Animal studies confirm that the relief some of us get from eating sugar is not just psychological—it is an actual brain-chemistry reaction. In one experiment, Blass and colleagues studied two groups of baby mice who were separated from their mothers and left alone for six minutes. Their resulting “isolation distress” was considered to be a kind of animal equivalent to our human version of depression. The depressed mice who were given sugar water cried only seventy-five times during their isolation—as compared to the more than three hundred cries that came from the mice left 

alone with no sweet treat to alleviate their emotional pain. Apparently, the young mice were literally “medicating” their depression with sugar. 

        Why did sugar have this remarkable effect? Researchers thought that perhaps the sweet food stimulated the release of extra beta-endorphin molecules. Since these molecules help us cope with physical and emotional pain, the sugar had a literally soothing effect. Researchers confirmed their theory by giving both groups of mice Naltrexone, a drug that blocks beta-endorphin receptors. If you take Naltrexone, it does not matter how many beta-endorphins you release—you will not get any relief from pain. Sure enough, when the sugar-fed mice were given Naltrexone, they lost all interest in the sweet substance, suggesting that their only reason for their sweet tooth had been to stimulate the release of beta-endorphins. 

        Numbed by Naltrexone, both groups of mice cried equally often. The poor baby mice were still depressed—but now even sugar could not make them feel better. 

The texture and color of a stone used in the dolmen often bespeak a good knowledge of local geology.Priest-architects would have taken the best that was available in the area. In chalky earth at Bougon, the dolmen’s pillars match one another and are made of the local rock. The covering slabs, however, are of a different texture. One is a 32-ton block of Bathonian flint from an outcropping two and a half miles away, and the other is a fossiliferous coralline massif weighing 90 tons that was excavated at a distance of several hundred yards.

   Children who experience social anxiety—feeling discomfort or distress in social situations—or who are socially incompetent are particularly at risk for developing dependence on electronic media. This is true whether the preferred agent be the Internet, video games, or a smartphone. The more a child hides behind a screen, the more socially awkward he or she becomes, creating a self-perpetuating cycle. In contrast, a shy child who continually works at overcoming social anxiety is likely to overcome it. In the past, the strong desire to belong to a social group during adolescence helped override resistance to social interaction, which would lessen over time simply due to practice. Nowadays, socially anxious or awkward children and teens aren’t forced to practice face-to-face and eye-to-eye interaction because some of their social needs are met online. Thus, in socially anxious children, the ability to tolerate the physical presence of others never builds, and “walls”are erected instead to keep the child feeling safe. An adolescent with somewhat poor social skills in high school can easily become reclusive as a young adult, spending more and more hours online and less and less time interacting in real life. This pattern makes it increasingly harder to make and keep friends. Relationship problems show up at home, too; research indicates that the more time a child spends using the Internet, the less healthy the parent-child relationship becomes. Thus, social incompetence and screen-time represent another bidirectional relationship.

        A Tokyo-bound flight made a U-turn while flying over the Pacific Ocean and returned to Los Angeles because one passenger, for reasons still unclear, had boarded the wrong flight. All Nippon Airways Flight 175 left the Los Angeles International Airport at about 11:30 a.m. Tuesday Pacific Standard Time, spent about eight hours in the air and landed back in California just after 7:30 p.m., majorly inconveniencing its passengers, including model Chrissy Teigen, who live-tweeted the “flight to nowhere” to her 9.2 million followers. Teigen, who was traveling with her husband John Legend, wrote on Twitter that the plane was turned around about four hours into the flight. The Twitter world watched in amusement as Teigen kept her followers updated on the ordeal, which apparently involved an hours-long wait at the airport, unanswered questions, some police presence and a microwaveable Ramen meal.

        The incident involved two brothers, one of whom was an authorized All Nippon Airways, or ANA, passenger while the other had a United Airlines ticket, Transportation Security Administration spokesman Mike England said.

        The brothers, who were not identified, went through security screening without incident and had valid passports and boarding passes. Both were headed to Tokyo and were scheduled to leave around the same time. Both ended up on the ANA flight even though only one of them was an authorized passenger. It remains unclear how that happened. The airline said the decision to turn around was part of a security procedure.

        Weather concerns, mechanical problems, medical issues and terrorist threats are among the common reasons for diverting a plane. Others are unusual, but not unheard of.

        In 2015, for example, a British Airways flight flew back to Heathrow Airport just 30 minutes into the seven-hour flight to Dubai because of an overwhelming odor coming from the lavatory. A similar incident happened earlier this year, when a SpiceJet flight headed to New Delhi was diverted because of a “very foul smell” coming from the lavatory.