Scientists at Swiss university ETH Zurich have found a way to make chocolate shimmer, without the artificial colorants. The stunning incandescence is achieved through a surface imprint that disperses light to display an array of hues, similar to a chameleon’s skin. Instead of a coating, the researchers tried to do an impression on the surface, which allows a colorful shimmer to appear.  Researchers plan to refine the chocolate shimmer to a glow. Geek.com has the details: 

Thanks to experts from the FHNW University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland, who developed a mould that makes it possible to imprint more than one chocolate at a time, this unique method can be scaled up for industry.

The scientists are in discussions with major chocolate producers, according to ETH; they even plan to establish a spin-off company. A patent for the process has also been filed.

“The project was only successful because different disciplines worked together,” the university said in a press release. “Fresh ideas prevented the project from stalling at crucial moments.”

image via Geek.com

Major depression is one of the most common mental disorders in the United States. In 2017, an estimated 17.3 million adults in the country had at least one major depressive episode. This number represented 7.1% of all U.S. adults. These people have had few treatment options, until now.

In March, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the drug called esketamine (Spravato). It is...

a fast-acting nasal spray derived from ketamine that is the first genuine advance in treating depression in more than 30 years.

First synthesized in the 1960s and still used globally as an anesthetic on battlefields and in surgery, ketamine became popular as an illicit club drug known as Special K in the 1980s and ’90s because it triggered trippy dissociative side effects. But nearly two decades ago, researchers noticed it banished depression even in people who are suicidal or resistant to treatment. Another plus: Their response was swift and profound.

Find out more about this drug over at Discover.

(Image Credit: Anemone123/ Pixabay)

The editing battles on this began after an Austrian teenager launched the Wikipedia entry.

If you ask Google “what is OK Boomer?”, Google would answer back that it is “an ageist catchphrase and internet meme that gained popularity throughout 2019, used to dismiss or mock attitudes stereotypically attributed to the baby boomer generation.”

Google’s answer comes from the then-current English language version of the OK Boomer Wikipedia page, which means that “the knowledge from the online encyclopedia branched out to the wider net”. It also helps explain why the editors behind the Wikipedia article feel so strongly about its content.

The online encyclopedia has been known in the past for its infamous edit warring, where editors delete changes and try to hijack a page to slant the encyclopedic summaries toward a subjective point of view. It seemed worth investigating the OK Boomer Wikipedia page to see if there were in fact signs of a fully digital, young-versus-old bloodbath.

But on his investigation, Stephen Harrison found an entirely different thing.

[It] was a generally respectful editorial process and a few young people who were contributing in good faith.

Find out more about this over at Slate.

This is wholesome.

(Image Credit: TeeFarm/ Pixabay)

Juno, NASA’s Jupiter-orbiting spacecraft, has discovered a new giant storm on the planet. While giant storms on this planet are not surprising, this storm in particular did something amazing: it has shouldered its way into a ring of storms found at Jupiter’s south pole, which converted the tiny pentagon of evenly spaced storms into a hexagon of evenly spaced storms.

“One of the very first things we discovered at Jupiter is that the poles don’t look like the rest of the planet,” Steve Levin of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory told a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

When Juno arrived in 2016, he adds, one of its finds was that the south pole had a giant central storm surrounded by a ring of five others. “Now we have six,” he says.

[...]

When the original storms, all of them about 7000 kilometres across, were first discovered (the new storm is about one-third as big), scientists were amazed by their symmetrical arrangement. But the recent change is even more amazing.

(Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SWRI/ASI/INAF/JIRAM)

You know the bares bones story of how Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer came to be. First it was a story in a promotional booklet given to kids by Montgomery Ward in 1939. Then it became a simple song written by Johnny Marks and sung by Gene Autry in 1949. And then in 1964, the story was again fleshed out, this time for a TV special that is still broadcast 55 years later. But there's more to the story. Johnny Marks had a hard getting anyone interested in his Christmas song about a reindeer.

It was off to a slow start. Marks had pitched a demo for his new song but the biggest stars weren’t interested. Both Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby turned him down before Marks got a foot in the door with Gene Autry. The “Singing Cowboy” himself didn’t actually like the song, but his wife loved it, and she talked her husband into recording it as the B-side to another Christmas single he was recording for Columbia Records. By the end of the year, Marks’ little ditty about a flying red-nosed reindeer named Rudolph was the biggest song in the country.

Crosby released a new version the following year. Then Sinatra, and then the Supremes and the Temptations. By 1980, more than 500 different renditions had been commercially released. By the end of the century, it was the biggest Christmas song ever written, and so closely identified with the holiday that it is hard for subsequent generations to imagine the holiday without it. No one since Charles Dickens had so profoundly altered the mythology of Christmas itself.

Read how the different iterations of Rudolph and his red nose captured the public's imagination at HuffPo.

(Image credit: Rankin Bass)

Christmas, and the midwinter festivals that preceded it, have been around a very long time, so there is no end to the superstitions surrounding the holiday. The turning point of winter at the solstice was traditionally the start of a new year in northern climates, and therefore people did everything they could to ensure food, fortune, and fertility for the coming year. And it being winter, they had plenty of time stuck inside to come up with the "rules." Here is a small sampling.

Societal pressure to be happy and in love at Christmas is nothing new, consequently there is a glut of love divination superstitions for this time of year, strangely all aimed at women. For example, young women who go out and hit pigs with a stick at Christmas can tell the age of their husbands-to-be, presumably if they can avoid being arrested for trespassing and pig-bothering in the meantime. The first pig to squeal determines the age: old pig, old husband; young pig, young husband; no squeal, no husband.

If there’s a hen house next to the pig sty, knock on its door between 11pm and midnight. If the rooster answers, you’ll be married; if the knocking is followed by silence, you’ll not marry. Probably best to check there’s a rooster in there first, and make sure it is before midnight, as farm animals are briefly gifted with the power of speech at this time – naturally it’s fatal for a human to hear them.

There are also superstitions surrounding decorations, Christmas food, and gifts, at Folklore Thursday. -via Strange Company

Have you ever wondered what your auto mechanic is doing when it's too cold for anyone to bother bringing their car in? This must have been inspired by the jingling sounds of wrenches dropped by accident on the concrete floor. After you watch it once, go back and watch it again at 1.5x speed. Yeah, his wrenches are just a little bit out of tune, but the warm wishes are perfect. -via reddit

Jessica Myshrall’s grandmother loved euchre so much that her family dropped a deck of cards into her casket. “Deal us a hand, Beth,” Jessica’s grandfather said. Despite being in grief, the family laughed. The grandmother would have laughed, too.

For them, euchre is not just a card game; it is a rite of passage. Through illnesses, arguments, divorces, and death, they have played countless games of euchre.

Those who attend the Tuesday-night game continue to do so in the same way devout Christians attend service… Euchre has held us together and helped us heal.

Know more about Jessica’s story over at The Walrus.

What about you? What games do you and your family play together?

(Image Credit: Atchius/ Wikimedia Commons)

Christmas trees have come a long way as time passed by. 

Martin Luther is said to have decorated his Christmas tree with candles to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. Prince Albert, several centuries later, set up the first Christmas tree in Windsor Castle.

Who would have thought that this tree would be one of the symbols of Christmas and be an immense global success? Certainly not the people mentioned above.

Now, fir trees are grown in Denmark especially for the export market, and others are shipped by helicopter in Oregon. Factories in China produce plastic replicas of these trees.

FInd out more about the history of Christmas trees over at Quartz.

(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)

Cider, eggnog, and piping-hot chocolate. These are the usual drinks of the winter holidays in the United States. These beverages reflect the culinary traditions, weather, religion, and agriculture of the places where they came from.

Tired of the same ol’ eggnog and cider? Try these nine beverages from across the globe and make experience something new this holiday season. See the drinks over at Smithsonian.

(Image Credit: gliuoo/ Wikimedia Commons)

Norwegian artist Caroline Eriksson brought us the amazing gingerbread xenomorph last year, and a gingerbread Optimus Prime a few years ago. You also might remember her gingerbread Smaug and gingerbread Darth Vader. This year, she's outdone herself with this  gingerbread Groot! The sculpture is full size, and is made of gingerbread cookie slabs held together with sugar syrup built over a wire mesh structure. It took a week of planning, and another four weeks to build it. You can see some of the process in pictures here.  -via Geeks Are Sexy

What could be more festive than a cake iced with an image of Rudolph, Santa's lead reindeer? While that may sound like a fine idea, you must first know how to draw a reindeer. It's slightly more difficult than a couple of eyes, a red nose, and some antlers. None of those things are as easy as you might think to render in pen and paper, much less icing. I'm sure there are cake decorators up to the task, but you won't find any of those decorators in a roundup of disastrous attempts at Cake Wrecks. 

A select number of otakus who chose to marry 2-D wives are now in danger of losing them. Gatebox is a tech start-up that released a “character summoning device” that lets its users live with hologram characters. However, these devices, called GTBX-1 Gateboxes will become inoperable as the company is discontinuing its service for the GTBX-1. Owners will no longer be able to see or talk to their virtual wife, as SoraNews24 detailed: 

There is, however, a silver lining to this potential digital strategy. Gatebox is discontinuing service for the GTBX-1 because its hardware isn’t compatible with improvements made to the newer GTBX-1000 model. Because this isn’t any fault of early adopters, owners of GTBX-1 models can exchange their unit, for free, for a GTBX-1000, for which service will be continuing without interruption. What’s more, the exchange program will go on until May 31, meaning that if users want to watch their original Gatebox wife’s final, fading moments in her original GTBX-1 before she’s reincarnated into newer tech, they can.

image via SoraNews24

No, these dogs aren’t official mascots of the UPS. The UPS dogs are the puppers the UPS drivers encounter on their routes during work. The drivers have been sharing their photos and stories on Facebook and Instagram feeds called UPS Dogs. The popular pages feature adorable dogs who greet their local parcel carriers, as My Modern Met details: 

UPS Dogs explains that while drivers meet a lot of pups throughout the day, many of them are nice but others are not so agreeable. The posts on their social media reflect the genial pups who break the stereotype that canines despise mail carriers. “When time permits, drivers snap a photo and send it to UPS Dogs,” they explain. “Our followers love the photos and the stories told as we share our love of these special relationships with these lovable creatures.”

image via upsdogs on Instagram

Today’s Christmas cards scream joy and cheer, just in tune with the festive season. But before the sparkly cards with drawings of christmas ornaments or adorable festive illustrations, did you know that Christmas cards were designed with anthropomorphic cats, murderous frogs, and insects dancing by the moonlight? Victorians in the 19th century sent such grim cards with the words, “may yours be a joyful Christmas”. 

(via Hyperallergic)

image via Hyperallergic