According to this latest research, people in the U.S. check their Facebook, Twitter, and other social media accounts a staggering 17 times a day, meaning at least once every waking hour,

Buying clothes, electronics, and other goodies once required leaving the house. Not anymore.

To make things worse, Nintendo and Microsoft had to go ahead and release the Wii and Kinect (respectively). Thanks to these two addictive gadgets, you can go bowling, play tennis, or participate in the Olympic Games in your living room.

Find the answer to anything with Google

Giant’s Peapod service lets you get groceries delivered right to your home. TaskRabit lets you find people that will literally do any type of errand you need from returning merchandise to putting together Ikea furniture.

"the presence of mobile technologies has the potential to divert individuals from face-to-face exchanges, thereby undermining the character and depth of these connections."

Julian Kabab, co-founder of FlashGap said that people are too focused on looking at social media when they're out at events, and it may be costing them in social interaction. "People miss out on parties because they want to see what's going on, on social networks, take beautiful selfies and add filters to their pictures," he told CNBC.

The study, conducted by Flashgap, a photo-sharing application with more than 150,000 users, found that 87 percent of millennials admitted to missing out on a conversation because they were distracted by their phone. Meanwhile, 54 percent said they experience a fear of missing out if not checking social networks.

Basically, what the University of Waterloo study reveals is that the more heuristic thinkers used their phone to replace their brain. If they couldn't remember a phone number, or the name of an actress, or any other tidbit of information, they'd look it up immediately. They wouldn't try to think it through or reason it out. They were happy to have someone else tell them the answer. Analytical thinkers didn't use the smartphone that way. They took the time to retrieve the information from their brains, or at least think it through before checking.

The University of Waterloo researchers followed the smartphone habits of 660 people and discovered a pretty frightening thing. When they excluded using the phone for pure entertainment purposes, such as streaming a movie, they noticed that the more people used their mobile devices, the more likely they were to rely on intuitive thinking. This was particularly true for those who used their smartphones to access search engines. The more analytical thinkers in the study were far less likely than others to use their smartphone's search engine.

Look at it this way. Pennycook compared the brain to a Ferrari: "If you think of someone like a physics professor, someone with high brain power, you can think of them as having a Ferrari. A Ferrari has a lot of horsepower. It is very powerful. But if my grandmother had a Ferrari, it wouldn't be very fast because she wouldn't drive it fast. If someone isn't willing to push the gas pedal down on their brain and use the horsepower, their brain won't be very fast either."

The problem is, according to Gordon Pennycook, a PhD candidate at University of Waterloo and one of the researchers on the study, that we get used to easy answers. In an interview with InformationWeek he said: "The fear is when we come across a problem we can't Google. You get used to having easy answers. Once you get used to it you won't persevere." If you don't persevere, you don't think through the problem cognitively and you come to a bad answer.

Since E. coli O157:H7 is a reportable infectious disease, our county public health department was notified as soon as Kevin was diagnosed. While Kevin laid in intensive care, health department officials interviewed my husband and I for an hour and a half. They asked us, along with our then five year old, to provide them with stool samples so they could determine if anyone else in the family had contracted E. coli. After we provided our samples, they said they would investigate our case and get back to us. We never heard from them.   Finally, on September 10, 2001, my mother – who was in visiting – asked me if she could follow up with the public health department. We were floored when the head of the health department informed her that my husband and daughter had also tested positive for E.coli O157:H7. Their only symptom was one loose bowel movement. Had Kevin not been sick, we wouldn’t have even given it a second thought.

On Tuesday, July 31, 2001, two weeks after we returned home, Kevin awoke with diarrhea and a mild fever. On the evening of August 1st, we took him to the emergency room for bloody diarrhea but were sent home. By the next morning, Kevin was much sicker and was hospitalized for dehydration and bloody stools. Later, that afternoon, we were given the diagnosis: E.coli O157:H7. On August 3rd, Kevin’s kidneys started failing. He had developed the dreaded HUS.

In 2003, after receiving and reviewing all the documents, we discovered that the PFGE pattern (or DNA) of Kevin’s E. coli matched that of a meat recall in August 2001. The recalled meat had been produced by a subsidiary of one of America’s largest agribusinesses. In July 2000 – one year before Kevin’s illness - this company failed USDA’s Salmonella test for the second time. This is significant because, under the new HACCP food inspection system, failing a Salmonella test is an indicator that other foodborne pathogens are more likely to be present and, according to USDA’s HACCP regulations, plants that fail the Salmonella test three times are supposed to be shut down.

Kevin finally convinced us to give him a sponge bath and, as soon as the washcloth came near his mouth, he grabbed it, bit down on it and sucked the water out of it. It broke our hearts.  

On Tuesday, August 7th, Kevin was placed on a ventilator and continuous dialysis. In hopes of preventing Kevin from remembering this ordeal, doctors heavily sedated him. As the medication wore off, Kevin would try to pull the tubes out so braces were put on his arms. His body began to swell. Doctors inserted tubes to drain fluid off both of his lungs. By the end of the week, he was receiving more medications than we could count to stabilize his blood pressure and heart rate. He had received eight units of blood. A special bed was ordered to help alleviate some of his pain, but throughout it all the hospital staff remained optimistic. They said that this was typically the way HUS/E.coli kids got through the illness. But for Kevin, all of this was not enough and finally on August 11th at 8:20 pm after being resuscitated twice - as doctors were attempting to put him on a heart-lung machine – our beloved Kevin died. He was only 2 years, 8 months and 1 day old. The autopsy later showed that both Kevin’s large and small intestines had died – a condition that is 100% fatal.

As of Sept. 3, seven states put in orders to the USDA for about 2 million pounds of beef that may contain the controversial product for the meals they serve in the 2013-14 school year. At this time last year there were only three states — Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota — that had put in orders for beef that may contain lean finely textured beef.

some areas might find it fairly easy to eat locally (in Washington State, for example, I’m less than fifty miles from industrial quantities of fresh produce, corn, wheat, beef, and milk), people in other parts of the country and the world would have to look farther afield