You get tickets to visit the local natural history museum, and you’re psyched to spend an afternoon learning about ancient artwork, the evolution of local species, and seeing lots and lots of dinosaur bones. However, after 30 minutes, you start to yawn, look for a bench to sit on, and realize you’re not exactly stoked to walk through the next long corridor to see the buffalo exhibit.

What happened? Are you really just fooling yourself when you say you’re into an afternoon of culture? No, not at all. The reason you got exhausted so quickly was first identified 110 years ago by Benjamin Ives Gilman, secretary of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, who called it “museum fatigue,” and it’s a real phenomenon. Gilman outlined it in a paper for The Scientific Monthly.

What is “museum fatigue”?

“‘Museum fatigue’ is an admitted evil, hitherto tacitly accepted as admitting only relief. May not a study of how it comes about suggest some means of prevention?” Gilman wrote. He introduced the topic in The Scientific Monthly through a series of photographs showing how people had to stand in uncomfortable positions to study artwork.

Why a trip to the museum is so exhausting

Even though a stroll through an art museum seems like a great way to relax on a weekend, it’s actually a physically and mentally exhausting experience. 

1. Displays aren’t at eye level

Since Gilman’s original piece, curators have worked to place more exhibits at eye level for the average person. However, museums have become increasingly immersive, and patrons are often required to crane their necks upward to see bones suspended from the ceiling or lean in close to ancient hieroglyphs to see the details. This can create physical strain throughout the body.

2. Mental fatigue sets in quickly

A museum can be mentally draining because your brain, which uses up to 20% of the body’s metabolic energy, is busy soaking in new information. After 30 minutes, the brain can enter cognitive overload, where taking in new information becomes increasingly difficult. It’s like sitting through a college lecture where, toward the end, you just can’t retain any new information.

If you walk into a room of art from a particular era, you may see the same themes repeated over and over again, whether it’s another depiction of war or another ancient statue of a woman carrying a large pot of water. After a while, it becomes harder to pay attention.

Museums are often dimly lit to help create a relaxing atmosphere and preserve the artwork. However, this lack of exposure to natural light can make people feel sleepy.

Museum floors are designed to handle thousands of people walking through every day, so they are often made of marble, polished concrete, or dense hardwood. There is little to no shock absorption on these surfaces, so throughout your visit, your body receives countless micro-jolts through your skeletal system. After half an hour or so, this can turn walking through a cavernous museum into a slog.

Next time you plan to visit a museum, think of it as an intense mental and physical experience and plan your day accordingly. Understand that you may need to take a few breaks or split the experience into multiple visits to get the most out of it. Also, wear comfy shoes.

While a bottle of bubbles might seem out of place in a hospital setting, you might be surprised to learn that, for thousands of children around the world born with cleft lip and palate, they can be a helpful tool in comprehensive cleft care. Lilia, who was born with cleft lip and palate in 2020, is one of the many patients who received this care. 

As a toddler, Lilia underwent two surgeries to treat cleft lip and palate with Operation Smile’s surgical program in Puebla, Mexico. Because of Operation Smile’s comprehensive care, it wasn’t long before her personality transformed: Lilia went from a quiet and withdrawn toddler to an exuberant, curious explorer, babbling, expressing herself with a variety of sounds, and engaging with others like any child her age. 

Lilia is now a healthy five-year-old, with the same cheerful attitude and boundless energy. Her progress is the result of care at every level, from surgery to speech therapy to ongoing support at home—but it’s also evidence that small, sustained interventions throughout it all can make a meaningful difference. 

Cleft Conditions: A Global Problem

Since 1982, Operation Smile has provided cleft lip and cleft palate surgeries to more than 500,000 patients worldwide with the help of generous volunteers and donors. Cleft conditions are congenital conditions, meaning they are present at birth. With cleft lip and palate, the lip or the roof of the mouth do not form fully during fetal development. Cleft conditions put children at risk for malnutrition and poor weight gain, since their facial structure can make feeding challenging. But cleft conditions can have an enormous social impact as well: Common difficulties with speech can leave kids socially isolated and unable to meet the same developmental milestones as their peers. 

Surgery is a vital step in treating cleft conditions, but it’s also just one part of a much larger solution. Organizations like Operation Smile emphasize the importance of multi-disciplinary teams that provide comprehensive, long-term care to patients across many years. This approach, which includes oral care, speech therapy, nutritional support, and psychosocial care, not only aids in physical recovery from surgery but also helps children develop the skills and confidence to eat easily, speak clearly, and engage in everyday life. This ensures that each patient receives the full range of support they need to thrive. 

A Playful (and Powerful) Solution

Throughout a patient’s care, simple tools like bubbles can play a meaningful role from start to finish. 

Immediately before surgery, children are often in a new and unfamiliar environment far from home, some of them experiencing a hospital setting for the first time. When care providers or loved ones blow bubbles, it’s a simple yet effective technique: Not only are the children soothed and distracted, the bubbles also help create a sense of joy and playfulness that eases their anxiety. 

In speech therapy, bubbles can take on an even more important role. Blowing bubbles requires controlled airflow, as well as the ability to form a rounded “O” shape with the lips, which are skills that children with cleft conditions may struggle to develop. Practicing these skills with bubbles allows children to gently strengthen their facial muscles, improve breath control, and support the motor skills needed for speech development. Beyond that, blowing bubbles can help kids connect with their parents or providers in a way that’s playful, comforting, and accessible even for very young patients. 

Finally, bubbles often follow patients with cleft conditions home in the “smile bags” that each patient receives when the surgical procedure is finished. Smile bags, which help continue speech therapy outside of the hospital setting, can contain language enrichment booklets, a mirror, oxygen tubing, and bubbles. While regular practice with motor skills can help with physical recovery, small acts of play help as well, giving kids space to simply enjoy themselves and join in on what peers are able to do.

Bubbles at Home and Beyond

Today, because of Operation Smile’s dedication to comprehensive cleft care, Lilia is now able to make friends and speak clearly, all things that could have been difficult or impossible before. Instead of a childhood defined by limitation, Lilia—and others around the world—can look forward to a childhood filled with joy, learning, discovery, friends, and new possibilities.  

CTA: Lilia’s life was changed for the better with the care she received through Operation Smile. Find out how you can make an impact in other children’s lives by visiting operationsmile.org today. 

An itch on the tip of your nose can feel different from one on your rear end—and possibly a bit more painful. Why is that? Shouldn’t your body treat an itch like an itch, no matter where it pops up?

According to a new study from North Carolina State University, your body treats itches on your face much differently than it treats them on the rest of your body.

The study found that your body sends itch signals from the face and the rest of the body along different routes to your brain, where they are processed. It’s as if your body has two different “itch phone lines” communicating with the brain—one from the face and another from the rest of the body.

Itches travel to your brain differently throughout the body

An itch on your arm starts with irritation of the skin—perhaps from dryness—then travels through the dorsal root ganglia, the spinal cord, and finally to the brain. An itch on your face goes from the spot of irritation to a different system called the trigeminal ganglia, and then to the brain.

Here’s the straight science:

“You can think of itch being transmitted from the skin to the brain as a series of switches that get flipped,” Santosh Mishra, associate professor of molecular biomedical sciences at NC State, said in a statement. 

“On the body, itch signals go from neuronal projections in the skin through the dorsal root ganglia (DRG) – which are clusters of sensory cells located at the root of the spinal nerves – then to the spinal cord. But on the face and head, those signals travel to the trigeminal ganglia (TG) – which are clusters of sensory cells located in a small structure below the brain where it sits atop the skull,” Mishra added.

Your body sends mixed signals to your face

The researchers also discovered why an itch on your face may feel different from one on your torso. Studies showed that when histamine, an itch-inducing substance, was applied to the neck and cheek, the cheek itched less than the neck. Researchers initially assumed this was because there are fewer nerves in the cheek, but they were wrong: the cheek actually has far more. Instead, the face sends itch and pain signals simultaneously, and pain often overrides the sensation of itching. In the rest of the body, those signals are separated. That’s why an itch on your face feels different and may even be more painful than one on your arm.

Now that we know why an itch on your cheek feels different from one on your stomach, researchers can work on therapies that better address skin irritation on different parts of the body. One day, you may have a separate cream for a facial itch and another for one on your torso—not because of marketing, but because of real science.

“Understanding how itch perception in the face differs from itch perception in the body could give us better molecular targets for future therapies,” Mishra said.

Which lane do you choose at the grocery store?

To your left, the self-checkout area: a collection of blinking, beeping, whirring, computer-speaking machines with bright LED screens and audible prompts to “please select a payment type.” To your right, a single lane with a human cashier…and a line that snakes into the next aisle and out of sight.

You look down. You have six things; the math is obvious. The kiosks will be faster.

But somehow, you and your little basket find yourselves at the back of that winding line.

What’s going on here? If you have ever steered your cart away from self-checkout, even when it is the faster, more efficient option, you are not alone. It may seem like a simple preference on paper: You’re either a “kiosk person” or a “not-kiosk person.” Optimized or old-school. But for many shoppers, that choice is rooted in a human desire for connection and emotional safety, and a small, stubborn refusal to do more work under cameras.

A ritual quietly disappears

Within a single generation, grocery shopping moved from “you hand your stuff to a person” to “you become the person.” For most of the 20th century, buying groceries meant interacting with at least one other human: You chose the lane, loaded items onto the belt, and handed your entire life—cloves of garlic, wine that costs $2, strawberry ice cream, tissues infused with lotion and  Vicks VapoRub—to another person. They scanned, bagged, and told you, “Have a good night.”

Today, 40% of checkout lanes at major U.S. grocery chains are self-checkout. They are everywhere: In 2026, 96% of grocery stores in the U.S. offered self-checkout technology, while 86% of consumers claim to use it. You scan. You bag. You look up codes for organic green onions. You do all this on camera, with a disembodied voice ready to tell you about an “unexpected item in the bagging area.”

There was a time when a “full-service checkout” meant that someone else—a trained professional—handled everything. They asked about your day, made sure that egg cartons never wound up at the bottom of your bag, and sometimes carried everything out to your car. It felt like being taken care of.

Self-checkout machines didn’t just replace a series of tasks. They erased the human at the end of a grocery trip.

The importance of “weak ties”

So, you avoid self-checkout lines. Psychologists say a few different things are going on here.

Researchers use the term “weak ties” for the small, casual relationships we maintain with people we don’t know well: the kind cashier who always smiles, the guy behind the fish counter who saves his best salmon for you, and the bus driver who recognizes your face even if they don’t know your name.

Brief, ordinary, easy to overlook—and, for many people, irreplaceable. Toni Antonucci, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, explained the significance to the Daily Mail: Weak ties are “somebody who makes you feel important in their world—somebody who makes you feel human.”

When self-checkout replaces the cashier, it eliminates one of the last reliably recurring weak-tie interactions in many people’s daily lives. 

Studies on social connectedness show that these fleeting moments play an important role in our day-to-day lives and measurably improve our mood and sense of belonging, particularly for people who otherwise move through their days in relative isolation.

Imagine the person who works from home or whose apartment falls quiet by 9 a.m. When that cashier remembers something they mentioned weeks ago, they experience the “weak-tie connection.” It’s not friendship. But on certain days, it’s the only exchange that reminds them they exist outside their apartment. It’s a microdose of belonging: proof that they still live in the minds of others.

When habits don’t meet expectations

Researchers who study checkout behavior note that many shoppers—particularly older ones—carry a strong expectation that being served by a person is simply part of what it means to be a customer. It is not entitlement in the pejorative........

© Upworthy