Happy Valentine’s Day! Many will be picking up bouquets for their loves today, but did you know that most flowers have to pass through the Miami International Airport before landing in U.S. stores?
Over the past three weeks, hundreds of flights from Colombia and Ecuador have delivered around 18,000 tons of flowers to the Florida hub. There were roses and carnations from Bogota; pompons, hydrangeas, and chrysanthemums from Medellin; and roses, carnations, and gypsophila from Quito, the Associated Press reports, citing airline Avianca. Check out a video chronicling how the stems make it from South America’s flower fields to your neighborhood shop.
The Surprising Power of Holding Hands With the People We Love |
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| Anecdotally, we can all probably speak to the soothing power of holding hands with a loved one. But there’s also some real science behind those positive feelings we associate with hand-holding.
“If you really understand hand-holding — what it is and how it has its effects — you begin to understand just about every single facet of what it is to be a human being,” clinical psychologist James Coan told Dr. Trisha Pasricha in her recent “Ask a Doctor” column for The Washington Post. “It expresses all the things that we are for each other.” Coan has been involved in several experiments on the topic, including one in which 16 married women were placed in MRI machines and faced with the prospect of an electric shock. When they held hands with strangers, it lowered their stress. When they held hands with their husbands, it lowered their stress even more. And the most profound effect occurred in couples who scored highest on marital quality tests. Subsequent studies replicated this result with other types of relationships, including friends and those who were dating. For Coan, the most surprising revelation from the experiments is that hand-holding isn’t an added benefit or a boost to our brains. Rather, it represents the baseline — we’re meant to be sharing our lives, and our burdens, with other people. “To the human brain, the world presents a series of problems to solve,” he said. “And it turns out being alone is a problem.” |
So…. HAPPY VALENTINES DAY TO ALL LOVERS!
