Author: Jena Bailey

Hasbro Predicts Hot Items for Christmas 2017

Christmas is but five months away. If you’re going to be looking for the hottest toys, you can’t start early enough. Hasbro has released a list of what they think will be the most popular toys come December.
HotToys
“Hanazuki” MoodGleam Wearable, $20. Colors change to reflect the mood of the wearer, just like the bracelet worn by the popular cartoon character, Hanazuki. For ages 6 and up.

Play-Doh Letters and Language Set, $20. Kids can practice letter recognition and pronunciation using the alphabet stampers and play mats. For ages 2 and up.

Spider-Man: Homecoming Vulture Attack Set, $45. Help Spider-Man defeat Vulture in this Queens, New York, street scene playset that lets kids play out the battle however they imagine. For ages 4 and up.

“Star Wars” Black Series Poe Dameron Electronic Helmet, $80. Although they have yet to test, the experts at the Good Housekeeping Institute love the interactive aspect of this role-playing helmet. Put the device on and the surround sound will immerse you in the life of skilled X-Wing fighter pilot, Poe Dameron. For ages 8 and up.

Littlest Pet Shop Cruise Ship Playset, $40. This playset will let the Pet Shop crew set sail on a luxurious cruise. The kit comes with three new pets as well as nautical accessories. For ages 4 and up.

Marvel Legend Series 12-Inch Figures, $50. Add to your child’s super hero collection with these extra-detailed 12-inch figurines from the Legend Series. The “Deadpool” character is available now and Thor and Hulk figurines will join in the fall. For ages 4 and up.

Pie Face Sky High, $25. The original version of this hilarious game was a favorite in the Good Housekeeping Institute’s Toy Test last year, so we’re excited to get our hands on this edition. Inspired by the Strong Man carnival game, this new rendition has a mask that is three feet tall. The speed at which the pie will fly all depends on how hard the player hits the launcher with an included plastic hammer. For ages 5 and up.

Coinhole, $15. Available this summer. Players compete in this game by bouncing coins off the table, onto the board and into the hole. The first to sink all of their coins wins! For ages 8 and up.

“BeyBlade” Burst Avatar Attack Battle Set, $50. Available in August. Let it rip and unleash your attack! Inspired by the series Beyblade, players launch their spinning tops into an arena to compete against one another to spin the longest. The last one standing takes the winning title. For ages 8 and up.

Disney Princess Dance Code Belle, $120. Available this fall. We know that Belle has always been a curious learner, but now she is dabbling in coding. Through an app, kids will learn basic techniques with her and can even connect the dots to program a dance routine for Belle to perform before their eyes. For ages 5 and up.

Furreal Roarin’ Tyler, the Playful Tiger, $130. Available this fall. Furreal has been a hit in the Good Housekeeping Institute’s Toy Test in the past and our engineers are excited about the new interactive tiger for kids to play with this holiday season. For ages 6 and up.

Furreal Makers Proto Max, $120. Available this fall. Another new toy from one of the Good Housekeeping Institute’s favorite brands, this futuristic dog comes with a customizable personality that makes each pup unique. For ages 6 and up.

Get a Grip, $20. Available this fall. Find out just how useful your thumbs are in this game that has players attempting to complete dozens of tasks without using their thumbs. For ages 8 and up.

Marvel Legends Series Star-Lord Electronic Helmet, $100. Available this fall. The most gleaming features of this helmet are the LED light up eyes, authentic sound effects and the fact that it is Bluetooth compatible, meaning you can sync up your music to the built-in speakers and rock out. For adults only.

Hearing Things, $20. Available this fall. Hilarity will ensue in this game that challenges players to put on noise-cancelling headphones and read the lips of their teammates. The challenge is to guess as many phrases as possible before time runs out. For ages 12 and up.

Marvel’s “Thor: Ragnarok” Gladiator Hulk Interactive Figure, $35. Available this fall. Fans can have their own 13-inch electronic Hulk figure that they can control by the push of a button. This version of Hulk also interacts with the electronic Thor figure. (Sold separately). Ages 4 and up.

Marvel’s “Thor: Ragnarok” Rumble Strike Hammer, $20. Available this fall. The foam edges will let your child channel the strength of Thor without actually wreaking havoc on your house. For ages 5 and up.

Nerf Nitro Motofury Rapid Rally, $50. Available this fall. The newest member of the Nerf family comes with one blaster, one high jump ramp, one long jump ramp, nine Nerf Nitro foam cars and 12 obstacles, leaving your child with a hands-on game safe for both inside and outside. For ages 5 and up.

Pour Taste, $20. Available this fall. Kids who love weird food combinations will get a kick out of these challenges. Players pick their liquid ingredients, spin the spinner and the game tells them which they have to mix up. From there, they can choose to drink up the crazy concoction or take a pass. For ages 8 and up.

“Star Wars: Forces of Destiny” Adventure Figure & Friends Assortment, $25. Available this fall. R2-D2 makes the perfect companion to the Princess Leia Organa figure for your child’s collection from the galaxy far, far away. Each comes with their own unique heroic action moves to prepare them for their galactic missions. For ages 4 and up.

“Star Wars: Forces of Destiny” 11-inch Adventure Figure Assortment, $20. Available this fall. Similar to the one above, the 11-inch action figure assortment includes Princess Leia, as well as Rey of Jakku, Jyn Erso and Sabine Wren. Each is sold separately and, unlike the other, don’t come with any little companions (like R2-D2). For ages 4 and up.

Baby Alive Sweet Tears Baby Doll, $50. Available this fall. The newest model from the Baby Alive line is the most expressive yet with the ability to frown, cry real tears and show signs of a cold. For ages 3 and up.

“Star Wars: Forces of Destiny” Bladebuilders Extendable Staff, $20. Available this fall. Kids can pretend that they themselves are the heroic scavenger Rey of Jakku with this extendable staff. It’s compatible with Bladebuilders Lightsabers, making for even more creative methods of defense. For ages 6 and up.

Tickle Me Elmo, $30. Available this fall. Elmo’s hysterical laugh is back for a new generation of fans. This new Elmo is a little smaller, lighter and softer than he has been in years past, but still comes with that infectious cackle. For ages 18 months to 4 years.

Marvel Legends Series “Thor” Mjolnir Electronic Hammer, $100. Available this fall. Made for elevated role-playing, this die-cast metal pommel hammer features intricate detailing , SFX and light up lightning effects. For adults only.

Big City, Small Town

If you are from a small town, whether it be in the Sandhills of Nebraska or the north of Saskatchewan, you experience the world differently than folks from the big cities, like New York or Toronto.

Small town folks learned to drive at 11. Big city folks likely don’t own a car and if they have a license to drive they got it in their 20s or 30s.

Small town folks are most comfortable with their legs swinging from the rear end of a pickup truck. Big city folks depend on public transportation – a bus, subway or Uber ride – to get to the newest “in” place.

In a small town the mayor used to be your gym coach and the checker at the grocery store was last year’s prom queen. Big city folks have to tell their country cousins that they have not met that famous person who lives in their city. The country folks believe their city cousins are constantly kicking it with the rich and famous.

Small town folks knew the name of every person in their high school graduating class. Big city folks have no idea who most of their 700 fellow graduates were.

Getting mentioned in the local weekly paper is akin to winning an Oscar for small town folks. If the big city daily mentions someone, that’s nearly as bad as being the subject of a wanted poster on the post office wall.

In a small town, the cop who just pulled you over used to be your babysitter. In the big city, the cop that starts asking you questions is looking for someone like Jack the Ripper.

Small town folks might start their out-of-the-nest residency in a roomy 95-year-old farmhouse that they rent for $350 a month. Big city folks settle into an 800 square foot apartment for around $1,000, or more, per month.

Living in one-bedroom apartments and studio spaces in the big city doesn’t make for an ideal living situation for a dog. At most you can hang out with a cat. When you see someone walking around the park with a basset hound, you can’t help but wonder what palace they must live in. In a small town, your two dogs and three cats have plenty of space – inside and out – to roam.

The Statue of Liberty, Royal Ontario Museum and Shedd Aquarium are all amazing places to visit – for small town folks. Big city folks haven’t been yet and aren’t that interested in going.

To note that the neighborhood is really changing in a big city means you just got back from vacation and found that construction on a 12-story luxury condo building has started on your block. In the small town, change means that a kid from a town 10 miles away has just moved into the apartment above the drug store.

Biometric Monitoring May End Passwords

The average computer user has 27 passwords, and it can be tough to keep track of them all. But a solution that some consider creepy may be at hand, CBS News reports. With sensors that can read all kinds of identifying information about us, biometric data may be the key to our online world, putting an end to the password.

Professor Vishal Patel asked a student to walk across campus at Rutgers University, then hand his phone to another student, who walked back. The difference in how they walk was “enough to identify who the person is walking,” Patel said. To the phone’s accelerometer — every smartphone has one — the walking signals looked different.

Just two years ago, in “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation,” this was science fiction. But researchers like Patel are making biometrics real and trying to use them to make our devices more secure with a process called “active authentication” that constantly and passively monitors the user.

The phone was also trained to recognize the unique way its owner scrolls down the screen. The time between specific keystrokes also gives you away, as well as the words you choose and the way you punctuate them. Move a mouse and the path of the pointer can identify you and so can the way you click.
No one method works well enough, but combining several should, as Google showed in a 2015 test claiming “a new method of authentication that may prove to be 10-fold more secure than the best fingerprint sensors.”

Much of this work has been funded by DARPA, the research group within the U.S. Department of Defense which is overseen by Angelos Keromytis. “We have a lot of passwords, and as you’ve seen in the news, we get targeted same as everybody else, and we think we can do something better than passwords,” Keromytis said.

So DARPA called on a dozen universities and private companies for creative solutions. Some are hard to believe. “Your phone has a number of radios: wifi radio, cellular radio, Bluetooth radio. These emit signals, the signals from a close up distance reflect off your skin. Well, it turns out they don’t actually reflect off your skin. They actually penetrate the skin a few millimeters,” Keromytis said. “So one of our performers figured out a way of not only sensing heartbeat but also extracting a high-fidelity signal that could be used to authenticate a user based on their individual heartbeat.”

So why isn’t this active authentication active yet? It could drain our batteries too quickly or fail to work in certain settings – and some of the methods, like tracking our pattern of life, could turn off users. “Once you have this information you can sort of learn where the person will end up in the afternoon or at night,” Patel said.”It is creepy, but it is very powerful,” Patel said.

Joseph Atick helped invent facial recognition technology 25 years ago. Today, he said, tracking users is so valuable to marketers that tech companies can’t be trusted to self-regulate their use of biometrics. “You broke my password, I’m going to change it,” Atick said. “I can’t change my face, I can’t change my fingerprints. I need some mechanism to protect me.”

That mechanism would be a guarantee that all the biometric information stays on the device.

A Canadian Word Tour

Hey Yanks, if you have visited your upstairs neighbors you likely know that Canadians have a number of expressions that aren’t quite the same as those used in the States to describe a variety of things.

Several such words or phrases have to do with alcohol. Here are a few of those:

Mickey: A 375 ml (12.7 oz) bottle of alcohol. Usually shaped like a flask but slightly larger, they fit perfectly in a purse.

Texas mickey: A 3 liter (101 ounces) bottle of alcohol.

Gong show or gonger: A situation that gets way out of control, often in a funny way. A total disaster. Sometimes used to refer to a party that gets out of hand.

Two-four: A case of 24 beers.

Pre-drinking: What Americans refer to as “pregaming” – having a drink with friends at someone’s home before going out to a bar or club.

A “pull” or a “boot”: Both terms are used to describe someone who is of drinking age who buys alcohol for those who are underage. In British Columbia and Alberta, the term “boot” is used. In Saskatchewan, the term is “pull.” Neither is prominent in eastern Canada.

Another batch of words or phrases have to do with foods.

Homo milk: Homogenized milk, also known as whole milk. In Canada, it is very normal for a parent or spouse to ask you to pick up some homo milk on your way home

KD or Kraft Dinner: Kraft mac and cheese.

Timbit: A donut hole from Tim Hortons or from any other restaurant in Canada.

Nanaimo bar: A popular rich dessert that requires no baking. Named after the city of Nanaimo, British Columbia.

Rockets: The candy that Americans call “Smarties.” In Canada, “Smarties” are candy-coated chocolates made by Nestlé that are closer to M&Ms.

Freezies: A favorite summertime treat that consists mostly of sugar and water frozen in a clear plastic tube.

Here’s a variety of other uniquely Canadian expressions:

Keener: A person who is extremely eager or keen. Used interchangeably with terms like “brownnoser” and “overachiever.”

Chirping or beaking: Making fun of someone. (Chirping is used in eastern Canada; beaking is used in parts of western Canada.)

Gotch, gitch or gonch: Tight men’s underpants known elsewhere as tighty-whities – e.g., “Do you separate your gitch from your socks when you do laundry?”

Stag and stagette parties: Bachelor and bachelorette parties.

Give’r: To exert as much effort as possible. Often used in the context of extreme sports.

Hang a Larry: Turn left.

Hang a Roger: Turn right.

Toque: Pronounced “toohk,” a toque is a winter hat or knit cap, like a beanie. It often refers to the type of beanie that rolls up at the bottom.

“Out for a rip”: Going out for a drive. Or a snowmobile ride. Or any other kind of excursion, really.

Dart: A cigarette.

Decked out: An adjective used to refer to someone who is dressed up or something that has been decorated. This one often is heard in parts of the States, too.

Gravol: The Canadian equivalent of Dramamine, the over-the-counter drug for motion sickness.

Runners: Running shoes. Or, really, any kind of athletic shoe, like a tennis shoe.

Chesterfield: A couch or sofa.

Garburator: An electric device underneath of a kitchen sink that breaks up food so it can be washed away. Americans call it a trash disposal or a garbage disposal.

Washroom: A polite word for bathroom. The Canadian version of “restroom.”

Housecoat: A bathrobe.

Pencil crayons: Colored pencils.

College: This refers specifically to community colleges in Canada. Any institution that awards degrees is referred to as a university.

Haligonian: Anyone from the city of Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Bunnyhug: Used exclusively in Saskatchewan to refer to a hooded sweatshirt, or hoodie. But only in Saskatchewan.

Dep: A convenience store in Montreal and other parts of Quebec. It’s short for the French word dépanneur.

“Hey” vs. “eh”: In some parts of western Canada, the term “hey” is used more commonly than “eh.” Importantly, Canadians do not intersperse either word at random throughout sentences. Both are used like the word “right” at the end of a sentence.

Happy Birthday USA & Canada!

From coast to coast across North America there will be parades, picnic, concerts and fireworks celebrating Canada Day on July 1 and Independence Day on July 4.

FlagsUSCanadaIt’s birthday time for the neighbors!

Canada Day is the national day of Canada, a federal statutory holiday celebrating the anniversary of the July 1, 1867, enactment of the British North America Act, 1867, which united three colonies into a single country called Canada within the British Empire. Originally called Dominion Day, the holiday was renamed in 1982, the year the Canada Act was passed. Canada Day observances of this 150th birthday will take place throughout Canada as well as among Canadians internationally.

Independence Day, also referred to as the Fourth of July or July Fourth, is a federal holiday in the United States commemorating the adoption of the Declaration of Independence 241 years ago on July 4, 1776. The Continental Congress declared that the thirteen American colonies regarded themselves as a new nation, the United States of America, and were no longer part of the British Empire.

In both countries a large percentage of the population gets the nation’s birthday off and many retailers, government offices, libraries, schools and services shut down.

Celebrations such as fireworks or parades will generally be held on this day. In major cities across the continent celebrations begin early in the day and continue into the evening, with concerts, games and other festivities.

Our Brains Take Shortcuts

Our brains are good at some things but not others. We are terrible at crunching numbers, for example. The brain takes shortcuts and makes snap judgements instead of carefully deliberating the facts, according to Jeff Stibel, a vice chairman of Dun & Bradstreet and a brain scientist.

Business owners should consider experimenting with prices. Thanks to brain science, we now know that even a one-cent change can make a big difference.

CrunchingNumbersThe human brain is likely to round down to make a product appear to be a better value. Being aware of this can make you a more careful buyer. Numbers are an easy place for the brain to take a shortcut. We tend to be great at making estimates but horrible at rounding. When our brains see a price tag with lots of numbers, they automatically estimate, so $4.99 ends up closer to $4 than to $5; $66,999 becomes $66,000 or sometimes even $60,000. Psychologists have known this for decades, and economists now begrudgingly admit it too.

Researchers found that there is a big sales difference between $2.99 and $3, but dropping a product’s price from $2.24 to $2.23 does not yield a measurable sales increase. Relative pricing plays a significant role: A product’s price compared to the products physically surrounding it can impact its sales.

This is why gas stations not only charge per gallon to the nine-tenths of a cent but also price match to the nearby competitor. The human brain is especially good at making either/or comparisons and especially bad at decimals.

Rounding bias becomes more important for a larger purchase. A $399,000 house is pretty much $400,000, but not in your mind: your brain shortcut system will try to suggest it’s closer to $300,000.

To combat this, physically write down the price on a piece of paper, strike through it, and rewrite the appropriate number by rounding up. The best defense is always a strong offense.

Billionaires Ready for the Apocalypse

A rising number of American billionaires are snapping up large tracts of land. Some are doing it in preparation for an apocalyptic event – be it viral epidemic, nuclear war or cataclysmic pole shift.

Reid Hoffman, the cofounder of LinkedIn and a notable investor, told The New Yorker earlier this year he estimates more than 50% of Silicon Valley billionaires have bought some level of “apocalypse insurance,” like an underground bunker.

doomsdayAn article in Forbes suggests the super-rich are making serious land grabs in America’s heartland, where the climate is mild and the locations are conducive to survivalism, farming and living on the land. States like Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Texas and Wyoming are home to a number of fortified shelters and vacation homes where wealthy billionaires could happily live out their post-doomsday or retirement days.

According to Forbes contributor Jim Dobson, lots of billionaires have private planes “ready to depart at a moment’s notice.” They also own motorcycles, weaponry and generators. None of the billionaires named by Forbes have said publicly that their vast amounts of land will be used for apocalypse preparations – though they certainly would make good hide-outs.

John Malone, who made his fortune in cable and communications, is the nation’s biggest individual landowner. Malone owns 2.2 million acres across six states including huge swaths of Maine and New Hampshire. The cable king told Forbes in 2011 that he made the land grabs as an investment. He said he loves to fish and occasionally bird-hunt on his properties.

Media mogul Ted Turner, the second biggest individual landowner in the US, owns 2 million acres across Colorado, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico and South Dakota.

Philip Anschulze, a railroad and oil magnate, locked down 434,000 acres in Wyoming. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has 400,000 acres in Texas. And Stan Kroenke, owner of a massive sports and entertainment holding company, bought 225,000 acres in Montana.

Real estate tycoon David Hall, a Mormon engineer, has been snapping up farmland in Vermont. He wants to build sustainable, high-density communities based on the writings of religious figure Joseph Smith.

Nearly 1 in 3 People Overweight

Nearly a third of the world’s population is obese or overweight and an increasing number of people are dying of related health problems in a “disturbing global public health crisis,” acording to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Some 4 million people died of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer and other ailments linked to excess weight in 2015, bringing death rates related to being overweight up 28 percent since 1990, according to the research.

“People who shrug off weight gain do so at their own risk,” said Christopher Murray, one of the authors of the study. In 2015, excess weight affected 2.2 billion people equal to 30 percent of the world’s population, according to the study.

Almost 108 million children and more than 600 million adults weighed in as obese, having a body mass index (BMI) above 30, said the research that covered 195 countries. More than 60 percent of fatalities occurred among this group, the study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington found.

BMI is calculated by dividing a person’s weight in kilograms by their height in meters squared, and is an indication of whether a person is a healthy weight. A BMI score over 25 is overweight, over 30 is obese and over 40 is morbidly obese.

The World Health Organization says obesity has more than doubled since 1980, reaching epidemic proportions. Obesity rates among children were increasing faster than among adults in many countries, including Algeria, Turkey and Jordan, the study said. Meanwhile, almost 800 million people, including 300 million children, go to bed hungry each night, according to the United Nations.

Poor diets and sedentary lifestyles were mainly to blame for increasing numbers of overweight people, experts said. Urbanization and economic development have led to increasing obesity rates also in poor countries where part of the population doesn’t have enough to eat, as people ditch traditional, vegetable-rich diets for processed foods.

“People are consuming more and more processed foods that are high in sugar and fat and exercising less,” said Boitshepo Bibi Giyose, senior nutrition officer at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. Research in Mexico, Brazil, China, South Korea and Britain by London-based Overseas Development Institute has shown that the cost of processed foods like ice cream, hamburgers, chips and chocolate has fallen since 1990, while the cost of fresh fruit and vegetables has gone up.

History of Irish Surnames

The earliest known Irish surname is O’Clery (O Cleirigh). It was written that the lord of Aidhne, Tigherneach Ua Cleirigh, who died in County Galway back in the year 916 A.D. In fact, that Irish name may actually be the earliest surname recorded in all of Europe, according to the website Ancestry.com.

Until about the 10th century in Ireland, surnames were not passed down from generation to generation. Instead, surnames were patronymic, or based on someone’s father’s name. A person was identified by his given name plus “mac,” meaning “son of,” followed by his father’s name.

For instance, Brian mac Colum was Brian, son of Colum. Brian’s son might be Finnian mac Brian (Finnian, son of Brian). The female form of “mac” is “nic,” shortened from the Irish iníon mhic. Alternatively, the prefix “o” was sometimes used in place of “mac” and meant “grandson of” or “descended from.” If Colum was well known, his grandson might have gone by the name Finnian O Colum.

There were no fixed surnames, so a surname changed every generation or two. That can make tracing your family tree a bit complicated for thr 14% of Canadians and 10.5% of Americans descended from the Irish.

Even without hereditary surnames, those names still hold clues. For example, that person named O’Clery or O Cleirigh (or Ua Cleirigh) was the grandson or descendant of someone named Cleirigh. (“Ua” was an earlier form of “O.”)

It was around the 1100s, as the population was increasing, that people in the upper social classes started taking hereditary surnames (those that remain fixed over the generations); others didn’t need surnames, or even get around to them, until the 1500s.

Another strong influence on Irish names came with the Norman invasion of 1169, when a lot of Anglo-French names came marching into Ireland (this, too, is when the Latin-derived prefix “Fitz,” meaning “son of,” first came into Irish names). It’s from this influence that some of the names we now consider Irish — Costello, Power, Burke, and others — first entered the scene.

In the 1500s, the influence of the English was beginning to make itself felt in Ireland. Ireland was experiencing religious persecution and invasions, and many changes came to the island — including the changing of Irish names, steadily but surely over the ensuing years, into ones that sounded more English.
An example of this was the common Irish surname Mac Gabhann, which meant “son of a smith.” Some Mac Gabhanns, living in County Cavan, had their name translated to Smith and it remained that way. Others outside that area resisted, but the spelling became anglicized and they became Mac/McGowans. This was very common. In many cases the prefixes Mac and O were discarded.

Many surnames originated as occupational or descriptive names. That earliest known name, O Cleirigh (O’Clery), was someone descended from a clerk; Mac an Bhaird (Ward) was son of a bard; and Mac Labhrain (MacCloran) was son of a spokesman. Descriptive names were names that described the first person to take them. The first person with the name Dubh (Duff) (“black” or “dark”) was probably dark featured. Other descriptive surnames include Bane (“white”), Crone (“brown”) and Lawder (“strong”).
Irish toponymic surnames, deriving from a place where the original name bearer once lived, are rare. They include Ardagh, Athy, Bray, Kelly, Sutton, and a few others.

The most common Irish surnames in Ireland haven’t changed much for a century. Here are 10 of them:

1. Murphy — The Anglicized version of the Irish surname Ó Murchadha and Mac Murchadha, meaning “sea warrior.”

2. Kelly — The origin of this Irish name is uncertain. An Anglicized version of the Irish name Ó Ceallaigh, it can describe a warrior or mean “white-headed,” “frequenting churches” or “descendant of Ceallach.”

3. O’Sullivan — (Ó Súileabháin or Ó Súilleabháin in Irish). In 1890, 90 percent of the O’Sullivans were estimated to be in Munster. Many people agree that the basic surname means “eye,” but they do not agree whether the rest of the name means “one-eyed,” “hawk-eyed,” “black-eyed” or something else.

4. Walsh — This name came to Ireland via British soldiers during the Norman invasion of Ireland and means “from Wales.” It’s derived from Breathnach or Brannagh.

5. Smith — This surname does not necessarily suggest English ancestry, as some think; often the surname was derived from Gabhann (which means “smith”).

6. O’Brien — This name came down from Brian Boru (941-1014) who was king of Munster; his descendants took the name Ó Briain.

7. Byrne (also Byrnes; O’Byrne) — from the Irish name Ó Broin (“raven”; also, descendant of Bran); this dates to the ancient Celtic chieftain Bran mac Máelmórda, a King of Leinster in the 11th century.

8. Ryan — This name has various possible origins: from the Gaelic Ó Riagháin (grandson or descendant of Rían) or Ó Maoilriain (grandson/descendant of Maoilriaghain) or Ó Ruaidhín (grandson/descendant of the little red one). Or it may be a simplification of the name Mulryan. It means “little king.”

9. O’Connor — From Ó Conchobhair (grandson or descendant of Conchobhar; “lover of hounds”).

10. O’Neill — Anglicized from the Gaelic Ua Néill (grandson or descendant of Niall). The name is connected with meanings including “vehement” and “champion.” The main O’Niall family is descended from the historic “Niall of the Nine Hostages.”

‘Smartphone Thumb’ Plaguing More People

A condition that doctors used to only see in factory workers is becoming more widespread. The pain that comes from the repetitive movements of texting has been dubbed “smartphone thumb” by doctors.

It’s actually tendinitis, when the tendon that bends and flexes the thumb becomes inflamed. More and more people are complaining about this type of pain in their thumb each year, say doctors at the Mayo Clinic.

Dr. Kristin Zhao, a biomedical engineer at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., explained what might be happening inside the hand to cause “smartphone thumb.”

“One of the hypotheses is that the joints get loose and lax, and because of that, the bones kind of move differently than they would in a normal situation,” said Zhao. She and a team of colleagues have been studying “smartphone thumb” for the last seven years. She says the movements we require our thumbs to make as we hold our phones are awkward.

“It’s also a movement that requires some force through the thumbs. So when you press on your phone, you know, you’re interacting with your phone. It’s not just free movement in space,” she said.

Mayo Clinic researchers began using a dynamic imaging technique in 2010 to watch the bones of a healthy patient move so they could document what’s normal and compare it with what’s not. “Our hypothesis is that abnormal motion of bones in the thumb could be causing pain onset and eventual osteoarthritis,” Zhao said.

Too much texting might lead to more cases of arthritis in the thumb, Zhao says. “There is a high incidence of osteoarthritis in the thumb, and we just want to make sure we aren’t encouraging that onset by our daily activities,” she said.

The researchers also want to address is the impact of so much thumb movement on children. What it will mean for them later in life is unknown. “We really don’t understand why adults get pain, and so children, if you start earlier, you may get pain younger,” she said.

To prevent problems, start by giving your thumbs a break, doctors say. Mix up your method by using your forefinger to peck the screen, or use your voice to dictate a message. You can also perform daily stretching exercises with your wrists and fingers to keep your tendons limber.

Think about wow often you’re using your joints and how often you are resting them, advises Zhao. “Are we taking periodic rests, or are we just exposing continually over the course of the day?” she asked.

The Mayo Clinic study is ongoing, and researchers have not yet reached any conclusions. Doctors do already know that about osteoarthritis in the thumb occurs more in women than men.