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A New York City gym has a new high-intensity class that looks like an arcade

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New York City gym Asphalt Green has a new high-intensity, circuit-based class that looks more like an arcade than a gym. The gym has a fully interactive workout space for the class, with floors and walls that respond to touch.

Participants have to react to unpredictable LED light cues, which trains reflexes and muscle memory, in addition to generating short bursts of intense exercise. People can burn up to 1,000 calories in a 45-minutes class.

Story by Lisa Ryan and editing by Stephen Parkhurst

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Shakespeare died 400 years ago today — here are 21 everyday phrases he coined

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Shakespeare

William Shakespeare wrote a lot of great plays, but he also coined and popularized a lot of words and phrases that we still use to this day.

We put together a list of our 21 favorites. Check them out:

"Puking"

"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms. ..."

How Shakespeare uses it: "Puking" was first recorded in Shakespeare's "As You Like It." It was likely an English imitation of the German word "spucken," which means to spit, according to Dictionary.com.

Modern definition: A synonym for the verb "to vomit."

Source: "As You Like It," Act 2, Scene 7



"Vanish into thin air"

"Then put up your pipes in your bag, for I'll away. Go; vanish into air; away!" (Othello)

How Shakespeare uses it: The Clown says this to the musicians in "Othello" to make them go away.

But some have also suggested that there is a darker underlying meaning. Act 3 in Othello is the final act that suggests that all of this might have a happy ending. It gets pretty dark starting in Act 4. So the Clown might be symbolically asking musicians and all happy things to "vanish into thin air" because there's no more room for them in the play.

A similar phrase is also found in "The Tempest."

Modern definition: To disappear without a trace.

Sources: "Othello," Act 3, Scene 1, "The Tempest," Act 4, Scene 1



"There's a method to my madness"

"Though this be madness, yet there is method in 't. Will you walk out of the air, my lord?"

How Shakespeare uses it: Polonius says it in "Hamlet," basically suggesting that there is reason behind apparent chaos.

Modern definition: The meaning is the same nowadays, although the language is a bit updated into modern terms. It is also a Bee Gees song.

Source: "Hamlet," Act 2, Scene 2



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This tiny clothing item can solve every man's worst summer footwear issue

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Sperry

Summer is a time for going sockless. 

Sperry's, moccasins, and even your trusty white plimsolls all call for wearing shoes without socks in summer — a look that's supposed to be effortless.

But anyone who has ever tried to pull it off knows that going sockless comes with a steep cost. 

Yep, we're talking about feet stink.

Walking around in canvas or leather shoes all day without any type of protection is a recipe for disaster. At the end of the day, your feet will have sweat a ton without a cotton outer layer to absorb it. That inevitably leads to smelly feet that will gross out anyone in the immediate vicinity when you remove your shoes.

One oft-recommended solution many try is to apply a sweat-absorbing powder, like talcum or cornstarch. After applying the powder to your foot and sliding your foot in, it will hopefully stay dry all day.

However, there are two major disadvantages to powder.

  1. The powder makes a mess. When you take your shoes off, through walking and sweating your feet will have formed clumps of powder that will need to be shaken out of the shoe. Also, your foot will still be covered with powder, so you must be careful where you walk as you WILL leave powdery footprints.
  2. The powder doesn't last forever. After a while, the effect will wear off, and your feet will start to sweat again.

A better solution to going sockless is to just wear socks.

Wait, what? Stay with me ...

It's not just any kind of sock – it's a special cut called a loafer sock (also know as "peds" or a "liner sock").

These are teeny-tiny socks that cover as little of your foot as possible. They hide in your shoe so that no one can see them, yet they still provide the essential sweat-wicking function that is so vital to keeping your feet dry and smell-free.

As a bonus, they're much more comfortable than going completely sockless.

Most major sock and underwear companies, including Banana Republic and J. Crew, now make the socks for men. Look for ones that have a bit of rubber at the heel so that they don't slip off during the day. My favorites are Taft, which are a bit pricey but never slip and are very comfortable.

Some may call this cheating. But what they don't know can't hurt you. 

SEE ALSO: These are the only 3 shoes a guy needs in his closet

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This longevity-linked simple salad helps people on a Greek island live past 100

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"Ikaria: The Island Where People Live Forever," is available on iTunes and Amazon

In Business Insider Films's short documentary, "Ikaria: The Island Where People Live Forever," we interviewed and captured the lifestyle amongst residents, elders and doctors on this remote isle to find out their secrets to living past 100.

While genes account for a small portion, two main factors contributing to longevity are the Ikarian lifestyle and diet. 

Chef Diane Kochilas spends her time on the island cooking up delicious traditional recipes.

In her cookbook "Ikaria," Kochilas writes, "Beans and pulses are one of the most important components of the Mediterranean diet...They are naturally gluten-free, low in fat, and a great source of cholesterol-free protein."

Here, she shows us how to prepare a bean salad and eat like a true Ikarian. 

Produced by Alana Kakoyiannis and David Hands. Edited by Lauren Browning and Andrew Stern.

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The line between 'mental' and 'physical' drug addiction is much fuzzier than you think

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drunk party drinking shots

To be truly addicted to a drug, the conventional wisdom goes, you have to be psychologically and physically hooked.

In other words, you have to both crave the drug and feel physically sick — for example, shaky or nauseated — when you can't get it.

But is this necessarily true?

In her new book, "Unbroken Brain," science writer Maia Szalavitz argues that the line between these two seemingly separate aspects of addiction is much fuzzier than most of us think.

And keeping up the distinction, while it might seem intuitively appealing, is doing more harm than good. Here's why:

Our bodies and brains react differently to different types of drugs

First of all, our physical and psychological reactions to drugs aren't universal across drug types. We don't respond to depressants like alcohol and heroin the same way we respond to stimulants like cocaine and meth.

When we regularly use a depressant like alcohol, for example, two things tend to happen in our bodies and minds:

  1. We develop a physical tolerance for it, meaning that each time we drink, we need more to achieve the same warm, pleasant feelings.
  2. We experience physicalwithdrawal when we suddenly stop drinking: We feel nauseated, shaky, or physically ill in other ways. We may also experience psychological withdrawal, meaning we crave or strongly desire to drink again.

Conversely, when we regularly use a stimulant like cocaine, very different things can happen to us physically and psychologically:

  1. We either develop partial tolerance or sensitization: In partial tolerance, we need slightly more of the drug each time to experience the same high. In sensitization, smaller amounts of the drug actually cause more intense effects. This virtually opposite reaction can happen in some regular users.
  2. We tend to go through psychological — but not physical — withdrawal when we suddenly stop using, meaning we might crave or strongly desire to use the drugs again, but not using them won't make us physically ill. "Stimulant withdrawal doesn't make you physically ill like heroin or alcohol withdrawal does; nearly all of its signs can be dismissed as 'psychological' rather than 'physical' and include things like irritability, craving, depression, and sleep disturbances," Szalavitz writes.

It's tough to put the signs of addiction into two distinct mind or body categories — and this gets at a bigger problem with the way we view and treat addiction.

For one thing, focusing on whether a drug's effects are primarily psychological or physical tends to obscure how dangerous it may be. In the 1970s and '80s, for example, many scientists regarded cocaine as fairly harmless because it didn't produce obvious symptoms of physical withdrawal like shaking or vomiting.

In a 1982 article in Scientific American, for example, renowned University of California at San Francisco psychiatrist Craig Van Dyke and infamous Yale psychopharmacologist Robert Byck compared the behavior of people who'd used cocaine to that of people who'd recently indulged in a delicious snack. The behavioral pattern of users, they wrote, was "comparable to that experienced by many people with peanuts or potato chips. It may interfere with other activities ... but it may be a source of enjoyment as well."

This sort of thinking would have drastic consequences. The number of people who admitted using cocaine on a routine basis jumped from 4.2 million in 1985 to 5.8 million in 1989, according to data from the Drug Enforcement Administration. During that same four-year period, cocaine-related hospital emergency room visits increased 28-fold.

"The lack of physical signs of dependence like vomiting and diarrhea in stimulant addiction made scientists see stimulant problems as less severe," writes Szalavitz. "You might want cocaine or speed, the thinking went, but you didn't need it like a real heroin junkie."

Just because someone isn't vomiting when they aren't using doesn't mean they're not addicted

To say that drugs that don't produce obvious symptoms of physical withdrawal — vomiting, diarrhea, etc. — makes them somehow "less addictive" is dangerous, naive, and above all else, unscientific, writes Szalavitz. At the end of the day, "both kinds of symptoms ultimately [are] expressed via chemical or structural changes in the brain." Whether these symptoms are visible in our bodies or felt in our minds, then, matters far less than what effects they ultimately produce in the brain.

And these effects are key to understanding how people get addicted to a substance — whether it's heroin, cocaine, marijuana, nicotine, or methamphetamine.

"While withdrawal from marijuana, cocaine ... and numerous other drugs does not result in the stereotypical 'opiate-withdrawal-flu-like-syndrome,' there is no doubt that real withdrawal from these substances exists for long term users," writes University of California at Los Angeles psychiatrist Adi Jaffe in a blog post for Psychology Today. "Fatigue, depression, anxiety, sleep disturbances, and trouble eating are only some of the symptoms that tend to show up."

We need to keep this in mind if we can ever hope to properly diagnose, treat, or prevent addiction.

"As far as I'm concerned, if you have a behavior that is making your life miserable and which you can't seem to stop, it doesn't matter if you're throwing up during withdrawal or not," writes Jaffe. "It's an issue and you need help."

READ NEXT: Mind-blowing images of the brain on LSD shed new light on how psychedelics change the brain

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There's a scientific reason why it's so hard to cook the perfect cup of rice

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Brown rice

Cooking a cup of rice can often be a daunting task.

From worrying about whether it will stick to the bottom of the pan to making sure you get the right water-to-rice ratio, it's easy to opt out and go for instant rice or just give up and steer clear of the grain overall.

We chatted with Dan Souza, the executive editor of Cook's Science at America's Test Kitchen and one of the authors of "The Science of Good Cooking." He told us that one of the biggest myths he's debunked in the kitchen is about the correct ratio of water to rice. 

Anyone who's tried to cook rice on a stove top knows that you typically put in two cups of water for every single cup of rice. A few minutes later, you ideally have a pot of perfectly cooked rice. But that's not always the case. So why is it that even when you put in the same ingredients, your rice seems to come out either perfectly or completely ruined?

The experiment

To see if he and his team could find a better way, Souza said they put sealed bags filled with a cup of water and a cup of rice into boiling water. He found that regardless of what kind of rice was being tested — long grain, brown, white, etc. — it always took just a single cup of water to perfectly cook a cup of rice.

Which means that the single biggest thing separating you from that perfect cup of cooked rice is chemistry. Evaporation, to be precise! And evaporation can be a tricky thing to predict. 

rice and chopsticks"Evaporation isn't a consistent thing, cook to cook, kitchen to kitchen," he explained. "If you have a pot with not a very good lid, you're going to get more evaporation. If it's really tight, you're going to get less evaporation."

Things get even more complicated if you try to double your recipe. Say you want to make two cups of rice, so you decide to use four cups of water. Souza said that's not necessarily the best approach if you're using the same size pot as you would with just the one cup of rice.

"If you have a ration of 1:2 and you double that to 2:4, you're saying you're going to get double evaporating because you doubled it and that's not true," he said. "If you're using the same pot with the same diameter lid and the same heat you're going to have the same amount of evaporation as you did the first time. so you end up with an extra cup of water in there."

How to succeed at cooking rice

Ideally, if there was a device that could limit evaporation entirely (rice cookers still let off steam, so they require more water), that would be the best way to get a cup of perfectly cooked rice.

But in the meantime, Souza said, the best way to optimize your ratio is through trial and error, based on pot size, humidity, and of course how many times you peel the lid off too early.

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What New York City's most famous buildings would look like in the middle of nowhere

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MisplacedSeries_NewYork_IACBuilding

No building is designed in a vacuum — architects must carefully consider many different factors, like its environment and the buildings and streets that will surround it.

These restrictions fascinate Anton Repponen, a creative director, trained architect, and photographerIn his latest personal project, entitled "Misplaced", Repponen turned those deciding factors on their head, asking questions like: "What would the Chrysler Building look like in a mountainous landscape?" and "What about the Metropolitan Opera in a Brazilian desert?"

"I wanted to see how those buildings [would] look [when] you take them out from their original locations," he told Business Insider. "Would they still work? Would it look good, or make no sense? Would they actually be even more beautiful outside their environment?"

Ahead, 10 gorgeous photos of frequented New York City buildings dropped in completely bizarre locations.

The inconsistency in New York City's architecture is what fascinates Repponen the most. "You have old and new mashed together without much rules," he said. "That's what's interesting to observe, and what makes New York somewhat beautiful, but not 'classic' beautiful like Rome, for example."



The images of both the buildings and the landscapes are all captured by Repponen.



"When I decided to proceed with this project, I spent a week going through my 10 years' [worth of photos] to select some of the locations I thought would work," he said.



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An Olympian jumped up an entire set of stadium bleachers in 5 leaps

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Norwegian sprinter Ezinne Okparaebo is looking to make her third-straight Olympics in Rio this summer, and has been documenting her intense training regiment on Instagram.

Her videos give you an idea of just how athletic and hard-working Olympians are.

In one specific video that gained a ton of attention online, Okparaebo does a stair-jumping drill where she scales an entire set of stadium bleachers in only five leaps.

Story by Tony Manfred and editing by Jeremy Dreyfuss

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How a Data Scientist hacked his way to becoming the top match for 30,000 women on OKCupid

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OkCupid

As a grad student working on his thesis, Chris McKinlay spent some of his free time on OKCupid.

The free dating site figures out two people's compatibility by how they answer specific questions: The more similarly answered questions, the higher the chance of a good match.

After striking out he began to use a super computer he had access to through his grad school to analyze OKCupid's question data. 

He was able to separate the woman around him into seven groups, figure out which had the highest chance of compatibility with him, and which questions were most important to the women from that group.

Once he knew the key questions, he answered them honestly and became the top match for 30,000 women and began receiving a huge increase in unsolicited messages. Though popular mathematically, McKinlay found he had to deal with woman's expectations that the two were "perfect matches." 

He combated this social expectation by going on "efficient and depersonalized dates" one after the other until he finally found his true perfect match, on date #88. 

Here's a video of McKinlay explaining his dating hack:

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