Month: January 2025

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Just One Cigarette Can Take 20 Minutes off Your Life

For centuries, the use of tobacco and smoking has been a part of our culture and other cultures around the world. Even up until the mid 1960s, smoking cigarettes was allowed in nearly every public space; hospitals, school buildings, bars, and restaurants included. It wasn’t until the 1970s and ’80s that the health consequences became more apparent, with illnesses such as gum disease and lung cancer being directly linked to smoking.

And while we know that regular cigarette use is dangerous for our health and the health of those around us, new research found that it may also have a direct link to a shorter life span. 

According to a study from the University College London, smoking a single cigarette takes about 20 minutes off a person’s life, on average. That means if you smoke one pack of 20 cigarettes, you’ll lose nearly seven hours off of your life. Add three more packs and you’ll lose over a day. 

Most data comes to the same conclusion—the harm caused by smoking is generally cumulative. Therefore, the sooner you stop regularly smoking, the longer you’ll live. 

Related: ‘Forever Chemicals’ Found in This Common Wearable Tech

To put it into perspective, the analysis concluded that if a person who smokes 10 cigarettes per day quits smoking on Jan. 1, 2025, they could prevent the loss of a full day of life by Jan. 8. In addition, if they stopped smoking for 20 days from Jan. 1 to Feb. 20, they could boost their life expectancy by a week. If they didn’t smoke from Jan. 1 to Aug. 5, they would gain a whole week and if they stopped for a year they would gain back 50 days of life. 

“Most smokers realize that smoking could shorten their life but not the impact of each cigarette they smoke,” the study’s authors said. “Britain has some of the best data available worldwide to estimate the average loss of life per cigarette smoked, which is approximately 20 minutes: 17 for men and 22 for women.”

Aside from obesity, smoking cigarettes is one of the main causes of death worldwide. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly one in five people die each year from cigarette use. That’s more than 480,000 deaths annually, including deaths from secondhand smoke. Not to mention, cigarettes are known to cause heart disease, stroke, lung diseases, diabetes, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). 

If you’ve been hesitant to stop smoking, this could be the sign you need to start 2025 fresh. 

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Author: Madison Freeman

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Popeye and Tintin are now in the public domain

An image showing a Popeye comic strip
Popeye’s first appearance in E.C. Segar’s Thimble Theatre comic strip. | Image: King Features

It’s a new year, and that means more works are headed to the public domain. This year, thousands of copyrighted works created in 1929, including the earliest versions of Popeye and the Belgian comic book character Tintin, are now free to reuse and repurpose in the US.

Duke Law School’s Center for the Study of Public Domain has once again rounded up all the most iconic works that have been freed from the bounds of copyright, which also includes sound recordings from 1924. As pointed out by Duke Law School, 1929 was a particularly pivotal year for film, as it was the first with sound.

These are just some of the works entering the public domain this year (you can view the full catalog here):

  • The Skeleton Dance from Disney’s Silly Symphonies short film series
  • Alfred Hitchcock’s first sound film Blackmail
  • Nacio Herb Brown’s Singin’ in the Rain and the film it appeared in, The Hollywood Revue of 1929
  • On With the Show, the first all-talking feature-length film in color
  • William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury
  • Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials Mystery
  • Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms
  • Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own
  • Various works from Salvador Dali, including Illumined Pleasures, The Accommodations of Desire, and The Great Masturbator

The list also includes Popeye, who first appeared in E.C. Segar’s Thimble Theatre comic strip, with a story titled “Gobs of Work.” But this Popeye isn’t the one that eats spinach to grow big muscles; the brawny sailor didn’t start eating spinach to gain strength until 1932 (though the very first Popeye could still pack a punch).

“Everything that he says, all of his characteristics, his personality, his sarcasm… that’s public domain,” Jennifer Jenkins, the director of Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, told NPR. “The spinach, if you want to be on the safe side, you might want to wait.”

The earliest version of the young reporter Tintin and his pup Snowy (or “Milou” if you speak French) from Hergé’s Les Aventures de Tintin are also headed to the public domain. But folks in the European Union, where protections apply throughout an author’s life and 70 years after death, will have to wait a little longer for a copyright-free Tintin. Since Hergé died in 1983, the EU won’t see Tintin in the public domain until 2054, according to Duke University.

As with previous years’ works, this latest round of media could’ve appeared in the public domain much earlier, but US lawmakers in 1998 extended copyright protections to works from 1923 and beyond for an additional 20 years — conveniently protecting Disney’s mascot Mickey Mouse. But Disney couldn’t keep its iconic mouse all to itself forever, as the Steamboat Willie-era Mickey entered the public domain last year. We’re getting even more Mickey Mouse animations in 2025, including the short film The Karnival Kid, where Mickey Mouse dons his white gloves for the first time and speaks his first words: “hot dogs.”

Just like with Mickey and Winnie the Pooh, we’re bound to see games and movies starring Popeye and Tintin as people try to draw attention with the freshly available characters. Even Netflix is preparing an adaptation of Agatha Christie’s 1929 novel The Seven Dials.

There will be an even wider range of classic characters to use next year, with Betty Boop and Pluto set to enter the public domain in 2026.

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Author: Emma Roth