There’s nothing more frustrating than having a blockage, whether it’s in your toilet, shower or sink – and usually, the problem happens at the most inconvenient time. Lucky for you, the professional plumbers at Dr Draino are on call 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Their local plumbers are proud to say that they've yet to come across a blocked drain they couldn’t clear, and with more than 42 years experience they’ve seen just about every plumbing problem in the book. Their emergency plumbers have a van full of equipment to get to the bottom of any drain blockages.

Ditch your open office, drink coffee strategically, and put your smartphone away to trick your brain into getting more done.

Artist Tony Luciani was testing out a new camera when his 91-year-old mother, Elia, snuck into the background of his photos. The spontaneous images that resulted sparked a years-long collaboration, with Luciani documenting his mom's life and spirit as she lived with dementia. In this touching talk, he shares the stories behind some of their favorite shots, capturing the joy and grief of caring for an aging parent.

Thousands of Cuban doctors work in healthcare missions around the world. Some medics say conditions can be nightmarish.

In Indonesia there are areas where almost all young mothers go to work abroad. Indonesians call them the "motherless villages".

As technology continues to progress, the possibility of an abundant future seems more likely. Artificial intelligence is expected to drive down the cost of labor, infrastructure, and transport. Alternative energy systems are reducing the cost of a wide variety of goods. Poverty rates are falling around the world as more people are able to make a living, and resources that were once inaccessible to millions are becoming widely available.

In bedrooms all over England, things have changed since 2001. According to analysis released Tuesday in the BMJ, couples in the UK just aren’t getting it on like they used to in the early 2000s. This represents a dearth in sexual activity that scientists say is just as “interesting” as it is “unexplained.”

Stop being so busy, and just do nothing. Trust us.

In 1780, John Adams wrote a letter to his wife, Abigail, in which he laid out his plans for what his children and grandchildren would devote their lives to. Having himself taken the time to master “Politicks and War,” two revolutionary necessities, Adams hoped his children would go into disciplines that promoted nation-building, such as “mathematicks,” “navigation,” and “commerce.”

Twenty-five-year-old Sotaro Ito lives in a 9.46-square-meter apartment with a loft in the capital's retro-hip Koenji district...

In the race for jobs, the capacity for leisure can give humans a surprising edge.

Japan has an increasing percentage of young adults with no history of heterosexual vaginal intercourse. Public health experts at the University of Tokyo completed the most detailed analysis of national fertility survey data to date to understand trends in sexual experience over the past three decades. "Previous news reports about virginity rates among Japanese young adults were a bit sensationalist, only included never-married individuals, and did not distinguish virginity rates by age group," said Dr. Peter Ueda, an expert in epidemiology and public health and leader of the research project.

Any number of world religions may claim to have the monopoly on enlightenment, but a study published Thursday in the journal Psychology of Religion and Spirituality challenges the idea that being religious is the most consistent way to feel satisfied with life. The researchers behind the study argue that a better predictor of life satisfaction is a sense of oneness with the world — a mindset that people of all creeds can adopt.

To understand the urgency of rethinking our societal values, let’s start with a kitchen table conversation common in homes with young children: whether to use daycare. Can a single parent or a couple gain more by working than staying at home with the kids? Likely considerations include how rewarding the job is in various ways, the long-term cost of dropping out of the workforce, and the quality and affordability of daycare.

Here is what I said to my distressed, dying child, as lovingly and reassuringly as possible: “You will not be alone. You will not feel pain. We will be okay.” He needed each of these phrases more than “I love you.”

Hundreds of millions of “dead profiles” will be added to Facebook’s network in the next few decades, a study found, raising questions about how the data of the deceased is being handled. Oxford University researchers published a paper that found the dead “may well outnumber the living” on the social media platform before the end of the century. According to their analysis, at least 4.9 billion Facebook users will die by the year 2100 if Facebook continues to grow at its current rate.

Thanks to student loan debt, rising rents and stagnant wages, more millennials are living at home with their parents than at any other point this century. More than one in five adults, or 22 percent of millennial Americans, are either staying home or returning to childhood bedrooms, according to Zillow.

For now and probably forever.

It's even harder to decipher the fake from the facts on April Fools' Day.

Rummaging through your refrigerator, you come across a jar of mayonnaise labeled “BEST IF USED BY 06/10/19.” If it’s mid-July, are you risking illness by slathering it on your sandwich and eating it? It’s hard to say. Massachusetts and New Jersey are considering measures to clear up the confusion, following a California law that went into effect earlier this year. Several other states also are looking at labeling bills, as anti-food waste groups advocate for clearer signs to indicate when food is okay to eat, even if it’s not the freshest.

A few years ago during a break in a leadership class I was teaching, a manager named Michael walked up looking unsettled. His boss had told him he needed to be more productive, so he had spent a few hours analyzing how he spent his time. He had already cut his nonessential meetings. He couldn’t find any tasks to drop from his calendar. He didn’t see an obvious way to do them more efficiently.

Listening to early morning gunfire roll across hills and valleys during November deer season, I used to hear the sound of evil. Hunters were out there committing willful acts of violence, taking the lives of fellow beings. What compelled them to inflict such gratuitous harm, violating the most basic principles of compassion and goodness? Sitting at the kitchen table munching granola, I found it incomprehensible.

Something people tend to ignore about the high price of child care in the United States is that it’s not just a burden on individual families; it’s really a weight on our entire economy. The drag is obvious if you look at how female employment has stalled in the U.S. compared with the rest of the globe since the early 1990s. Back then, shoulder pads were in, Murphy Brown and Designing Women were on the air, and the share of American women in the workforce was reasonably high by global standards.

For some players, the sense of beginnings and hope is tempered by the thought: Is this my last one?

Vern Loomis, a retired structural draftsman in West Bloomfield, Michigan, had a standard office lunch: a peanut-butter sandwich, with various fruit, vegetable, and dessert accompaniments. He ate this, he estimates, nearly every workday for about 25 years.

Have you ever been told to "grow up" in your 20s or need an excuse as to why you still find cat videos on the internet really funny? Well now you might have an official reason as to why you're not acting like a mature adult. People don't become fully "adult" until they're in their 30s, according to brain scientists. Currently the UK law says you become a mature adult when you reach the age of 18.

If you’re one of the 115 million Americans who heads to work in a vehicle, on a daily basis, odds are there are few things that frustrate you more than getting stuck at a red light. Unfortunately, those precious minutes you spend waiting for a light to change are more than just annoying: they’re a major time-suck, too. While red lights often feel as though they take an eternity to change, that’s not quite the case.

Scientists have discovered 12 new natural satellites around Jupiter. According to CNN, scientists have made a new discovery within the scope of the study, which was created to detect the solar system’s nesting planet. Scientists believe that there is another planet in the edge of the solar system.

Bill Langlois has a new best friend. She is a cat named Sox. She lives on a tablet, and she makes him so happy that when he talks about her arrival in his life, he begins to cry. All day long, Sox and Mr. Langlois, who is 68 and lives in a low-income senior housing complex in Lowell, Mass., chat. Mr. Langlois worked in machine operations, but now he is retired. With his wife out of the house most of the time, he has grown lonely.

Apartments smaller than 375 square feet are now temporarily banned in Santa Monica under an emergency ordinance adopted Tuesday night by the City Council. The ban will only be in effect until May 10, giving city leaders 45 days to mull a permanent measure to deal with a sudden boom of market-rate micro-apartments in downtown Santa Monica.

Comparing labor tax rates across countries is a tricky endeavor. Some countries rely mostly on income and payroll taxes charged to workers, others on payroll taxes charged to employers, and still others on compelling workers and employers to pay private parties who provide pension and health insurance products. To get an apples-to-apples comparison, you have to normalize all of these various schemes into a single labor tax concept that actually reflects just how much labor compensation is being put towards compulsory payments of one sort or another.

New research suggests that you may need to look at an unusual factor when considering a move to a new city – its personality. A study published in Psychological Science in 2016 found small but statistically significant links between your self-esteem and the personalities of the people living in the same city as you. The researchers decided to compare the Big 5 personality traits (openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, and emotional stability) of individuals to the Big 5 personality traits that were most prevalent in a particular city.

Employers are bellyaching about a lack of workers to fill jobs, but they're not willing to pay more to attract them.

Don't like your Uber rating? Well, in a not-so-distant future, you just might have a score for everything else in your life.

There’s nothing virtuous about “early to bed, early to rise.” By Kate Shellnutt. (Feb. 27, 2017)