Dog hiccups can be hilarious—at least for the humans watching. But for the dog, they can be confusing and distressing. While we laugh at our little friends, they wonder what is happening and why we’re not making it stop. Most dog hiccups are harmless and temporary. After you finish laughing, we’ll discuss some common causes and things you can do to help your pup. @medmitz He’s too funny #fypシ #fyp #dogsofttiktok #funny #labrador #viral #labsoftiktok #hiccup ♬ original sound – medmitz Watching, if you’re a new pet parent or have never seen a dog with hiccups, can be distressing. While we began by poking fun at the unfortunate pup in the video, he was confused by this new thing. He is asking his pet parent for help. Image from TikTok. Understanding what causes dog hiccups is the first step. The causes can include eating or drinking too fast, stress, anxiety, overexcitement, food that is too spicy, medications, or excess gas in the stomach. Dogs hiccup 4 to 60 times per minute, and the response is more common in puppies than in adult animals. One of the most common causes is the dog gulping air into their stomach while eating too fast. Slowing down your dog’s eating will help alleviate recurring hiccups. Another method to help your dog is to calm their breathing. Sometimes, a good belly rub will cure the issue. If you can, coax your dog into drinking water slowly to help. Image from TikTok. If your dog’s hiccups last more than three to four hours, please take them to a vet to be checked for other causes. Although watching your dog can be humorous, please don’t allow them to struggle too long. You are not a bad dog parent for laughing at your dog while they struggled. Please share this helpful information. You can find the source of this story’s featured image here. The post Dog Gets “Super Annoyed” At Mom For Not Curing His Hiccups appeared first on InspireMore.

Birds are weird little creatures. They used to be the most terrifying predators the world has ever seen, and now they just spend their time getting drunk, facetiming their pals, and occasionally killing one in three humans across the globe. Oh – and, of course, tweeting.And every so often, they go crazy and start attacking infrastructure. Whether it’s your house, your car, or McCormick Place Lakeside Center in Chicago, sometimes birds just love to fly at, peck, and otherwise bring to ruin, completely inanimate objects.So, what’s going on? Well, it’s not some deep-seated hatred of the modern world manifesting itself in a recreation of Hitchcock’s The Birds – it’s just territory marking. See, birds aren’t what you’d call the Einsteins of the animal kingdom – there’s a reason “bird-brained” means what it does. Unfortunately, it takes a particular level of cognition to be able to pass the mirror test – that is, to see your own reflection and understand that it’s not some other being staring back at you – and so, when these birds catch sight of themselves in a shiny piece of glass or metal, their immediate thought is not “hey, I’m lookin’ good today!” but “INTRUDER! KILL THE INTRUDER!”It’s annoying – but from the bird’s perspective, it’s vitally important that they get rid of this rival. You may have noticed these attacks being more common during warm weather – that’s when the birds are staking out their nesting areas, ready to find mates and start making the next generation of window-attackers. Fighting off an interloper isn’t just a good idea for protecting your future eggs, it’s also a nice little advertisement to any potential mates out there who might want to make those eggs with you.Still, it would probably be nicer for all involved if bird attacks could be avoided. Luckily, there’s some fairly simple things you can do to reduce the chances of them occurring – the most obvious of which is to remove the reflection the bird is getting annoyed at.“Simple solutions can involve putting a non-reflective material, such as cling film or non-reflective cellophane, on the outside of a window,” suggests the British Trust for Ornithology. “Physically blocking access to windows with plants and hanging baskets might also help, while objects that dangle and catch the light and wind (e.g. strips of foil, CDs) could be effective.”“It might also be worth placing a mirror near a window that is being attacked to provide an alternative reflection on which the bird can focus,” they add. “If multiple windows are being attacked in sequence, target a window early in the chain.”An important thing to remember, by the way, is that these territorial attacks are not the same thing as bird strikes – when a bird thinks your window is just open sky, and flies directly (and sometimes violently) into it. When that happens, it’s less of an annoyance and more of a potential problem, and the bird may need your help.So, if you come across a bird that just slammed itself into a building, first, check it’s alive – it can be difficult to tell the difference between death and concussion in birds, so if you aren’t sure, try gently moving its legs. “Birds go into rigor exceedingly quickly, like in a matter of minutes,” Rita McMahon, director of Wild Bird Fund in New York City, told The Audubon Society. “If the legs don't move, the bird is dead. But if they move, the bird’s just unconscious.” If the bird is alive, carefully pick it up, preferably using gloves, and take it to a wildlife rehabilitation specialist. If that’s not possible, keep it in a paper bag or shoebox in a dark, quiet room and leave it undisturbed for an hour or so – “then,” McMahon advised, “listen.”“If you hear that bird tap-dancing around inside, he’s feeling better.” If not, call in the pros. 

What’s the biggest number you can think of? A googol? TREE(3)? Fourteen? How about an infinite number of nines? No, we’re not being facetious – in higher math, that’s not just a legit possible answer, but it’s also a really bad one. Why? Because an infinite number of nines is actually equal to negative one. It’s not very big at all.Okay, let us explain.A crash course on countingUnless you’re reading this from ancient Babylonia or the northwest of Papua New Guinea, your go-to number system is practically guaranteed to be base ten, or decimal.What that means in practice is – well, it’s something so basic that you may not have really thought about it since you were first learning your numbers back in pre-school. We count using ten individual symbols – 0,1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 – and when those run out, we just go back to the start again, this time with the prefix “1” to remind ourselves that we’ve already finished the whole set once. If we continue counting like this, we may find ourselves having to change that prefix to a “2”, a “3”, and eventually, a “9”. We may even reach 99 – meaning we’ve counted all ten digits ten times – and at that point, we just level up again, adding a second “1” prefix and starting once more at 100.Now, that’s the first principles explanation, but it’s not really the most useful one – so, instead of thinking about our numbers in terms of adding, let’s move to multiplication. How should we understand a base ten system now?In fact, it’s rather beautifully straightforward. A number like, say, 12,345, can be thought of as the sum of five numbers: 1 × 104, 2 × 103, 3 × 102, 4 × 101, and 5 × 100 – those indices, or powers, above the 10s referring to how many times we multiply 10 by itself. It’s both a lot easier than plussing one twelve thousand three hundred forty-four times, and also lets us do something pretty cool – it allows us to enter the world of decimal fractions.More than zero, less than oneEver since two cavepeople first looked at a single hunk of delicious mammoth meat and decided there were better solutions than warfare to solve their problems, we’ve needed a concept of fractional quantities. And for rather a lot of Western history, these fractions – numbers like 1/2 or 1/3, formed by setting the number of things you want to divide on top of the number of things you want to divide by – was the only way we had to express them.Other cultures, though, were smarter about it. In China, the Islamic world, and even ancient Mesopotamia, mathematicians had figured out a way to express fractions as decimal expansions – and now that we’ve seen how to create decimal numbers, we can too.So: rather than confining our indices to non-negative numbers, what if we extend them to include numbers less than zero? In other words, what is 10-1?In fractions, this is simple once you know the rule: when you see a minus sign in the index, it just means “one divided by this number”. 10-1 is equal to 1/10, for example; 10-2 is equal to 1/102; 10-163 is equal to 1/10163. But what if we chose instead to take our way of writing base ten numbers and extend it in the opposite direction? Basically, if 12,345 means 1 × 104 + 2 × 103 + 3 × 102 + 4 × 101 + 5 × 100, then we can stick in a decimal point after the 100 term and continue for as long as necessary: 12,345.6789, for example, would then be equal to 1 × 104 + 2 × 103 + 3 × 102 + 4 × 101 + 5 × 100 + 6 × 10-1 + 7 × 10-2 + 8 × 10-3 + 9 × 10-4.And the cool thing about these numbers is that they can go on literally forever – with some unexpected results. One of the best known counterintuitive facts is that 0.999… – that’s math-speak for “an infinite number of 9s, but we don’t have time to write them all out” – is equal to 1.No, not approximately equal. Literally, exactly, equal.What are 10-adic numbers?Now, you might have seen “0.999… = 1” and thought, “no, that’s weird enough for me” – and you know what? That’s fair. But if you, like number theorists, hunger for more, then allow us to introduce you to the world of 10-adic numbers.The basic idea behind 10-adic numbers is this: what if, instead of extending decimal numbers indefinitely to the right like this, we extended them to the left? Is there some way in which a number like, say, …999 – that is, 9 + 90 + 900 + 9000 + 90,000 and so on ad infinitum – even makes any sense?Well, let’s take our cues from repeating decimals. Remember how 0.999… = 1? We can prove that using the following neat little argument: first, note that 0.999… × 10 = 9.999….Then, subtract one from the other to see that 0.999… × 10 - 0.999… × 1 = 9.999… - 0.999…                  = 9.In other words,0.999… × (10 – 1) = 0.999… × 9 = 9,which means that 0.999… = 1.Got that? Great! Now let’s apply the same argument to 10-adic numbers and see what happens. We have:…999 × 10 = ...9990.In this case, subtracting one from the other gives us …999 × 10 - …999 × 1 = …9990 - …999                                            = -9But that means …999 × (10 – 1) = …999 × 9 = -9,which means that – hang on, that can’t be right:…999 = -1.Weird mathOkay, at first glance, it seems extremely obvious that a never-ending row of nines simply cannot be equal to negative one. But we dare you to prove us wrong – look:.…99999  0000001 + Try adding the two together, and you’ll be locked into an infinite row of repeating zeroes – in other words, zero itself. If …999 + 1 = 0, then …999 = -1.Now, it’s tempting to stop here and say “well, if that’s what math says, then obviously math is nonsense.” But is there a way we can make it make sense? In fact there is – and, just like when we leveled up to discover decimal expansion, it takes some lateral thinking to get there.     So: let’s think about what we mean when we say “close to zero”. Normally, we’re thinking additively, right? The number 5 is the size it is because it is five unit-lengths away from zero; the number 13 is thirteen unit-lengths away from zero; the number 18.75 is eighteen and three-quarter unit-lengths away from zero.It’s a very natural way of thinking about distance, and we’re going to completely forget about it from now on. Instead, let’s think multiplicatively, and consider numbers in terms of their factorizations by 10.Let’s start with zero, since that’s the number we measure from. In the world of integers, zero is the most divisible number of all – you can literally divide any number into it, and it will work fine (just don’t try it the other way around). Now let’s consider a couple of examples: let’s take, say, 30, and 1,000,000. We can divide 30 by 10 just once before we leave the integers – 1,000,000, on the other hand, can be divided by 10 six times. So, in a sense, we can say that 1,000,000 is “closer to zero” than 30 – it is more zero-like in terms of divisibility.It may not seem intuitive, but you can – and people have – prove that it is a perfectly sensible mathematical metric. All we have to do is set up the following rule:If a can be divided by ten a maximum of k times and remain an integer, then set |a|ten = 1/10k.Applying this to …999, we can now see that the number really is getting closer and closer to negative one. After all, we have: |9| = |10 -1| = 0.1 – 1 = -0.9|99| = |100 -1| = 0.01 – 1 = -0.99|999| = |1,000 -1| = 0.001 – 1 = -0.999|9,999| = |10,000 -1| = 0.0001 – 1 = -0.9999And so on. We can extend the idea to fractions, too: for example, we can get 1/3 by asking “what 10-adic number, when multiplied by 3, results in 1?” We’ll spare you the working, but you can check for yourself that the answer is …6667 – that is, an infinite number of sixes followed by one final seven.Everything is looking great, right?A problemWhat would you say is the “first” fraction? Like, the most basic one? A half?What’s one-half as a 10-adic number?By the same logic as above, we’re looking for a 10-adic number which, when you multiply it by two, gives us one. And here’s the problem: no such number exists.The same problem turns up if you try to divide by five – and you may now be getting an idea of what the reason is. Basically, 10-adic numbers suffer from the problem that 10 is non-prime: it’s equal to the product of 2 and 5, which leads to a weird situation where you can multiply two non-zero numbers in the 10-adic system and get a result of zero. The solution is, in true number theory style, to simply only consider prime numbers as the basis for your p-adic numbers – p here stands for “prime”. By doing that, you avoid these issues and can use these infinitely long numbers to your heart’s content.But why would you? Well, p-adic numbers may be weird, but they’ve been used to solve some of the most famous problems in mathematical history – namely, Fermat’s Last Theorem. They’re useful for both ancient problems, like Diophantine analysis, and modern ones like quantum mechanics; mostly, they’re just a neat way to look at problems that would be much more difficult using our normal, boring number system.Or, to put it more poetically by quoting the Japanese mathematician Kazuya Kato: “Real numbers are like the sun, and the p-adics are like the stars. The sun blocks out the stars during the day, and humans are asleep at night and don't see the stars, even though they are just as important.”

When the ancient Greeks told the legend of Icarus, doomed to forever be a warning against flying too close to the sun, they couldn’t have known that the real dangers at such heights would be athlete’s foot and strangers’ pee.But here we are – because, apparently, some of you need telling: don’t take your shoes off on an airplane. They’re gross. “Cabins are cleaned prior to every flight,” pilot Patrick Smith, author of website Ask the Pilot, told Travel + Leisure back in 2022, “but that will be more perfunctory on a quick turn when there are only 15 or 20 minutes to get it done.” Even in the years since the COVID-19 pandemic hit, when we’ve all been more aware than ever of hygiene practices and the importance of not sharing germs with strangers, there’s no guarantee that airlines are performing the kind of cleaning you’d expect between flights. It could be as little as chucking out the garbage and wiping down the door handles.“If a plane sits for longer than eight hours – typically a long-haul jet – then the airline will perform a deep clean,” explained Mike Arnot as part of a write-up on airline cleaning processes for the New York Times. “During a deep clean, every seat cushion is removed, the seats are vacuumed and the carpet is shampooed throughout the cabin.”But such regimens are often few and far between. Much more likely is that the plane you’re boarding has been, at best, “fogged” – that is, sprayed throughout with electrostatically charged droplets of disinfectant. “It’s a little bit like rubbing a balloon on your hair, then sticking the balloon to the wall,” Joshua Robertson, the chief executive of EMist, a Texas company that manufactures electrostatic sprayers for United Airlines and Alaska told the Times. “Every single molecule leaving that nozzle is charged. They are attracted to surfaces like a magnet.”In practice, this looks like a cleaner armed with a backpack filled with disinfectant and a spray nozzle, filling every corner of the cabin with a fine mist. Once this is done, a full team may enter and wipe down high-touch areas like chair arms and door handles with disinfectant wipes, and – if time allows, which it often does not – the carpet may be vacuumed.Obviously, such a system is not as rigorous as a deep clean – but it’s definitely not the least you can expect. Airlines are notoriously driven by profit margins rather than, you know, passenger comfort or safety, and every extra second counts. Spills or splashes are spot cleaned, but not necessarily disinfected; fogging may be omitted if the plane needs a quicker turn – and, worst of all, there’s no requirement for the plane, even in the bathrooms, to be cleaned mid-flight. Yes, even if somebody makes, ahem, a mess.All of which means, basically: keep your shoes on. “Those who decide to go barefoot might be picking up bacteria and viruses that could negatively impact their health,” David Krause, owner of SyQuest USA, which manufactures cleaning products used on airplanes, told Travel + Leisure. “Likewise, the concern of picking up a fungal infection is always there as well.”In fact, you know what? Might be a good idea to wear gloves, too. Just to be safe.  

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