While stress is an unfortunate and unhealthy part of modern life, going on a destructive rampage isn’t usually a socially acceptable way of dealing with it. Enter the Anger Room, an inconspicuous storefront in a Dallas strip mall where fed-up Americans can act out.

Inside, proprietor and founder Donna Alexander and her staff offer up rooms of stuff — TVs, office furniture, glassware — for patrons to smash. 

“Stuff that you can’t do to other people, you can do here,” one customer says. “I can’t afford going to the psychiatrist, but I can afford this.” 

The ‘Anger Room’: The new way to blow off steam after work

Meet Rep. Bob Dold, the Republican trying to save Planned Parenthood. The Illinois politician wants to keep taxpayer dollars trickling to the women’s health organization the GOP loves to hate. He’s introduced a bill that would prevent agencies and governments from denying it family-planning dollars just because it offers abortion services. 

Who is this guy, and will lawmakers approve his bill? 

Yogurt: The secret to male sexual prowess

Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were using mice to study how eating yogurt affects weight gain when they noticed something strange.

“You know when someone’s at the top of their game, and they carry themselves differently?” explained one researcher. “Well, imagine that in a mouse.”

Not only were yogurt-fed rodents noticeably slimmer than their peers, but the males exhibited a distinct sexual “swagger,” complete with shinier fur and more pronounced… features

The 13-year-old CEO who invented a cure for hiccups

Mallory Kievman is CEO and founder of a company that might just cure one of the world’s oldest and most annoying maladies, the hiccups. The 13-year-old is preparing to launch her product, the Hiccupop, a hiccup-stopping lollipop of her own invention.

After testing about 100 folk remedies, Kievman picked three of her favorites — sugar, apple cider vinegar, and lollipops — and combined them. I’m still “tweaking the taste,” she tells The New York Times, but the combination of ingredients “triggers a set of nerves in your throat and mouth that are responsible for the hiccup reflex arc… It basically over-stimulates those nerves and cancels out the message to hiccup.”

She has a patent pending, financial backers, and a team of business consultants (in training). Here’s her story

A new report estimates the national cost of accommodating obese citizens at $190 billion a year.

Included in that figure: hospitals widening bathroom stalls, stadiums installing larger seats, the Federal Transit Administration testing new steering and breaks on mass transit systems, and thousands of dollars per person in medical expenditures. Here’s a look at some unexpected financial costs of obesity, by the numbers:

35.7 — Percentage of U.S. adults considered obese

400 — The new minimum seat threshold, in pounds, for subway trains in New York

9.4 — Extra sick days obese women take every year compared to their coworkers

$3,792 — Annual cost to workplaces due to lost productivity for every obese male worker

$5 billion — Extra annual cost of gasoline required to fly overweight passengers on airplanes

More numbers

Many women may be putting too much faith in birth control pills and condoms. Nearly half of the women questioned in a new study, published in theAmerican Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, thought these methods were better at preventing pregnancy than they really are. Just how far off were they? Here, a look at misconceptions about contraceptives, by the numbers:

9 
Annual pregnancy rate for women who take birth control pills, but fail to take them every day as directed

Less than 1
Annual pregnancy rate for women who take the pill as directed

18 to 21
Annual pregnancy rate for women who use condoms

45
Percentage of women in the new study who overestimated the effectiveness of the pill and condoms

0.8 
Percentage of women using an IUD who have an unplanned pregnancy in a given year

0.05
Percentage who have an unplanned pregnancy within a year despite the use of a contraceptive implant 

6
High-end estimate, in percent, of women in the U.S. who use either an IUD or a contraceptive implant, the most effective birth-control methods

71
Percentage of the 4,144 St. Louis-area women in the study who said they would have chosen an IUD or implant if they had received adequate counseling on their options

50
Rough monthly maximum cost, in dollars, of birth control pills

800
Up-front cost, in dollars, of an IUD, which should remain effective for 10 years

400 to 800
Cost range, in dollars, for an Implanon contraceptive implant

The grocery cart that suggests better food choices

The Lambet Shopping Trolley Handle is equipped with a barcode sensor and can clip onto any cart. It uses a 16-LED multicolor display to give would-be buyers a quick idea of the product they’re buying, including allergen information and calories. ”One color pattern might indicate that a product is organic, and another might tell you if it’s local” by flashing the words low, medium, or high, to indicate the food miles the product traveled to get to your store, says Ariel Schwartz at Fast Co. Exist.

Users can compare two competing products with the scanner, which tells you which item is the better buy with a smiley face, and steers you away from less healthy options with a neutral or frowny face. The system is “appealing because of its simplicity,” says Walter Frick at BostInno.

Keep reading

Bullying might make school kids old before their time… literally. In a new study published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, scientists say that exposure to violence actually causes cells in the bodies of young victims to age at a faster rate than those of their peers, which could have a profound effect on their health years down the road. 

Scientists have finally figured out brain freeze

Using diagnostic imaging to monitor blood flow in subjects’ heads, researchers had 13 healthy participants sip ice water (sadly, not ice cream) through a straw pressed against the upper palate. Subjects were told to raise their hands when the headache hit, and then raised them again when the pain went away. 

They hope to use their findings to help treat migraines

How TV shows deal with abortion: A timeline

It’s been 40 years since Bea Arthur’s outspoken liberal Maude Findlay was the first television character to have an abortion in a 1972 episode of Maude, but televising the divisive issue still courts controversy. On Sunday night’s episode of Girls, Jemima Kirke’s free-spirited global nomad made an abortion appointment, but conflicted feelings kept her from showing up for it. Indeed, while the hot-button issue surfaces frequently on TV these days, says Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon, characters rarely go through with abortions.

“Four decades after Roe v. Wade, are we ever going to able to talk about abortion on television and have more to say than, ‘Maude had one?’”

Here, a history of how TV series have dealt with the issue, from Maude to Girls