shows just how much protection people have against the Omicron variant of COVID-19 at each vaccine dose interval. Though there are more tools to deal with the COVID-19 spike now, Omicron has adeptly sidestepped vaccines and made cloth face masks a nearly useless tool of yester-year. (Seriously, upgrade your masks, people.) But it’s clear that a COVID-19 vaccine is still a powerful tool at preventing hospitalization and serious illness in vaccinated people....

MagnifyMoney wanted to find out how big of an impact child care issues have on American parents. So, using several metrics, they investigated how much money in wages Americans lose each week due to complications with securing child care. “Lost hours were calculated with U.S. Census Bureau microdata from the March 2021 Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC) of the Current Population Survey (CPS), as well as microdata average monthly results (July 2021 to June 2022) from the Basic Monthly CPS,” MagnifyMoney reports....

“I’ve got great people in my life who’ve known me my whole life through the ups and downs,” he says. “I’m lucky I have fostered relationships with people who call me on my shit.” Pratt would be well within his right to have some shit. He is, 39, famous, and rich. He is Star-Lord. He’s engaged to a Kennedy progeny. He’s a Lego. Some of his friends are velociraptors. But he’ll happily record a video for your kid, telling him to listen to clean up his Legos (thanks Chris) and in the age of micromanaged celebrities, he handles all his own social media, which, in Pratt’s case, means offering the people some hot takes on sheep farming and, yes, fatherhood....

Because you got to start that STEM training early, Circuit Cubes are “electronic building blocks that add sound, motion, light, and sensors to any creation or LEGO project.” They’re transparent so kids can see and learn about circuitry, and they connect using magnets; which means not only can they be stacked in any direction, but they can also be attached to non-LEGO toys (and common household items like toilet paper tubes and egg cartons)....

Having already mastered the art of creating miniature working replicas of iconic amusement rides, the good folks at CoasterDynamix are on to a new challenge: turning those models into LEGO-compatible, brick-based construction toys. First up, Coney Island’s famous Cyclone. The 1,000-piece kit (targeted at ages 14+) includes the track, the train, and a hand-crank chain lift to make that sucker move (although it works with Lego Power Functions like motors and batteries too, if your fingers get tired)....

Yes, but, they’re not exactly accepted by science — or society. Some of them are backed by limited evidence; others are just bizarre; none are part of the blanket CDC recommendations (although Anthony Fauci has personally endorsed the first). You probably don’t need them for a trip to the grocery store, but if you want that extra sense of security or have to go into a high-risk environment, they can help....

The good (?) news is that there is no evidence that wearing a surgical mask is necessary for healthy people. “Right now, there’s no evidence that [wearing face masks] is going to help prevent that infection,” says Dr. Charles Chiu, a professor of laboratory medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. “I would not recommend that someone in the US who does not have direct exposure did not recently travel to China…or in general, that you go buy a face mask....

Costco’s giant bear probably the only stuffed animal famous enough to get its very own Wikipedia page, Instagram, and Facebook profile. Part of that might be the fact that it’s available around the globe. Inside of Costco Japan, a subsidiary of Costco US, hundreds of Japanese fans have stopped by to grab a selfie with the giant bear. While no one knows exactly how much the bear will be sold for once it makes its comeback, Costco sold a 4-foot version of the bear for $24....

Although Mike wasn’t much of a drug user, he had experimented with MDMA a few times since college, mostly with an ex-girlfriend. For the most part, he’d found it enjoyable: “Lots of cigarettes, lots of pot, lots of touching one another, lots of warm showers.” But his wife had never done MDMA before, and Mike was fairly certain she wouldn’t want to try it. So he started rolling with another woman, which eventually led to them fooling around and having sex on MDMA....

The agency approved the use of remdesivir, also called Veklury, for kids who test positive for COVID-19. The medication can be used in kids as young as 28-days-old and who weigh at least three kilograms (about seven pounds). The medication is approved for use in kids who are hospitalized, as well as those who are not hospitalized, but are at risk of the disease potentially progressing to a severe condition, the FDA states....

“All my kids are grown now. But I would go back to those days in a second,” Trejo tells me. “I have a tattoo on my back of my daughter and my sons when they were babies. And they’re all running on the beach. I remember that day. I picked them up and I was supposed to take them to school and it was one of these beautiful California days....

Given the Rand survey data, it will likely not come to a surprise to most working men and women that one in four feel they have too little time to do the work they’ve been assigned. That translates into about half of the AWCS respondents reporting that they take work home at least some of the time in order to meet employer demands and tight deadlines. Another upshot of the amount of work and the lack of time?...

The Space Isn’t Kid Friendly Take a look around. Do you see things that don’t belong? Does it look like a warm, friendly place for kids? Are there sharp edges? No smoke detectors? Is the place dirty? Then you might want to reconsider. If you were to see that the sockets were uncovered or the teacher’s pocketbook is out where a child can get to it,” says Marisel Morales, who has worked in daycare for nearly 30 years....

The lunch box’s toothy head is made of food/drink-safe plastic, measures 5.3-inches by 6.2-inches by 9-inches, and features a moveable jaw to keep those carrot sticks and Fruit Roll-Ups safe. The food (or LEGOs if you want to use it to tote toys instead) is also well-protected thanks to two gleaming rows of (hopefully not) razor-sharp teeth and a muzzle carrying strap. Dino Case weighs about a pound ⏤ in case your kid isn’t working out yet ⏤ and is recommended for ages 3 and up....

The New York Times reports that, after a police raid where 3,000 fossils were seized in a Brazilian port, one particularly important finding was “the most complete fossil of a species of a pterosaur ever found, providing new details about how the flying reptile might have looked and behaved some 110 million years ago.” And it’s really, really cool. The fossils were found in 2013, but a study on the findings was published recently in PLOS ONE....

13Zapped (2014) In this movie, Zendaya stars as a 16-year-old teen who named Zoey moves in with her mom and her new husband and his four sons. They’re a mess, she hates them, and on top of that, she has to go to a new school! Adjusting to her new life is tough and after a freak accident occurs where Zendaya’s phone ends up being able to control boy’s brains and uses it to her advantage....

The harsh truth is that a Disney World vacation requires thoughtful planning, months of preparation, and a good amount of hustle. Otherwise, the experience will be a mess of long lines, expensive food, and exhaustion. But it doesn’t have to be that way. So, start by managing expectations. Here’s what you need to know. Harsh Truth No. 1: Planning a Disney World Vacation Takes Months It’s not an exaggeration to say that planning a trip to Disney World takes months....

“Your father/mother is a deadbeat.” Saying anything bad about your spouse, whether it’s running down the father or saying mom is greedy, is an invitation to problems, as it puts the children right in the middle. “Children are half of each parent,” says Dr. Nancy Mramor, a health, media and educational/child psychologist, and former trainer for parents in Pittsburgh’s Divorce Education program. “So when the parent is berated, the child feels berated, too....

I’m a divorced dad still trying to make the holidays work and figure out what the hell grandparent visitation rights mean. We divorced in no small part due to my in-laws. They hated me. They hate me. They thought I was, to quote drunk Grandpa at Thanksgiving, “a cuck dad raising a pussy.” Needless to say, I was very protective of my five-year-old boy and didn’t want them having him for a full week every summer at their seriously hands-off grandparenting pad....

The study, which they graciously abbreviated from “Better Identification of Germs-Longitudinal Viral Epidemiology” to “BIG-LoVE,” was published to minimal acclaim in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases in 2015. What with the small sample size, it wasn’t big news despite marking the first deployment of a now-commonplace virus-detecting tool. But the implications were huge. Here was something very close to confirmation of a suspicion long held by parents: What grows up must come down with highly transmissible infections....