotkin told Business Insider, but it's not ready for a public debut.

Until then, vigilant prevention and quick treatment with antibiotics will have to do until what some researchers call a public-health fiasco can be turned around.

"Primary prevention is something where we're clearly losing the battle on," Dr. Mead says. "A safe and effective vaccine could help us turn the tide."

LIVE LONGER: The scariest health risks associated with summer and how to avoid them

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NOW WATCH: Should we kill off one of the most dangerous creatures in the world?

In what seems like the plot to disaster movie, the quiet town of Centralia, Pennsylvania has endured a burning problem since 1962: It's been on fire, literally, for the past 53 years.

And how this fire started still remains a mystery. But chemistry can help explain why it's still going.

The problem runs deep

Centralia, Pennsylvania sits atop a few of the biggest coal deposits in the world. This was fortuitous for the sleepy town at the time because coal was — and still is — one of the main sources of energy and electricity, having fueled the Industrial Revolution.

In the 1800s, miners in Centralia blasted tunnels underground to harvest the coal, but by the mid-1900s, many of the mines where abandoned.

No one knows exactly how the Centralia fire started, but the strongest theory is that burning trash from a nearby landfill accidentally ignited coal below an old entrance to the mine. The fire then spread through the mines

Feeding the flames

Coal is formed over millions of years when swamps and bogs full of organic matter like trees, roots, and bacteria are buried under sand, mud, and other natural materials. The pressure on the organic matter increases as layers of earth above it grow over time, and all of the water and other substances from the buried plants and trees get squeezed out, forming coal that ends up being mostly carbon — about 40-90% carbon by weight.

When the carbon inside coal mixes with oxygen, it ignites. It can even begin spontaneously without a flame nearby.

Those tunnels that the miners dug in the 1800s fed the flames by siphoning in oxygen from the surface. Then, as more coal burned, the flames bit deeper and deeper into the surrounding region — a whopping 300-feet-deep— in a vicious, fiery cycle that wouldn't stop.

Coal burns slow and steady, which means that it takes a very long time to burn out. This is unlike timber in a forest or a camp fire, which smolders quickly.

As long as there's enough heat, fuel, and oxygen to keep it going, the fire won't burn out. Because coal contains a natural source of fuel — carbon — it can keep burning for as long as there's enough heat and oxygen to keep it going. This is why coal mine fires can blaze for centuries.

Today, the Centralia fire covers six square miles and spreads 75 feet per year. Shockingly, it could burn for another 250 years.

Eternal Flame

The 1,000 residents that lived in Centralia at the time thought the fire was a silly inconvenience at first. But that changed when sulfurous fumes and carbon monoxide began seeping out of the mine, nearly suffocating them in their homes. The underground fire also fractured the ground, making sinkholes pop up all over the place. A 12-year-old was nearly consumed by one in 1981.

The town has tried in vain to snuff out the flames over the years. They drilled holes into the mine and plugged them up with wet sand to choke off the air supply, but it didn't work. They stopped trying to put it out in the 1980s and haven't made another attempt since.

The state government condemned Centralia in 1992 and almost all of its residents left. Today, just about a dozen people live there. The town has been taken over by graffiti artists.

While a long-burning, underground fire may seem like a freak occurrence, they are actually fairly common. Today, mine fires are burning in New Zealand, Wyoming, India, China, and Turkmenistan.

Fires like this also exist naturally too, with a few thousand burning around the world.

Our friends a the American Chemical Society made a YouTube video about the Centralia fire on their Reactions channel. Check it out for more fiery details.

SEE ALSO: Coal: The Fuel Of The Future, Unfortunately

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NOW WATCH: NASA captured this stunning time-lapse of a massive eruption on the sun

In a bizarre move, PETA, or "People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals," decided to put out a statement on the unexpected death of Nintendo's president, Satoru Iwata.

The organization sent over the following statement this morning:

We at PETA are deeply saddened by the death of Nintendo's Satoru Iwata. Many of us grew up with Nintendo—we've celebrated games such as Nintendogs, which PETA Europe named Best Animal-Friendly Video Game, and our love for these games powered the parodies we've made, such as the Super Mario Bros.–spoofing Super Chick Sisters, in which players try to save Princess Pamela Anderson from the evil Colonel Sanders, and Pokémon Black & Blue: Gotta Free 'Em All, in which players battle to free Pokémon from human enslavement. Our thoughts are with Mr. Iwata's family and everyone at Nintendo today.

That comes from Joel Bartlett, PETA's senior director of marketing innovations.

The statement from PETA follows the news from Sunday night that longtime Nintendo president Iwata passed away from a rare form of cancer (what is known as a bile duct growth). Iwata was 55 years old. 

Iwata's work in the video game industry, and his time at Nintendo, was highly influential on the greater game landscape. He helped create such iconic characters as Kirby, and oversaw Nintendo's most successful home game console in history: The Nintendo Wii.

His death was sudden and unexpected; Iwata had surgery in June 2014 to remove the cancer in his bile duct, and statements following that surgery made it sound like he had recovered.

He issued this statement through Nintendo at the time:

In general, it is said that a bile duct growth can be difficult-to-treat, partly because of the difficulty of detecting it early. In my case, luckily, it was detected very early and I had no symptoms. I was counseled that removal at an early stage would be the desirable medical option. Therefore I had surgery last week, and I came through it well, as predicted.

Iwata missed this year's game industry trade show, E3, in Los Angeles this past June, but spoke at Nintendo's annual shareholder meeting around the same time. When Iwata announced he would miss this year's E3, Nintendo issued the following statement to IGN:

Nintendo’s focus for E3 this year will be showcasing the many games we have coming for both Wii U and Nintendo 3DS. Mr. Miyamoto and other members of our development team will be in Los Angeles to explain these games and the unique experiences that each offers. Mr. Iwata’s focus in this period will be on other areas of our business that require his presence in Japan

Iwata even appeared in an aggressively silly Nintendo video this past June – a stand-in for their usual E3 press conference – as a puppet, alongside Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime and Nintendo creative director Shigeru Miyamoto.

SEE ALSO: Longtime Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has died

AND: Nintendo's president just passed away — and he was probably a huge part of your childhood

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NOW WATCH: Why it’s so hard to get a good deal when selling used games at GameStop

In a talk last year, Google CEO Larry Page raised a radical notion: We all might be working much harder than is necessary.

"The idea that everyone needs to work frantically to meet people's needs is just not true," he said, pointing to recent advances in technology that have made meeting humanity's basic needs much easier.

Some people work hard to pay rent, to put food on the table, because they enjoy it, or — in rare cases — because the job really demands it. But what about everyone else, those who earn more than they need and still run themselves ragged, often working to the point of misery?

Christopher K. Hsee, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, has looked at this very question. His basic hypothesis is that people work until they are beat, instead of working until they have "enough." That means it's the highest earners among the white-collar set who are likeliest to work far more than is really necessary.

He calls this phenomenon overearning: when people "forego leisure to work and earn beyond their needs."

In a 2013 study published in the journal Psychological Science, Hsee and his collaborators found that the student participants in a series of laboratory experiments did just that — even when the researchers eliminated what they called the "normative reasons for overearning, such as enjoyment of work, uncertainty about the future, and desires to bequeath wealth to others."

Those reasons can be real and rational motivators of overworking in the real world, but the results of Hsee's study suggests there's something else going on, something a bit more depressing.

Testing overearning

Here's the creative paradigm they set up in the lab, which was designed to be minimalistic and controlled, not absolutely realistic:

In Phase I, the participant can relax and listen to music (mimicking leisure) or press a key to disrupt the music and listen to a noise (mimicking work). For every certain number of times the participant listens to the noise (e.g., 20 times), he or she earns 1 chocolate … The participant can only earn (not eat) the chocolates in Phase I and can only eat (and not earn more of) the chocolates in Phase II.

The computer shows the participant a running tally of their chocolate earnings in Phase I. In Phase II, they can eat as much as they want on the spot; everything else must be left behind. Those who opt to disrupt their leisurely music-listening with button-pressing and noises so frequently that they end up with more chocolates than they can actually eat are considered "overearners."

The researchers dub this behavior "mindless accumulation"— something that might be familiar to anyone who has ever looked up after far too many hours at work and wondered: "Why am I still here?"

This is especially counterproductive when it involves high-earners, who would be able to earn enough (and, often, do their jobs) in far fewer hours. "Regardless of consumption needs or earning rates, participants will work about the same amount — until feeling tired rather than until having earned enough," the researchers hypothesized. Since people's tire-out rate would be the same whether they are earning one chocolate per 20 noises or per 120, the researchers predicted that those earning more would overearn more, paying little attention to the unneeded "work" that left them with more chocolates than they could ever want.

That's exactly what happened.

The researchers speculated that perhaps this miscalculation came from a strategy humans first developed when working too much and earning too much were not real concerns.

"To earn and accumulate as much as possible was a functional heuristic for survival," they write. "Individuals did not need to worry about earning too much, because they could not earn too much." They compare this to overeating — also something that's common now, but was hardly an issue when scarcity was the norm.

From the lab to the office

While Hsee's laboratory experiment was clever, it hardly replicates real life. Participating in a study is, in most important ways, not like a real job; hearing an unpleasant noise is not "work;" and chocolate is not money.

John Carney, in a CNBC column critiquing the research, went further. "The test conditions are so artificial that the study may be largely irrelevant to the real world," he argued. "Rational behavior sometimes looks silly in a psychologist's lab."

Still, Hsee's experiment captures an element of something that we can see playing out all around us. The motivating factors may be more complex, but the result is largely the same: an excess of work and "mindless accumulation."

Many people work hard their whole lives, planning to finally enjoy the fruits of their labor in retirement — but then those lucky few for whom it's financially feasible forget to ever actually slow down. "They may later regret overly virtuous behavior and feel they missed out on the pleasures of life," Carey K. Morewedge of Boston University writes, in the "Blackwell Handbook of Judgment and Decision Making."

The internet, email, and mobile phones have paradoxically made many of us report that we are both more productive and logging more hours at work. How can that be? In a comprehensive post on the outmoded idea that technology would lighten our workloads, Matt Novak explains that it's a quaint notion that's been largely abandoned. "The prospect of working less and enjoying more leisure time used to be the great futuristic promise of midcentury America,"he writes, at Paleofuture. "Today it's little more than a punchline."

While our overall working hours in the US have in fact declined slightly (when you include housework), technology has not yet brought a radical shift in the amount of work we do. Our propensity to overwork and overearn might be to blame.

To be fair, Larry Page seems to get this. He didn't argue that we would be working less — only that we didn't need to continue working so much. "A lot of people aren’t happy if they don’t have anything to do," he acknowleged.

John Maynard Keynes, in a famous 1930 essay predicting a time when leisure time was plentiful but we didn't know what to do with it, may have captured this best: "We have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy."

SEE ALSO: Larry Page's vision of society is shockingly similar to what John Maynard Keynes once predicted

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NOW WATCH: 5 horrible things that happen to your body when you're stressed

From telepathy to total immunity from disease, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg didn't shy away from bold predictions about the future during a Q&A on his Facebook profile on June 30.

But one of Zuckerberg's technology dreams is on the verge of coming true: a computer that can describe images in plain English to users.

Zuckerberg thinks this machine could have profound changes on how people, especially the vision-impaired, interact with their computers.

"If we could build computers that could understand what's in an image and could tell a blind person who otherwise couldn't see that image, that would be pretty amazing as well," Zuckerberg wrote. "This is all within our reach and I hope we can deliver it in the next 10 years."

In the past year, teams from the University of Toronto and Universite de Montreal, Stanford University, and Google have been making headway in creating artificial intelligence programs that can look at an image, decide what's important, and accurately, clearly describe it.

This development builds on image recognition algorithms that are already widely available, like Google Images and other facial recognition software. It's just taking it one step further. Not only does it recognize objects, it can put that object into the context of its surroundings.

"The most impressive thing I've seen recently is the ability of these deep learning systems to understand an image and produce a sentence that describes it in natural language," said Yoshua Bengio, an artificial intelligence (AI) researcher from the Universite de Montreal. Bengio and his colleagues, recently developed a machine that could observe and describe images. They presented their findings last week at the International Conference on Machine Learning.

"This is something that has been done in parallel in a bunch of labs in the last less than a year," Bengio told Business Insider. "It started last Fall and we've seen papers coming out, probably more than 10 papers, since then from all the major deep learning labs, including mine. It's really impressive."

Bengio's program could describe images in fairly accurate detail, generating a sentence by looking at the most relevant areas in the image.

It might not sound like a revolutionary undertaking. A young child can describe the pictures above easily enough.

But doing this actually involves several cognitive skills that the child has learned: seeing an object, recognizing what it is, realizing how it's interacting with other objects in its surroundings, and coherently describing what she's seeing.

That's a tough ask for AI because it combines vision and natural language, different specializations within AI research.

It also involves knowing what to focus on. Babies begin to recognize colors and focus on small objects by the time they are five months old, according to the American Optometric Association. Looking at the image above, young children know to focus on the little girl, the main character of that image. But AI doesn't necessarily come with this prior knowledge, especially when it comes to flat, 2D images. The main character could be anywhere within the frame.

In order for the machines to identify the main character, researchers train them with thousands of images. Bengio and his colleagues trained their program with 120,000 images. Their AI could recognize the object in the image, while simultaneously focusing on relevant sections of the image while in the process of describing it.

"As the machine develops one word after another in the English sentence, for each word, it chooses to look in different places of the image that it finds to be most relevant in deciding what the next word should be," Bengio said. "We can visualize that. We can see for each word in the sentence where it's looking in the image. It's looking where you would imagine ... just like a human would."

According to Scientific American, the system's responses "could be mistaken for that of a human" about 70% of the time.

However, it seemed to falter when the program focused on the wrong thing, when the images had multiple figures or if the images were more visually complicated. In the batch of images below, the program describes the top middle image, for example, as "a woman holding a clock in her hand" because it mistook the logo on her shirt for a clock.

The program also misclassified objects it got right in other images. For example, the giraffes in the upper right picture were mistaken for "a large white bird standing in a forest."

It did however, correctly predict what every man and woman wants: to sit at a table with a large pizza.

SEE ALSO: These trippy images show how Google's AI sees the world

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NOW WATCH: We tried cryotherapy — the super-cold treatment LeBron James swears by

Dear Apple,

In recent years, you've been adding more applications I can't delete from my phone.

It started with just a few apps — Notes, Calculator, Calendar, small apps to be sure — but now you're forcing me to keep your Apple Watch app, regardless if I own that device, and soon I won't be able to delete Find My Friends, either.

C'mon Apple: Let me delete your apps.

I know you care deeply about offering "the whole widget," as your old co-founder Steve Jobs used to say. I know you want to control the complete end-to-end experience, and you don't want people to meddle or modify your apps. But please, at least let me delete the apps I don't want.

Before the App Store came along, the iPhone was barren. Apple understandably needed to fill its first "smartphone" with enough carefully curated content to fulfill people's needs and make them happy. But times have changed; we have an App Store now, which offers tons of options for every single application.

I never needed your Stocks app. I don't care about stocks at all. So let me delete that app, and free up some space for an app, or maybe a song, that I actually do want on my phone.

But let's say I actually did care about stocks. Maybe I'm really into the stock market. If that were the case, maybe I would want a third-party app from the App Store that's better tailored to my needs, something that offers more data and analysis than your app.

Why should I keep two apps if I'm going to only use one?

FaceTime, Contacts, iBooks, Newsstand, Compass, Voice Memos... why are you forcing me to own apps I don't want or use?

I think it's great that every new iPhone owner has a slew of apps they can use right away, with no need to visit the App Store. But if those apps are just taking up valuable space — especially for those 16 GB iPhone owners— so what's the use of forcing me to keep them? Why not let people choose how they use their storage?

I get it, some of your apps are "required" for certain experiences. For example, I can't use Apple Pay without the Passbook app, and I can't access the iBooks Store without the iBooks app. There's not much wrong with the Clocks app, either. I get it. But at least give me the option. A notification saying, "Warning: You will be unable to use Apple Pay if you delete the Passbook app," is a totally acceptable solution.

Even if I choose to re-download those apps later and you make me re-enter all my information into those apps, I'm totally fine with that. What I'm not fine with is the current situation.

There are nearly 30 apps of yours I can't delete. That means roughly one out of every 6 apps I own, I didn't choose to own. That's a problem!

Apple, please reconsider your stance on this policy. You're the biggest company in the world, and there's no reason you need to listen to a single person's opinion. But I'm sure I'm not the only person who feels this way. Please let me delete some, if not all, of your first-party apps, to allow more space for stuff (apps, videos, and songs) I actually want.

Sincerely,

Dave 

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NOW WATCH: How to clear out a ton of space on your iPhone superfast

It's finally here, the highly anticipated first look at 'Suicide Squad.'

The folks at Comic-Con got to see this over the weekend, and now we all can, check it out.

"Suicide Squad" comes out August 5, 2016

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As spring blooms each year, another season blooms along with it: Pollen season.

When plants grow and blossom, they also release tons of pollen into the air, to the detriment of many people's respiratory systems.

Now, thanks to climate change and increasing carbon dioxide levels, each year's pollen season gets worse.

"Longer growing seasons, along with higher temperatures and carbon dioxide levels, can increase pollen production, intensifying and lengthening the allergy season,"according to a 2014 report by the National Climate Assessment.

Dr. Stanley Fineman, past president American College of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology, told Business Insider that he in fact does see more people with allergies and more complaints of allergy symptoms.

Wheezing and asthma related ER visits increase 10-15% on days with high pollen counts, a study based in the country's south east found. Separate studies in New England, New York City, and California found similar results, high pollen counts correlate with more ER visits.

Allergies in general are on the rise possibly because of what's called the hygiene hypothesis. As people start living in more sterile and urban environments their immune systems aren't exposed to microbes and don't know what to do when they encounter allergens or bacteria, making allergies and auto-immune diseases more prevalent, Scientific American's podcast Science Talk explains.

But it seems the hygiene hypothesis can't explain everything about the increase in pollen allergies, because researchers found that specific sensitivity to ragweed pollen, which up to 20% of Americans are allergic to, increased by 15% over a four year period.

As you can see in the graph below, from the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America, pollen levels have been getting worse each year, for at least the last 20 years, as carbon dioxide levels rise:

While digging into this "pollen crisis" Business Insider discovered that there is no single, consolidated source of national pollen counts. To make this graph the foundation took data on ragweed pollen, one of the most common allergens, from local pollen counting stations around the nation and used it as a proxy for all pollen producing plants. In the graph, the y-axis on the left shows how much carbon dioxide was in the air for a given year, and the y-axis on the right shows the average amount of pollen that ragweed plants produced that year.

If you look at the chart above you'll see that the amounts of pollen ragweed produces only went up by 1 gram per plant in almost 20 years. But Mike Tringale, SVP of the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America, told Business Insider by email that slight increases, such as the graph shows, can make clinical differences for people with allergies.

Ragweed actually works pretty well as a proxy since it's so common, and scientists found similar trends in other plants like allergy-causing grasses.

And another study of ragweed found that the plant's pollen is more potent, meaning it can cause worse symptoms, than before thanks to climate change increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the air and causing warmer drought-like conditions.

This gets even worse the closer plants are to sources of carbon dioxide — ragweed growing next to highways produces more potent pollen than ragweed growing away from large roads.

It seems that the pollution from the cars increases the potency of the ragweed pollen.

But pollen isn't getting worse just in the US, the same changes are happening to Europe's pollen season. And ragweed, one of the worst plants for allergies in the US, is invading Europe and beyond.

In the United States up to 30% of adults and 40% of children suffer from nasal allergies to pollen, mold spores, dust mites, or animal dander. And more than 10 million people in Britain suffer from hay fever.

Once a grain of pollen, or other allergen, enters an allergic person's nose, mouth, or eyes that person's immune system overreacts to the harmless particles. This overreaction causes the dreaded mix of snuffly noses, watery eyes, and in really bad cases, sets off a bout of allergy-induced asthma, which can be deadly if untreated.

What is a person to do in the face of such an allergic onslaught?

Well there are many ways of coping with seasonal allergies. But Dr. Fineman told Business Insider the most effective course of action for someone with allergies is to find what exactly they are allergic to and to take care around or avoid that allergen. A discussion with their doctor is the best way to deal with an allergy — an allergist can recommend different treatments and tips for reducing allergies tailored to you.

SEE ALSO: Merck's grass pollen allergy vaccine wins U.S. approval

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NOW WATCH: Here's the best look yet at the next big game starring Batman

Ever wonder how celebrities like Kevin Hart, Cara Delevigne, and the Kardashian sisters create their perfectly timed lip sync videos? 

They're all using an app called Dubsmash, an app that lets you record videos of yourself lip syncing to sound clips ranging from pop songs, to famous movie lines, to viral YouTube videos. More than 3 million posts have been uploaded to Instagram using the hashtag #Dubsmash, some of these coming from celebrities.

Check out Reese Witherspoon and Sofia Vergara using the app to dub a goat-inspired YouTube edit of Taylor Swift's hit song "Trouble."  

In March, Rihanna used the app to tease the release of her latest hit "B---- Better Have My Money,"Mashable reported.

Unlike other social media apps, Dubs are not shared within the app itself. Instead, users can send them as messages to friends and upload them as videos on a number of platforms, such as Vine, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook. 

How to use Dubsmash 

First, open the app and select the audio you want to use for video. You'll see lots of trending categories, such as "Chick Flicks,""Popular TV," and "Rap."

For my video, I selected the "Chick Flicks" category. 

Next, you'll see a list of different audio clips. Tap the play icon on the left-hand side of each title to listen to the clip. 

Once you've decided on the perfect clip, tap the title once. I chose "On Wednesday, we wear pink," an infamous line from the 2004 movie "Mean Girls."

This is where you'll record your video. Position yourself in front of the camera and prepare to film.

Once you're ready, tap the "Start" button at the bottom of the screen to begin. You can use the audio waves at the top of the screen as a guide to perfectly time your recording.  

When you're done recording, the app will play your Dub back to you. If you didn't quite nail it, tap the "X' in the upper left-hand corner to try again.

If you're pleased with your work, tap the "Next" button to share your creation. 

This will give you several options for sharing your Dub. You can send Dubs to your friends through Facebook messenger, WhatsApp, or as text messages. 

I chose "Save to Camera Roll," so I could upload my Dub as a Vine. 

Here's a look at the finished product.  

SEE ALSO: Only hardcore Snapchat users know about this awesome trick everyone should be using

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NOW WATCH: This photographer got 100,000 Instagram followers by arranging food in a very particular way

After a leak, Warner Bros. has officially released the "Suicide Squad" footage that debuted at Comic-Con Friday morning.

The end of the over three-minute trailer gives our best look at the new iteration of the Joker, who will be played by Jared Leto.

He'll be the first actor to play the role since Heath Ledger in 2008's "The Dark Knight."

As we've seen from a few image teases, Leto's Joker doesn't look like any version of the character we've seen before.

Take a look:

Here he is when his intro is first teased.

"Suicide Squad" is in theaters August 5, 2016.

SEE ALSO: 12 things we learned from the new "Batman v Superman" trailer

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Marie Kondo is a Japanese lifestyle celebrity in Japan. She's known for helping people decrease clutter and straighten up their homes for good. And she's developed a fan base so huge, her followers are flooding Instagram with photos of their "kondo-ed" homes.

Her book — "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing"— became a top seller this year and even earned her a spot on Time's 2015 "Top 100 Influential People" list. 

She also has clients in Japan that seek her out to help them tidy their homes. She encourages them to clean everything in one fell swoop and only keep the objects and clothes that they truly love.

"There is an order to follow: 1. clothes, 2. books, 3. documents, 4. miscellaneous items, 5. mementos,"Kondo told Business Insider about her method. "Working in this order, you can improve your judgement and determine which items spark joy."

She told BI that you can tell when something sparks joy when you "feel your body go upward." If something doesn't make you happy when you touch it, Kondo said you should "thank it for its service" and get rid of it.

"When you choose things based on your real feeling, you can choose the right amount of items to totally fit [in you home]," Kondo said. "That is surprising for everyone — this is part of the magic of tidying up."

Bellow you'll see inspiring images of so-called "kondoed" homes that people posted on Instagram. You might even want to start "kondo-ing" yourself.

This might be what your bedroom currently looks like right now. To start "kondo-ing," put all of your clothes in one spot and sort them by what to keep and what to throw away.

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The point of kondo-ing your home is to surround yourself with things that you love. Kondo recommends only keeping things that "spark joy," or that make you feel lighter when you touch them. She says you'll recognize the feeling immediately.

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That means you'll probably end up throwing out or giving away a lot of what's in your home.

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One of the show-stoppers of 20th Century Fox's big San Diego Comic-Con panel was the trailer for the X-Men spinoff film "Deadpool." Fans reportedly loved it — so much so that the trailer was shown twice! 

But who is Deadpool, and why is this a big deal?

Created in 1991 by Fabian Nicieza and Rob Liefeld, Deadpool was originally an antihero in the Punisher mold, a scumbag antihero with big guns and two swords. But in 1997 writer Joe Kelly and artist Ed McGuiness decided to reinvent the character completely, and it's thanks to those two that Deadpool is famous. 

The Deadpool Kelly and McGuiness depicted was a parody machine, lambasting every trope of action heroes and superhero comics with an extra fourth-wall breaking twist: Deadpool knew he was a comic book character, and talked about it all the time. Since then, that's been a defining trait of the character, who has since become the hero of numerous violent action-comedy comics, each more ridiculous than the last (The recently concluded series by Brian Posehn, Gerry Duggan, and Tony Moore kicked off with Deadpool taking on zombie US Presidents).

That's what people love about Deadpool: Over-the-top action and crazy meta-comedy. 

And from the trailer screened at San Diego Comic-Con, it looks like this new movie is getting everything right. While it will take the studio three weeks to officially release the trailer (star Ryan Reynolds says that's because the visual effects aren't done yet), what was shown at Comic-Con is remarkably faithful to the source material. We're introduced to Ryan Reynolds character, Wade Wilson, a man with cancer in his "liver, lungs, prostate, and brain," promptly quipping that they are  "all things I can live without."

Humor? Check. 

Wilson then submits himself to a military experiment that promises to make him "a superhero" and heal him. In the comic books, this is the same Weapon X project that gave Wolverine his metal skeleton and claws.  Just before the procedure begins, Wilson requests that they "please don't make the super suit green. Or animated!"

Meta-humor? Double check.

Then, an action sequence that looks like a pretty close live-action approximation of the leaked CGI test footage that fans adored — only with a sudden, surprise cameo by Colossus. 

Not-very-subtle connection to the X-Men? Check.

Then Deadpool tells the camera to "cue the music."

Breaking down that fourth wall? Definitely.

Oh, and then they reveal the side-effect to the experiment that turned Wade into Deadpool — his skin is horribly scarred and disfigured, and there are several very descriptive and filthy jokes traded between Wade and his pal about how ugly he now looks. "Like an avocado had sex with an older avocado" is probably the tamest one, I swear. Then there's a bunch of stylish and gory violence, complete with headshots.

R-rated comedy and violence? Totally there. 

Deadpool is a character you sort of have to experience for yourself to understand why he has such ardent fans, but it's hard to miss the appeal of an exuberantly irreverent R-rated superhero comedy. It's something that we haven't really seen before outside of maybe the first "Kick-Ass," and as we become more and more accustomed to the spectacle of superheroes onscreen, "Deadpool" could prove to be an extremely fun palate cleanser. 

At the very least, it's a heartfelt apology for the first time Reynolds played Deadpool in "X-Men Origins: Wolverine." Because that was horrendous.

SEE ALSO: Why can't Hollywood ever get Superman right?

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People age at different rates, and now, a new study finds that people's tendency to age more slowly or quickly than their contemporaries is evident in healthy people as young as their 30s.

In the study, researchers looked at a group of people, all of whom were 38 years old. The researchers determined these participants' "biological ages" based on how well their body systems were working. To determine each person's biological age, the researchers looked at the participants' cognitive abilities, blood pressure and markers of their kidney, liver, lung and immune system function, among other measures.

They found that the participants' biological ages ranged from 28 to 61. In other words, some of the 38-year-olds functioned as well as people in their late 20s, whereas others more closely resembled the functioning of people in their early 60s.

"We set out to measure aging in these relatively young people," the study's first author, Dan Bel sky, an assistant professor of geriatrics at the Duke University Center for Aging and Human Development, said in a statement. "Most studies of aging look at seniors, but if we want to be able to prevent age-related disease, we're going to have to start studying aging in young people," he said.

Belsky said he was surprised to find "so much variation already by the midpoint of the life course in how people are aging.""The biological age range being from below 30 to over 60 is really extraordinary," he said.

The same information that the researchers used in the study to determine people's biological ages is typically collected during routine medical checkups. Doctors could use this data to explain to patients, in a relatable way, how their lifestyles are affecting their health, Belsky said.

"When somebody says, 'Well, you're 40 years old, but your body looks 50,'" it's very intuitive for most people to understand what that means for their health, Belsky told Live Science.

Turning back time

In the study, researchers looked at data from nearly 1,000 people born between 1972 and 1973 in the same hospital in Dunedin, New Zealand. The participants were part of the Dunedin Study — an ongoing project to track the health of a group of people from their birth — and they undergo physical exams and extensive interviews every few years.

The researchers also used data collected from the participants from age 26 to 38, to calculate a "pace of aging" value, or approximate measure of how fast they were aging. For this calculation, the researchers used measures such as the participants' waist-hip ratio, body mass index and cardiorespiratory fitness.

They found that for people who were aging the most rapidly, every chronological year correlated to three years of physiological aging. People aging faster also tended to report feeling older.

Furthermore, in a separate study in which undergraduate students at a U.S. university looked at photos of the participants' faces, with no additional information, the students rated the participants with higher biological ages as looking older than their biologically younger counterparts.

Can people change how old they look?

Using markers from many body systems gives researchers a better picture of how aging works in the body, Belsky said. "If aging is a process that affects all the organ systems in the body simultaneously, what we're mostly interested in is a broad trend across all those organ systems," he noted.

Going forward, the researchers may add even more biomarkers to their calculations as advanced technology makes it easier to collect more data.

The study shows that it's possible to detect the types of changes that come with age in people who are still young and free of disease, he said. For example, researchers were able to detect declines in organ function and strength, as well as cognitive decline.

The findings also imply that people's habits can affect how quickly they age, and eventually, the research could point to tools or therapies that might be able to slow down the aging process, he said.

"Only about 20 percent — perhaps a little bit less, or a little bit more — of variation in life span is genetic in nature," Belsky said, adding that environment and lifestyle play large roles in aging. "What we see with aging is really about the interaction between our genes and the environments we encounter," he said. "There's nothing about this process that's set in stone."

The research was published on July 7 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Elizabeth Goldbaum is on Twitter. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook& Google+. Original article on Live Science

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SEE ALSO: I calculated my approximate age at death — and what I found was totally unexpected

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This weekend at Comic-Con, the first trailer for the upcoming "X-Men: Apocalypse" debuted. While the trailer has not officially been released to anyone outside of San Diego, the footage recently leaked online and it gives an exciting, detailed look at the latest movie.

It also gave us a look at some brand new mutants, good and evil. A few of them were seen in the original X-Men trilogy, while one has never been captured on film before. 

Here are the new mutants that we'll meet in the latest X-Men reboot:

Jean Grey (Sophie Turner)

The telepathic Jean Grey is a force to be reckoned with. In the original "X-Men" trilogy, Grey was played by Famke Janssen, who was trying to figure out the full extent of her abilities. In "Apocalypse," Grey will be portrayed by Sophie Turner, who is seen in the trailer having visions of an imminent and terrifying apocalypse.

This will mark Turner's first major cinematic role. Her current claim to fame is her portrayal of Sansa Stark in "Game of Thrones."

Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee)

Nightcrawler was first introduced to the cinematic X-Men universe in 2003's "X2: X-Men United." There, he was played as a quiet outsider by Alan Cumming. The new, younger Nightcrawler will be back in "Apocalyse." As always, he can be seen lurking in the shadows.

Storm (Alexandra Shipp)

It actually hasn't been too long since we've last seen Storm. The original Storm, played by Halle Berry, appeared in the future scenes in "Days of Future Past."

The time travel and new timelines created in the latest "X-Men" installments have allowed for a young Storm to enter the picture. She is played by a silver-haired Alexandra Shipp.

Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac)

And finally, the latest villain to pose a challenge to Professor X's team is Apocalypse, who gives this sequel its title. Apocalypse is supposedly an ancient mutant who is nearly unstoppable. 

The world got their first glimpse of a hooded Apocalypse during the closing credits of "Days of Future Past." During this trailer, the terrifying Apocalypse finally takes his hood off. If you don't know who Oscar Isaac is, he has had a busy year. In April, he starred in "Ex Machina" and later this year he will star in the latest "Star Wars" sequel, "The Force Awakens."

"X-Men: Apocalypse" will be out in theaters on May 27, 2016. 

SEE ALSO: 12 things we learned from the new 'Batman v Superman' trailer

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Californians spend about twice as long working out per week as the residents of North Dakota.

Exercise-tracking apps MyFitnessPal and MapMyFitness recently released an analysis of their users' workout data to assess fitness levels across the United States. One of the variables they measured was users' time spent running, biking, or doing other exercise each week.

Business Insider made this map showing the average amount of time users in each state reported working out:

People who use fitness tracking apps are by no means a random sample of Americans, but the data show some interesting variability in exercise habits around the country.

SEE ALSO: Here are the most expensive places to live in America

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NOW WATCH: 5 science facts 'Jurassic World' totally ignored

When a woman waits to start having kids for just an extra five years, from the age of 30 to 35, it can have profound consequences. 

The biological difference is the most obvious one, though every woman will have a different experience. A woman's fertility generally begins to decrease around age 32, so for most women, it will be more difficult to conceive at 35 than it would have been at 30. Fertility declines more sharply after age 37.

In addition to potential difficulties getting pregnant, miscarriages and a number of complications to pregnancy, including gestational diabetes and high blood pressure, are more common for women over 35. 

But there's a significant, positive effect of waiting to have kids, Elizabeth Gregory explains in "Ready: Why Women Are Embracing the New Later Motherhood."

Women who delay having kids earn significantly more per year than women who start having kids earlier, and this effect shows up even in women who started families at 35 instead of 30. 

Gregory, who directs the Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program at the University of Houston, used US Census data from 2000 to compare the annual salaries of women between the ages of 40-45 who had professional degrees and full-time jobs. 

Those who gave birth to their first child at age 35 made more than $50,000 more per year than women who had their first child at 20, on average. But even waiting just those five years from 30 to 35 was associated with a difference of an extra $16,000 per year, on average. (It's impossible to tease out cause and effect with a study like this; the data show an intriguing correlation, not a smoking gun.) 

These higher earnings among those who delay having kids isn't just for women with professional degrees.

Women who had their first child between the ages of 21 and 33 earned 6% more for every year they waited to start a family, Amalia Miller, an economist at the University of Virginia, reports in a paper published in the Journal of Population Economics. If Miller's findings can be extended to women who had their first child at 35, that means a woman who waits five more years to start a family will be earning 30% more per year than if she started her family when she was 30, generally speaking. 

Women who wait to have kids make more money because they've built up experience and progressed up the ladder in their careers, Gregory told Business Insider. 

Besides higher salaries, women who wait until they're at least 35 to have kids generally have accrued experience and clout at work that helps them create what Gregory calls a "shadow benefits system" to supplement official benefits for parents (or lack thereof). They may have lots of stored up vacation time, or may be able to negotiate more flexible work schedules or the ability to work from home, while more junior colleagues might not. 

All this means waiting five years to start having kids can make a big difference for how much a woman earns in her career. Multiply that effect (and more) by all the women waiting even longer to start families, and the trend to delay parenthood becomes a really big deal. 

SEE ALSO: How having kids later is already reshaping our world in big ways

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NOW WATCH: The first computer programmer was a woman and the daughter of a famous poet

When former "Saturday Night Live" star and current "Brooklyn Nine-Nine" star Andy Samberg digs in on stupidity, he really digs in. Take, for example, his latest project: a fake HBO Sports documentary titled, "Seven Days in Hell." This is the movie's promo image, which speaks volumes unto itself:The "mockumentary" features two (fake) professional tennis players – Aaron Williams (Samberg) and Charles Poole ("Game of Thrones" star Kit Harington) – and focuses on the (fake) seven day match they had at Wimbledon 2001. The entire film is shot from the perspective of a serious HBO Sports documentary, with expert interviews from both HBO Sports interviewers and professional tennis players. (Serena Williams and John McEnroe are prominently featured).

Let's be clear right up front: "Seven Days in Hell" is an amazing movie, and by far the funniest film I've seen in 2015. You should watch it immediately. Today.

Here's a GIF of Andy Samberg's character Aaron Williams from his introduction video:

Right?

And things get much, much more ridiculous after that. Samberg's character is clearly modeled after tennis superstar Andre Agassi – here's hoping Agassi has a pretty serious sense of humor:

While Samberg plays the role of an even more insane Andre Agassi, "Game of Thrones" star Kit Harington plays his dim-witted upstart competition, Charles Poole, who unwittingly brings Samberg's character out of retirement.

Here's Harrington, as Poole, freaking out on an elliptical machine:

The entire faux-doc is littered with little flashes of brilliant absurdity like this.

Like so many Samberg productions, "Seven Days in Hell" feels like what would happen if you took a teenager's sense of humor, and applied professional production and an editor. Like "Zoolander" or "Wet Hot American Summer,""Seven Days in Hell" takes absurdity well beyond the rational limit; it asks viewers to not just accept its stupidity, but to revel in that stupidity. It expects the same level of careful attention to detail to its stupidity that it lavishes on itself.

Take, for instance, a two minute scene wherein the mockumentary devolves into various "experts" offering commentary on a Swedish courtroom sketch artist's influence on courtroom sketch art around the world. Yes, really.

I could keep going, but then I'd start spoiling the 42 minutes of juvenile comedy bliss that's waiting for you on HBO Go. Prepare yourself, and maybe use a sippy cup in case of spit takes.

SEE ALSO: Here's how 50 Cent spent his millions before filing for bankruptcy

AND: The best cosplay photos from San Diego Comic-Con 2015

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NOW WATCH: Get ready to root for the bad guys — your first look at 'Suicide Squad' is here

If a spacecraft fatally collides with speeding debris billions of miles into space, would anyone hear the crash?

No. But decades worth of science would be lost.

Such is the fear of NASA's New Horizons team as the space probe nears its closest approach to Pluto and its five (possibly more) moons.

As New Horizons speeds toward the icy planet — about 6,200 miles from the surface at about 31,000 miles per hour— it will be nearing the most perilous part of its journey yet.

"The most dangerous time for a collision is when you pass through the plane of Pluto's equator and when you pass all the other satellites," the mission's project scientist, Hal Weaver, told Wired. Satellites, in this use, means any rocky debris around the planet.

After an 18-month review that was published in 2013, NASA's New Horizons team identified the most likely thing that would derail the entire Pluto mission: dust and debris.

That doesn't sound like much of a threat, but when you consider that the spacecraft will be traveling at 31,000 miles per hour, even a blow from a particle as small as a rice grain could send the whole probe into a tumble.

And once the craft gets knocked off its course, Hersman told Wired, the entire vehicle could be destroyed — it has no recourse to get back on the right path.

When New Horizons launched back in 2006, only three of Pluto's five moons were known to exist. The Hubble Space Telescope found two of the three merely two and a half months before New Horizons launched. This presents a logistical challenge for the vulnerable craft. The more moons that are nearby, the more targets there are for space rocks originating from the nearby Kuiper Belt to smash.

Any smashing means the creation of even more space rocks. The bits of dirt and rock that ricochet off the moons as a result of space rock collisions will then be floating around — dangerously in New Horizon's path.

Alan Stern, principle investigator of the New Horizons team, isn't too worried. He told AFP that "there is a one in 10,000 chance that the spacecraft could be lost in a collision with debris around Pluto."

NASA announced on July 1 that, after 7 weeks of searching for anything that could come in the way of New Horizons' path — dust clouds, rings or any other obvious threats — the path seems to be mostly clear, as far as they could tell, and they made the decision for New Horizons to stay on its predetermined course.

Other than a momentary blunder on July 4 — in which the spacecraft lost communication with Earth for a frightening 90 minutes — the mission has had smooth sailing. But if this glitch happens again, mission scientist Andy Cheng told the Washington Post, the whole mission could be lost.

And Stern says that the mission is not completely out of the woods.

"While I don't lose sleep over this, the fact is, tomorrow evening is going to be a little bit of drama,"Stern told AFP. "Until we pass that point ... we won't really know with certainty that we cleared the system and that there were no debris strikes."

SEE ALSO: We're going to reach Pluto for the first time in history tomorrow — here's how to watch

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NOW WATCH: NASA captured this stunning time-lapse of a massive eruption on the sun

We won't be able to watch NASA's New Horizons spacecraft fly past Pluto in real time. But thanks to this awesome "Eyes on the Solar System" app developed by NASA, you can watch a simulation of the historic moment based on the New Horizons programmed flight plan.

Once you download the app and launch it you'll see a New Horizons feature in the top right corner:

In the live view, the main window shows the spacecraft, Pluto, Pluto's moon Charon, and few other objects farther out in the Kuiper belt. The right inset window shows which instruments on New Horizons are active. In the bottom left there's a countdown window that shows how many miles and hours to go until the spacecraft's closes approach to Pluto:

"The picture in picture view shows you where the spacecraft is looking and what its advanced instruments can see,"NASA explains. "You can use a 'live' mode to see what New Horizons is doing right now, or preview the flyby of the Pluto System."

The preview mode shows the whole flight path trajectory, complete with the latest images of Pluto and Charon. The NASA visualization team is updating them in the app as New Horizons continues to beam back more detailed images.

The flyby will happen at 7:49 a.m. EDT on July 14. NASA will start live streaming coverage at 7:30 a.m.

The morning countdown will not include any live footage because the spacecraft is too far away for any of our telescopes to spot. In fact we won't even know if the flyby was successful until around 9 p.m. EDT Tuesday night. New Horizons will be too busy gathering data to touch base with mission control immediately, and the signal will take hours to get all the way back to Earth.

For now you can watch what the last eight hours of New Horizon's final approach will look like sped up into this one-minute video using the app:

SEE ALSO: 11 mind-blowing facts about NASA's epic nuclear-powered mission to Pluto

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