Good morning, John. So there's a new study out in the Journal of Psychoneuroendocrinology that I know you're gonna be super excited about. Basically, they tested young people's bedtime cortisol levels. Cortisol is a stress hormone. The amount of cortisol in your blood goes up when you're more stressed out, and it has all kinds of effects on your physiology, your psychology, and your behavior. Physiological effects can include everything from, like, more acne, which is a bummer, to heart disease and death. Correlations.  It just increases your chances of death. Aggression, depression, anxiety, difficulty staying focused, difficulty making decisions. Some people actually make fewer decisions, like they'll avoid decisions when they have a lot of stress, and others make worse, more impulsive, less rational decisions. So that's interesting. Some people when they're stressed avoid the source of the stress. Others seek out more of it. If you listen to the podcast I do with my wife, Delete This, you know that Catherine and I opposite sides of that spectrum. Anyway, this study, not a super surprising, but they found that bedtime levels of cortisol increased after the election for people who didn't vote for Donald Trump, specifically young people, and that level went up more if you were a woman or from what they called non-dominant social groups. So LGBT people, people of color, that kind of thing. I don't know if I need to bring this up, but the last year has sort of felt like just a constant barrage of upsetting or confusing news. Every week it seems like there's a new scandal, a new fear, a new tragedy, and all of these things are problems that need to be faced, but if there is no respite from the stress, we will make worse decisions. We will not be as healthy as we could be. We will not be as productive as we could be. I don't want you to think that I'm not okay. I'm okay. But I have been looking for things to provide me with respite. I don't actually definitely know what the word respite means, so let's look that up. A short period of rest or relief from something difficult or unpleasant. Yes! So I asked Twitter and Facebook if there were some things that I may be missing out on that are great. And here's a list of some sources of respite from other people and from my own brain, starting off with Space Opera by Catherine Valenti. Finally, I feel like somebody had the chops and the guts to not just understand the genius of Douglas Adams, but to maybe even move beyond it in some ways. You want a book about glam rock in space? It's happening. The horns of bovids. There are 143 different species of bovids, which include cows, sheep, goats, antelopes, and some other good stuff, and they have great horns. The marvellous Mrs. Maisel, which is currently a season of eight episodes on Amazon Prime written by the creator, the Gimler Girls, and it makes me so happy. Hello for the Magic Tavern is a podcast produced by a guy who fell into a portal behind a Burger King and interviews citizens of the magical land of Foon, and it is always a wonderful break from all this earth stuff. Janet from The Good Place. I mean, yeah, the whole show, but mostly Janet. Whenever I think about that character, I smile. This collaboration we did on Eons discussing the first-ever organism. With help from PBS FaceTime, and It's Okay to Be Smart, we got as close to the bottom of this ultimate question of where life began as we could get. Elle Mills, always. Our new show, Nature League, which explores biology, all biology, everywhere with my friend Britt, and I'm just learning and relaxing and getting my curiosity satisfied. This long, long man advertisement for some kind of weird candy in Japan. It's good. Ask a mortician, a YouTube channel about what happens to people's parts after they die, from a person who does that professionally. Janelle Monet. I feel like I'm late to this party, but every time I listen to her music, I feel better. Abby Normans let me google that podcast, which covers everything from why we have names to crossword puzzles to the Titanic, and it's always got every morning new, good information for me, and I'm always happy to have it. Orla Gartland, who's doing the singer-songwriter thing so good, and I'm just so happy her music is in the world. And finally, this three-second-long video of my baby's butt. John, I hope that this list provides you and some other people with some respite. And I'll see you on Tuesday. And now it's time for the Endscreen God to write me an Endscreen song. This one's not that good.


World Kidney Day is an annual event organized by the International Society of Nephrology, ISN, and the International Federation of Kidney Foundations, IFKF, to raise awareness of kidney health issues around the globe. This year's theme is renal disease and children and will take place on March 10. This article was authored by Hamid Nasseri and Mahmoud Rafienko P.I.


Conversion, also known as zero derivation, is the type of word formation in which the category and the function of a word change without any reduction. Bill Waterson coined the phrase, verbing weird's language in his daily comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes. This quote demonstrates the conversion of the noun, verb, and the adjective, weird. The most productive conversion process in the English language is noun to verb, or verbification. Some examples are as follows. I can send someone an email, but I can also email someone. I can search Google, or I can Google something. And instead of adding you as a friend, I can friend you. Another productive process in English is verb to noun, or nominalization.  I can spy on someone, and I am therefore a spy. Less common forms are the nominalization of phrasal verbs, the conversion of verbs to adjectives, and even forms where function words are converted to nouns. Conversion is present in other languages, but it is not deemed zero derivation as they involve changes in the word form. In Esperanto, for example, any word can be changed into a verb by altering its ending or adding suffixes. And in Hebrew, and other Semitic languages, the internal vowels are changed. And with that, I think you'll all agree that verbing does indeed weird language.