Chick-fil-A fans rejoice; it’s almost your favorite day of the year to fill up on chicken and waffle fries. On July 14, 2026, the fast-food chain will celebrate its iconic Cow Appreciation Day. Anyone who dresses like a cow that day will be eligible for free food all day long. Breakfast: Chick-fil-A Chicken Biscuit or 4-count Chick-n-Minis Lunch/Dinner: Chick-fil-A Chicken Sandwich, 8-count Nuggets, or 3-count Chick-n-Strips Kids: A free entrée and kids prize will be available for kids 12 and under, while supplies last. But that’s not all; leading up to Cow Appreciation Day, Chick-fil-A guests can play Spot the Cow to win free waffle fries from July 7 to July 13, 2026. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Snackolator (@snackolator) Chick-fil-A is Giving Away Free Waffle Fries Chick-fil-A knows how much customers love Cow appreciation day and this year, the restaurant has even more fun in store. National French Fry Day is July 10 and Chick-fil-A is celebrating with a new Spot the Cow game in the app. Snackolator shared info on how to score free waffle fries. “It’s time to get some FREE Waffle Fries from Chick-fil-A this week ahead of National French Fry Day!This week you can play the new Spot the Cows game on the Chick-fil-A app starting tomorrow (July 7th) and win free medium waffle fries,” Snackolator explained. “When Chick-fil-A runs these games they are easy to win, but they might run out so I’d play earlier rather than later. Once you win it will be added to your account for your next order.” The Chick-fil-A website explained the free waffle fries are only good through July 13, 2026. So, if you want to enjoy those golden fries, you must do it before Cow Appreciation Day on July 14. This story’s featured image is by Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg via Getty Images

These days, everyone seems nostalgic for the 1990s. Compared with today, life was simpler. Back then, boredom led to adventure and creativity—and social media didn’t exist. A new parenting trend that parents across generations, especially Millennials, are embracing is the ’90s summer. Rather than letting their kids stay inside in the air conditioning playing video games, many ’90s kids who grew up playing outside until dark are trying to recreate their own summer experiences. What is a ’90s summer? “Kids don’t need every second optimized or curated to have a magical summer,” ABC News reporter Bethany Braun-Silva explained in a segment. “A lot of parents are realizing that the freedom and boredom that we experienced actually helped to create independence, creativity and confidence—all the things we want for our own kids.” Ashley Smith, a Millennial mom of four and blogger, is choosing to give her kids a ’90s summer—one that is unplugged and rooted in a back-in-the-day mentality. “We are going full 90’s summer over here, and I have absolutely no regrets,” Smith shared on Instagram. “No rigid schedule. No pressure to do it all. Just kids being kids while they still want to be around us…summer is short. Be in it.” View this post on Instagram 9 fun ’90s summer ideas Smith offered her followers nine fun ways parents can re-create an epic ’90s summer: No. 1: “Bikes and scooters out ALL day” “No check-ins every five minutes. Just be out and explore, and if we can find some friends along the way for spontaneous play, even better!” No. 2: A “boredom box” “Sidewalk chalk, bubbles, random craft supplies, activity books, clips for making forts, boredom ideas. When they say they’re bored, I point at the box and let them work through it.” No. 3: “One water day a week” “Sprinklers, water guns, the hose, water balloons. Doesn’t have to be a trip to the pool or even the lake in our case. Just wet and chaotic and different than usual and FUN!” No. 4: “Reading time after lunch” “Everyone picks a book. Everyone is quiet for 30 minutes. It is the greatest gift I’ve ever given myself.” View this post on Instagram No. 5: “Introducing them to old, less stimulating movies” “Pulling out old classics we used to love, making homemade popcorn, and snuggling up, no phones allowed.” No. 6: “Adventures that don’t cost money but are something to look forward to” “Finding a new playground. Traversing through a creek. Inviting friends to a picnic in the yard. Nature scavenger hunts through the woods. Fishing in a new pond. Hitting golf balls in the field. Simple, but oh so fun!” No. 7: “Neighborhood walks in the evening” “Sometimes we talk. Sometimes we don’t. Sometimes they ride vehicles. Sometimes they don’t. It’s one of the best parts of my day.” No. 8: “Saying YES to the spontaneous stuff” “Ice cream on a Tuesday. Staying up late to catch fireflies. Friends over on last-minute notice. A family movie night even though it’s already getting late. Letting the dishes and laundry wait a little longer.” No. 9: “Chore charts and family teamwork” “Incorporating family teamwork chores that everyone knows they do daily. Eliminates boredom, teaches responsibility, raises their sense of accomplishment. Plus, it helps me with the load.” The post Millennial mom shares 9 nostalgic ways she’s giving her kids a ’90s summer appeared first on Upworthy.

Throughout our lives, we will encounter many different types of friends. Some last only for a season; others stay with us through myriad chapters. Then there are the ride-or-dies, as it were, who are there through thick and thin and might even make us better people along the way.  But just what separates this steadfast ally from the fair-weather companion?  It turns out, there is one universal distinguishing factor. And it has nothing to do with shared interests, how long you’ve known each other, or even how much you “like” each other’s personality.  The No. 1 predictor of a lasting friendship, according to science  Two friends on a beach. Photo credit: Canva In 2022, a series of questionnaire-based studies published in the journal Evolutionary Psychological Science found that honesty was the trait people most wanted in a friend. In the first study, 236 people (122 women and 114 men) wrote down the traits they wanted and did not want in their friends. The 50 positive traits and 43 negative traits identified in this round were then used in the second and third studies. Participants in the second study responded to the statement, “I would like a friend of mine to be ___,” and chose from the 50 positive traits, rating the importance of each on a five-point scale from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.” Participants in the third study did the same with the negative traits and the statement, “I would like a friend of mine NOT to be ___.” Findings consistently showed that honesty ranked No. 1, followed by ethical, pleasant, and available. Dishonesty was also ranked the most undesirable quality, followed by competitiveness and impatience. In other words, that grumpy friend who always gives brutally honest advice might actually be your bestie. An earlier study from 2020 examined how lying affected adolescent friendships. Part of the reasoning behind the study was that lying tends to peak during adolescence, which is also a critical period for forming those first friend groups.  Interestingly, poor friendship quality predicted more lying over time, not the other way around. And lying about mental health led not only to more depressive symptoms but also to poorer friendship quality. Why we lose friends  Two friends. Photo credit: Canva Perhaps this is closely linked to why true lifelong or long-term friendships are so rare. According to sociological research, including a study conducted by Utrecht University, people tend to replace about half of their closest friends every seven years. This “pruning” and turnover happen because our lives, values, and locations shift over time. In some ways, maybe it’s easier to find people who match our newfound truths than to express them to people who knew us under an old identity. Still, by this logic, if you’ve had a close friend who’s made it past the seven-year mark, that’s something worth appreciating. Because it likely took some honest conversations to get there. Honesty doesn’t always have to be blunt A person in a gray sweater puts a hand on another person’s knee. Photo credit: Canva It’s worth noting that radical honesty can still be delivered with kindness. This might look like challenging a friend’s limiting thoughts with compassion rather than criticism. Or giving them room to speak their own truth without judgment. It also doesn’t always have to mean pouring out deep, dark secrets. Being more open about sharing the small stuff—little victories, upcoming plans, or a recent project that excited you—can also pave the way to those bigger conversations. Or, to put a Ralph Waldo Emerson spin on it, “The only way to have a friend is to be one.” Whether you place more faith in poets or science, both agree that being truthful, even when it’s difficult, is one of the strongest ways to build the kind of friendship that can endure through life’s many chapters. And for the friendships in your life that already have that trust, celebrate them. The post Researchers reveal the surprising No. 1 predictor of someone staying your best friend appeared first on Upworthy.

Nearly 4,000 years ago, in the Mesopotamian city of Larsa, a boy away at school pressed a reed stylus into a slab of wet clay to tell his mother that her homemade clothes weren’t good enough. That tablet survived. It sits in the Louvre today and, as La Brújula Verde reported, is often called the oldest known complaint from a child to a parent. Reading it feels less like studying an ancient artifact than scrolling through a teenager’s group chat. Iddin-Sin was not a hard-luck kid. His father, Shamash-hazir, was a high-ranking official under Hammurabi, the famous Babylonian king. That’s exactly why Iddin-Sin had been sent to board at a temple school and learn cuneiform, training for a comfortable future as a scribe or administrator. He was, in modern terms, a private-school kid, and he was furious about his wardrobe. In the translation by the scholar A. Leo Oppenheim, he lays it on thick: Every year the other young gentlemen’s clothes get nicer while his mother somehow lets his get worse, and wool is used in their house “like bread,” so what exactly is her excuse? Then he goes for the throat, comparing himself to the son of one of his father’s underlings, a boy from a lower-ranking family who struts around in two new outfits while Iddin-Sin can barely get one. He finishes with a classic guilt-trip attempt: You gave birth to me, he tells his mother, but the other boy was only adopted, and “his mother loves him, while you don’t love me.” His mother Zinu, meanwhile, wasn’t buying his clothes at a shop or even handing the job to a tailor. She was making them from scratch. She would have bought raw wool at the market from shepherds, then spun it, woven it, dyed it, and sewn it into a finished garment, a process that took about three months for everyday clothes and up to a year for anything fine. So when her son whines that wool flows through the house like bread and his clothes are still shabby, he’s sneering at months of his mother’s labor because a classmate turned up better dressed. Zinu apparently didn’t cave, and some scholars suspect she’d simply decided she’d had enough of him. Nobody actually knows how old Iddin-Sin was, whether Zinu was being stingy or just holding the line, or even whether he scratched the letter out himself or dictated it to a scribe. The writing is clumsy, error-strewn, and crammed so tightly onto the tablet that it runs off both sides and onto the edge before he runs out of room anyway, suggesting it was the work of someone still learning his letters and too worked up to plan ahead. A kid firing off an angry letter home and running out of space because he had that much to complain about is a scene that apparently hasn’t changed in four thousand years. Whether Zinu found it touching or wanted to hurl the tablet across the room, history doesn’t say. Any parent can probably guess. The post A 4,000-year-old clay tablet captures a kid whining that his mom’s homemade clothes aren’t cool enough appeared first on Upworthy.

BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Most Alzheimer’s research goes after the toxic proteins directly. This study asks a different question: what if the brain’s own clearing system could be fixed instead? Research from Monash University’s Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences, published in ACS Chemical Neuroscience, found that a copper compound called Cu(ATSM) repaired a waste-clearing mechanism at the blood-brain barrier, letting the brain flush amyloid-beta proteins out on its own. Why the blood-brain barrier matters The brain actively pumps out its own waste. Molecular pumps called P-glycoprotein, or P-gp, line the blood-brain barrier and push amyloid-beta into the bloodstream where it can be cleared. In Alzheimer’s, those pumps weaken progressively, the proteins accumulate, and over time the damage to memory follows. The Monash team treated an Alzheimer’s mouse model with Cu(ATSM) for 56 days. P-gp pump abundance rose 24.1 percent. Toxic amyloid-beta dropped 42 percent. Spatial learning improved by nearly 44 percent. “By improving the pumps, the brain can finally clear out the trapped waste,” said lead author Dr. Jae Pyun, who completed this work as the final chapter of his PhD. “This is the first study to show that Cu(ATSM) can increase the abundance of P-gp clearance pumps in an Alzheimer’s model.” Why this compound is closer to patients than most Most promising Alzheimer’s lab results don’t make it to human trials quickly. Cu(ATSM) has an unusual advantage: it has already been tested in humans for Parkinson’s disease and ALS, which means a significant portion of early safety evaluation is already behind it. “Cu(ATSM) has already progressed to clinical testing for conditions like Parkinson’s and ALS,” said senior author Professor Joseph Nicolazzo of Monash. “Because reducing amyloid burden is clinically proven to improve functional outcomes, these preclinical results strongly support the rationale for testing this drug in early symptomatic Alzheimer’s disease.” What’s still unknown The team doesn’t yet have a full picture of how proteins leave the brain once the pumps are working again. They suspect Cu(ATSM) may also activate microglia, the brain’s own immune cells, to break down plaques from the inside. The next studies will map the exact clearance routes. Alzheimer’s recently became Australia’s leading cause of death, passing coronary heart disease, and ranks among the top causes of mortality globally. The field has spent decades trying to eliminate plaques after they form. This study is a case for addressing an earlier failure: the system that was supposed to stop them building up in the first place. Source study: ACS Chemical Neuroscience– Cu(ATSM) Restores Blood–Brain Barrier Abundance of P-Glycoprotein and Improves Cognitive Function in the APP/PS1 Mouse Model of Alzheimer’s Disease     Did this solution stand out? Share it with a friend or support our mission by becoming an Emissary.The post Copper compound targets Alzheimer’s at the blood-brain barrier first appeared on The Optimist Daily: Making Solutions the News.