Looks good enough to eat
If you're having trouble trying to get your child to eat better, try changing the presentation of the food. A recent Cornell University study published in Acta Paediatrica found that children find colourful food more appealing - specifically plates of food with seven different items and six different colours. (Adults tend to prefer plates with only three items and three colours.) In the study, 23 pre-teen children and 46 adults were shown full-sized photos of 48 different combinations of food on plates that varied by number of items, placement of entree and organisation of the food. The children also preferred their entrees placed in front of the plate and with figurative designs.
Take a hike for charity
Positively speaking
We all have bad days. But it seems if you speak English, you're more inclined to talk positively because the language is inherently biased towards optimism, according to University of Vermont researchers. In their new study, they gathered billions of words from four sources: 20 years of The New York Times, the Google Books Library Project, Twitter and half a century of music lyrics. Using a service from Amazon called Mechanical Turk, volunteers rated, from one to nine, their sense of 'happiness' given by 10,222 of the most common words gathered. Averaging their scores, the volunteers rated, for example, 'laughter' at 8.50, 'food' at 7.44, 'truck' at 5.48, 'greed' at 3.06 and 'terrorist' at 1.30. 'We looked at the top 5,000 words in each, in terms of frequency, and in all of those words you see a preponderance of happier words,' says Peter Dodds, an applied mathematician.