It's hard to say what'll be a more entertaining watch today: the Seattle Seahawks playing the New England Patriots in Super Bowl LXl or Team Fluff taking on Team Ruff in Puppy Bowl XXI. In terms of niceness, it doesn't get much sweeter than watching rescue dogs having fun. But the Super Bowl does have the added bonus of incredible commercials, like the one featuring Lady Gaga singing Mister Rogers' "Won't You Be My Neighbor." Guess we'll just have to catch both games — good thing we stocked up on snacks! — the Nice News team
Featured Story
Do You Have Foot-in-Mouth Syndrome? How to Avoid Saying Things You'll Regret
Richard Drury—DigitalVision/Getty Images
An estimated 100% of adults will experience a dreaded episode of "foot-in-mouth syndrome" at some point in their lives. Symptoms include blurting out opinions before thinking them through, cracking one-liners that later make you cringe, and losing sleep over off-the-cuff comments. We kid, of course, but the pain of saying something embarrassing or unintentionally offensive is no joke. While everyone has put their foot in their mouth at one time or another, some of us tend to do so more than others. That doesn't mean we're bad people — it's more an indication that we're anxious people, per psychotherapist Joel Blackstock. "We often speak not to communicate information but to discharge our own nervous energy," Blackstock, clinical director at Taproot Therapy Collective, tells Nice News. "We feel a silence and it feels dangerous, so we fill it with a joke that does not land or a comment that is too honest." Click below to learn some strategies for speaking more intentionally and get expert advice on how to recover from a blunder.
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When Life Gave a German Farm 9M Pounds of Potatoes, It Shared the Spuds for Free
Jan Woitas—picture alliance/Getty Images
Now that's a lot of potatoes. This photo shows a German farm's potato harvest surplus, which topped 9 million pounds and prompted a massive giveaway last month. Truckloads of spuds were donated to soup kitchens, schools, zoos, churches, Ukrainian aid efforts, and distribution sites for Berlin residents. Dubbed "the great potato rescue," the bonanza aimed to prevent food waste after Germany's largest potato crop in 25 years overwhelmed markets and sent costs down. So the farm, Osterland Agrar, teamed up with a Berlin newspaper and the nonprofit search engine Ecosia to set up 174 sites around the city, where people could stock up on tubers. "At first I thought it was some AI-generated fake news when I saw it on social media," Astrid Marz, a teacher, told The Guardian. "There were pictures of huge mountains of 'earth apples' with the instruction to come and get them for free!" Another local described one of the sites as having "a really party-like atmosphere," with people helping one another haul their freebies while swapping cooking tips. If reading this is making you hungry, check out this thorough list of potato recipes, including how to boil 'em, mash 'em, and stick 'em in a stew.
Humanity
Author Erin Port on How "Tiny Tweaks" Help Us Shift Toward Happiness
Courtesy of Erin Port
Baking delicious banana bread requires trial and error. Your first attempt might need more salt; your second might need more nutmeg. If it still doesn't taste the way you want it to, you continue making tiny tweaks until you're happy with your loaf. The same idea can be applied to our lives, says Erin Port. Port is the author of Tiny Tweaks, Happy Life: Simple Changes to Create Space for What Matters(published Jan. 27), and her banana bread analogy was inspired by her experience baking with her four kids. The final tweak that perfected their family recipe? The addition of chocolate chips. "You have a great life. You have a perfectly good banana bread recipe, right? We're not throwing out the banana recipe for a cookie recipe. That's silly," she explains to Nice News. "We're wanting banana bread. We want our life. But it's just little iterations that can make it better." These little iterations are effective, Port says, because they break through the paralysis so many of us feel in the face of making larger shifts. "When we try to do a sweeping overhaul and it doesn't work out, it gives us evidence that we can't make a change," she notes, adding: "There's something that really is powerful in making a small change. It gives us evidence that we can, and evidence that we can is a far better motivator than failure." Learn a few tiny tweaks you can try today.
Environment
Solar Panels May Last Longer Than Advertised, Study Finds
Eloi_Omella/iStock
Twenty-five years is the typical lifespan of solar panels — or so we thought. A study found that this warranty may be on the conservative side, with tested panels still generating more than 80% of their original power after three decades. Swiss researchers examined six solar arrays installed from 1987 to 1993. They discovered that annual degradation averaged 0.24%, lower than the typical 0.75-1% cited in the prior literature, with higher altitude sites degrading more slowly. These findings suggest that many panels could be kept in use beyond the end of their warranty, thus reducing unnecessary waste. Meanwhile, solar farms have also emerged as unexpected sanctuaries for rare plants in the Mojave Desert, per another recent study. By creating shaded microclimates, the panels seem to be helping plants like the threecorner milkvetch survive — and even thrive. Rather than having to prioritize clean energy over nature (or vice versa), they can go hand in hand. As Tiffany Pereira, an ecologist and the lead study author, told Grist: "It's a wild and beautiful place that we live in, and it's our job to look out for these species as well."
Sunday Selections
Deep Dives
Actors, doctors, and priests all flock to a clown school near Paris to learn the art of looking silly
We all dream about coming up with a great idea that changes the world, but what sets apart the people who actually do it? In his new book, cognitive scientist George Newman makes the case that inspiration doesn't strike like lightning; there's a repeatable framework within the creative process that leads to those "magic" moments. The book blends research with anecdotal evidence and offers practical exercises for readers to unlock their own creativity.
Prog rock legend Peter Gabriel is following an interesting model for releasing his latest album, o\i: He's dropping a new song with each full moon of 2026, revealing the entire album at the end of the year. The first track audiences heard was January's "Been Undone," and last week, to mark the snow moon, Gabriel shared "Put the Bucket Down." Each song is also accompanied by unique artwork. February's graphic, called "Cosmic Spider/Web," was co-created by artist Tomás Saraceno and 12 different spiders "who are credited with authorship," Gabriel said in a press release.
This Week in History
Julia Child's "The French Chef" Debuts on PBS
February 11, 1963
Bettmann/Getty Images
Well before Julia Child was whipping up sole meunière, she was a research assistant in the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA. Through her service, she met her husband, and it was due to that love that she fell in love again — with French food: The couple moved to Paris in 1948 when he was posted to the U.S. Embassy. At 37, Child enrolled in Le Cordon Bleu culinary school, and at 49, she co-authored 1961's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, aimed at American readers. She and her husband moved back to the States that same year, and in 1963, PBS' The French Chef debuted, with Child at the helm. The show made her a household name and created one of the world's first TV-star chefs, running for 10 seasons and winning a Peabody award and an Emmy. Watch a clip of the first episode, in which Child cooks boeuf bourguignon.
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