This reality should mean it’s a no-brainer to keep the expanded child tax credit going, but unified GOP opposition and acrimonious discussion among Democrats on how to keep the child tax credit going has made it harder. An extension of the policy is still possible, even probable in Biden’s Build Back Better Plan, but there are some changes in how the program works. For example, the program has only been extended for a single year, not the five that Biden wanted or the permanent extension sought by progressive Democrats....

Determined to find the answer, Google sorted through its Trends data to find out which Christmas cookie was searched the most in each state from December 3-9, according to Axios. The search engine giant sorted the data, with the most searched cookie being the most popular in each state. Axios explained that the data “represents the uniquely searched cookies across the US,” and it defines “uniquely searched as a term that is over-represented in a region compared to the country....

The Dino’s brain is powered by IBM’s Watson so it gets smarter the more it interacts with your inquisitive youth (and, presumably, can defeat Garry Kasparov in chess). It remembers names, favorite foods, pets, what have you, and is able to recall them in later conversations to really sell the kid on the fact that they’re totally buddies. Not only that, but Dino doesn’t robotically pull answers from Google. If a kid asks a question that stumps the little guy, somebody at CogniToys will eventually write an answer that’ll be uploaded in a future update....

Colin appeared on Late Night with Seth Meyers recently, and the two dads’ conversation naturally turned to parenting. Seth Meyers asked Jost if he had any fears now that he’s a dad to his 13-month-old son, Cosmo, and Colin was very candid in his response. “I think when you have a decent imagination, it’s worse,” Colin shared, according to People. “You don’t have rational fears, you have creative fears.” Colin admitted that although he’s got “creative fears,” there’s been “no babyproofing” to help curb the “rational” fears he experiences....

Jack, not his real name, and his wife got married pretty much right out of college, just after they learned she was pregnant with their first child. Although their marriage was good at first, soon, Jack says he was buried in law school, and they grew apart. He began to suspect she was having affairs, but couldn’t confirm it until their second child was born with exposure to herpes and had to be rushed to the neonatal care unit....

Contact tracing was used in the Ebola outbreak to stop the very grim disease from taking hold in the United States and has been used in many other public health outbreaks in the past. Several states, including Washington, California, and New York have announced that they would launch their own contact tracing task forces to aid the fight against the virus. But what is it? Is it effective? Does it harm the family’s privacy?...

“Our characters are very instrumental in promoting hygiene,” explains Dr. Rosemaire Truglio, the affable Senior Vice President of Curriculum & Content for Sesame Workshop. “Maybe we need to have him use utensils now.” The folks behind Sesame Street, which decamped from PBS to HBO in 2016, take pride in being responsive to public health issues. “All of our characters sneeze into their elbow,” says Dr. Truglio. That’s not a small feat from a puppetry perspective given that none of the characters really have elbows in any orthopedically recognizable way....

Couvade syndrome isn’t a recognized disease. As such, it’s unclear whether the physical symptoms felt are psychologically influenced or honest-to-god physical symptoms. What we do know is that Couvade syndrome is a form of extreme male empathy for pregnancy, and it’s common around the world. What it looks like exactly, it seems, is highly dependent on geography and culture. One study of Polish dads, for instance, found just four symptoms prevalent among Couvade syndrome sufferers: sympathetic weight gain, flatulence, fluctuating appetite, and personal distress....

Last December at this time, the U.S. was averaging about 211,000 cases per day. Currently, the country is averaging almost 122,000 new cases per day, according to the New York Times COVID Tracker. Needless to say, although COVID is still very much a problem, it’s much less of an issue than it was in December 2020, largely thanks to the widespread availability of vaccines. But in some states, COVID cases are higher now than they were at this point last year....

Shared by Gender Reveal Videos and Daniella Moneta on Instagram, the video shows the new dad walking out of the delivery room into the waiting room. There, to the cheers of family and friends, he slowly unzips his sweatshirt, revealing a blue T-shirt, implying the baby is a boy. But a closer look reveals something different: As he pulls open the sweatshirt, the printed text on the front of the T-shirt reads, “It’s a girl....

In the post, the father makes it clear that these feelings have been stirring inside him for some time before explaining that his son’s autism should not mean he’s treated like he has “fucking leprosy.” He also called out several of his “so-called friends” who have kids and have still not extended the invite to his son when it was time for their birthday parties. He tells those who have ostracized his son to “go and fuck yourselves” before asking them if they have thought about how painful this whole experience must be for his son....

A group of Florida residents who live near Disney’s Walt Disney World in Orlando is suing the Governor over the state’s plan to dissolve the Reedy Creek Improvement District. The complaint claims the state violated their rights and that moving forward with the plans to dissolve will burden the residents with a $1 billion bond debt. “Ron DeSantis has been clear on his intended punishment of Disney, although he claims the elimination of special districts will not affect central Florida taxpayers,” the suit reads....

For the study, researchers analyzed health profiles of more than 10,000 men in the U.S. to test for a link between e-cigarette use and erectile dysfunction. Overall, daily users of e-cigarettes were 2.24 times more likely than non-users to suffer from erectile dysfunction, after accounting for variables such as age, race, physical activity and some medical issues like diabetes. The results were published this week in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine....

“If you can get a child to keep a mask on their face when they are outside, not indoors, you should,” says Dyan Hes, the medical director of Gramercy Pediatrics in New York City and a pediatrics professor at Weill Medical College of Cornell University. Hes realizes that’s easier said than done. “They rip them off in like three seconds,” she says, but it’s important to try anyway. In a set of guidelines released yesterday, the American Academy of Pediatrics offers a few caveats to the all-mask-all-the-time rule....

Spoilers ahead for Dune: Part One. You’ve been warned! The spoilers must flow! Oscar Isaac’s noble Duke Leto Atreides dies in Dune. But how and why? And what was up with that tooth? Baron Harkonnen planted a spy — Dr. Wellington Yueh (Chang Chen) – amongst the Duke’s entourage. Yueh is the last person the Duke would suspect, a loyal physician and healer who’s part of the Atreides family inner circle....

Someone on Twitter said the beloved actor “can’t possibly be one of those stinky ones” in reference to the slew of celebs who have proudly declared themselves as anti-showering. Johnson confirmed the suspicion, saying that he was “the opposite of a ‘not washing themselves’ celeb.” “Shower (cold) when I roll outta bed to get my day rollin’… shower (warm) after my workout before work… shower (hot) after I get home from work,” Johnson tweeted....

Large outbreaks have been mostly sequestered to the Midwest and South, but producers across the country are taking precautions to prevent more deaths. Iowa, the nation’s leader in egg production, has seen drastic shortages and deaths. In North Carolina, poultry shows and public sales of birds have been halted. Even some zoos have hidden birds from the public, despite no confirmed cases at zoos, to prevent the deaths of exotic birds like penguins and mitigate the spread of the avian flu....

My daughter — who has never seen one single episode of Sesame Street in her 19-month-old-life — loves Elmo. There’s a giant Elmo at the library and she can say his name. She gets Elmo even though she doesn’t really know anything about him. Why? He’s part of the cultural firmament. Also, Elmo traffics in Elmo-ness. He is famous for being famous. Elmo Elmos everywhere, all the time. He’s like Paris Hilton in the early 2000s or any of the Kardashians right now (minus the baby daddies, sex tapes, and tenuous connection to O....

“For the year and a half now that we’ve had vaccines out there, we haven’t had anything for those less than 5 years old,” says Paul A. Offit, M,D, director of the Vaccine Education Center and a doctor at the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “During that time, about 45,000 children in that age have been admitted to the hospital over the last two years, about 10,000 had to go to the intensive care unit, and about 450 have died....