The invasive plant kudzu was introduced to the US from Japan at an international exposition, and we've been making jokes about it in the South ever since. It grows uncontrollably in the summer and covers any property that isn't mowed or otherwise tended. Japanese knotweed was also brought from Japan to an exhibition and then was found to be terribly invasive in climates too cool for kudzu. But knotweed is harder to control and does a lot more damage.  

Along streams and rivers, knotweed grows into a wall that hides the water. Along roads, its arching canes can make it hard to see around bends. In Bronx River Forest, knotweed once grew so thick that driving along its paths was “like being in a knotweed carwash,” New York City conservation manager Michael Mendez told me. “There were people living in the knotweed,” he recalled. It was a good place to hide.

Knotweed can grow through cracks in cement, between floorboards, and out from the joints in a stone wall. “You can see it everywhere, along the roadside, in every city,” said Jatinder Aulakh, an assistant weed scientist at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station. In the landscapes it has infested, it is impossible to imagine what was there before—and harder still to foresee a future without it. “There is no insect, pest, or disease in the United States,” Aulakh said, “that can keep it in check.”

You can cut it, pull it, and dig it up, but all it takes is a tiny piece of the root remaining to propagate into another plant. Knotweed is so hard to kill that its presence will affect property values. Read about the spread of Japanese knotweed at Slate. -via Boing Boing 

(Image credit: U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service - Northeast Region)

We think of a kitchen as a standard part of a home, but like the bathroom, it wasn't always so for most working class families. Without plumbing, there were no sinks, and many homes had one stove or fireplace that was used for both heating and cooking. The concept of a room dedicated to food preparation really took off after World War I, when plumbing became more common, communities were wired for electricity, and factories produced amazing modern appliances to furnish the kitchen. That was all fine and good, but what about small city apartments that had to be retrofitted? Or even new apartments that were expected to have kitchens in a very limited space? Enter architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, who was charged with designing liveable yet affordable apartments for German cities rebuilding after the Great War.  Her 1926 "Frankfurt Kitchen" became the model for efficient housing across the globe.  

Schütte-Lihotzky conceived of the Frankfurt Kitchen as a separate room in each apartment, which was a design choice that had previously applied only to the cavernous kitchens that served great houses. She used a sliding door to separate it from the main living space. She read Frederick and Taylor’s works translated into German, and even conducted her own time and motion studies.

And presaging the work of American designers Norman Bel Geddes and Raymond Loewy, who drew inspiration from trains and cars in designing their streamlined kitchen appliances in the 1930s, Schütte-Lihotzky found a model of culinary efficiency in the kitchens of railway dining cars designed by the Mitropa catering company. Though tiny, the cars served scores of diners using an extremely small galley space—a term we still used to describe apartment kitchens today.

But we don't use the term Frankfurt Kitchen, and few people know of Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky. The reason can be summed up as the Nazis. Read about Schütte-Lihotzky and the evolution of modern kitchen design at City Lab. -via Digg

Bringing out the flavors while trying to create a good balance among them in one dish is a difficult skill to master. Chefs spend their whole careers trying to perfect this art but at times, some of the best practices are closer to home.

When Samantha Seneviratne sat down with her Sri Lankan grandmother, she had one goal in mind: to talk about food and learn as much as she could from her late grandmother. One thing caught her ear and stuck with her.

As she was being directed what to do for a curry recipe, her grandmother mentioned "tempering" the spices which confused her because that term was usually used in the context of dessert, particularly chocolate. But what her grandmother meant was letting the spices simmer in oil.

But my grandmother was talking about spices—coaxing the flavor out of cumin seeds, mustard seeds, and other aromatics by simmering them briefly in oil. Blooming the spices in this way, as opposed to just throwing them in willy-nilly, draws out more flavor and leads to a better curry, she assured me.

When it comes to baking, most of us just whisk ground spices into the dry ingredients without a second thought. But there is another way: the spice-tempering technique I learned from my grandmother can be applied to dessert.

The technique is quite deeply refined as you are putting an equal amount of attention to every ingredient in a dish, not simply the main element. It is true that spices bring out the flavor of the core of a dish, but they themselves can also be elevated in a masterful way without overpowering the whole dish.

Tempering aromatics in oil or butter works well because the flavor compounds in certain spices are fat-soluble. That means that hot fat (oil or butter, usually) will extract those compounds, flavoring the fat.

If you’re working with spices with more fat-soluble flavor compounds, like bay leaves, lavender, or sage, you’ll get up to 10 times more flavor if you bloom them in fat versus water. But of course the converse is also true: spices with more water-soluble compounds, such as saffron, are better tempered in a water-based ingredient like milk.

Learn more about it on Epicurious.

(Image credit: Badagnani/Wikimedia Commons; CC by SA 3.0)

The Spy Museum will be moving to L'Enfant Plaza some time this year and it will be showcasing several new artifacts that have never been displayed before. One of which is the ice ax that killed Leon Trotsky. Here's a brief look into the history of the ice ax.

(Image credit: fabioj/Wikimedia Commons; CC by SA 3.0; GNU)

The Bubonic plague was a nightmare. It killed millions during the 14th century, some calculate the total death toll to be more than half of Europe's population back then. When the plague ended, everyone thought the worst was over. Until 1899, when the plague reappeared in Hawaii.

On the morning of December 8, 1899, Yuk Hoy, a forty-year-old bookkeeper, awoke in his bed to the flash of a high fever and a mysterious swelling in his thigh. Unable to do much more than mumble, he laid his head down and drifted in and out of sleep, largely ignored by the other men crammed into a windowless room of a two-story flophouse in Honolulu’s overstuffed Chinatown.

Having arrived just weeks before from his native China, Yuk Hoy had few friends in the bustling city, and his absence over the following days went unnoticed at the general store on Maunakea Street where he worked. Only his increasingly frantic cries alerted others to the misery of his existence.

Woken by his wails, a man named Fong, who lived on the same floor, stumbled in darkness to find him trembling in a litter of straw, his body quivering, as Fong would later describe it, “like the branches of a tree in thunder and lightning gone crazy.”

Yuk Hoy was brought to one of a few Chinese doctors who were trained in Western medicine, Dr. Li Khai Fai. After examining the symptoms, Dr. Li knew the fate of the man. It was something he had already seen once in his life, something he thought he would never see again. He brought other doctors to show them the case but by the time the other doctors arrived, Yuk Hoy was dead.

So when exactly did the Bubonic plague arrive in America? What were the subsequent events following this tragic discovery by Dr. Li? And how did the local government in Hawaii decide to fight off the disease? Read them on Lapham's Quarterly.

(Image credit: Hawaii State Archives/Wikimedia Commons; US Public domain)

Have you ever asked yourself why there are days when you feel so alive and energetic, full of vitality and vigor, and why a few days or a week later, you feel so lethargic and restless, even though you get enough sleep at night?

There might be a variety of factors and reasons why this is the case. Pure Wow gives us a few of those on this list, some may be obvious but it takes its toll in a subtle way, accumulating the effects over a period of time. Here's one you might not have known:

Having a Cluttered Desk

Two words: mental exhaustion. According to psychology professor Sabine Kastner of Princeton University, the more objects you have in your visual field (read: a ton of stuff on your desk), the harder it is for your brain to filter them out and focus. The result? Your brain will end up tired.

(Image credit: Christian Erfurt/Unsplash)

According to a news story of dubious sourcing, a Taiwanese man named Hsu accidentally swallowed one of his iPhone AirPods while sleeping. When he searched for it in the morning, he realized that the sound from the AirPod was coming from inside him. The Deccan Chronicle reports:

The next day, when Hsu got a call of nature, he found the missing AirPod in it. In a great show of commitment to Apple products, he not only fished it out of his poop, he started wearing it again after cleaning it as well.

What was even more bizarre was that despite passing through a human digestive system, the AirPod was still in working condition. Speaking to Asia Wire, Hsu added: "The battery was still at 41 per cent! It was incredible." This extraordinary result could serve as a great advertising campaign for Apple; AirPods can be swallowed and pooped out, and still work at the end of the day.

Yes, Apple should definitely turn this event into a commercial after further product testing. Proper scientific research does, after all, call for duplication of experimental results.

-via Debby Witt

Photo: Tatsuo Yamashita

All around the world, cultures and peoples have rich stories about their history, their land, and the hidden or unknown things about the world.

Iceland holds a fascinating trove of tales about their huldufolk or hidden people. They are spoken of as guardians of the land, willing to give aid to those who need it while bringing harm to those who inflict it. Some liken them to elves who protect the natural world.

Though not all Icelanders believe in the huldufolk's existence, they don't dismiss them either as mere figments of their ancestors' imagination.

...there are modern day accounts of successful petitions to alter the road construction because it might disturb the dwellings of the ‘hidden people’, who would retaliate. This might not sound markedly different to beliefs about fair folk in other European countries, except that over half of Icelanders claim to believe (or not to disbelieve) in the existence of the huldufólk – and even those who don’t think them real nevertheless know that it ‘doesn’t pay to piss them off.’

Perhaps this is a reflection of the unpredictability of the landscape, the dangers it poses, and Icelander’s inextricable relationship with it. Icelanders might be close to their natural environment, but they’re also more threatened by it: 70-80 people have vanished without a trace since 1930 and historically, disappearances were not unusual.

My culture's folklore has similar stories about powerful supernatural entities and it's probably our ancestors' way of saying we need to protect nature and the land in which we were born. We shouldn't callously build roads and bridges without thinking about the consequences it will do on Earth. Because for better or worse, right now, Earth is our home. It is our duty to take care of it.

(Image credit: Alex Mustaros/Unsplash)

The big summer hit of 1999 was The Mummy starring Brendan Frasier. It wasn't just a horror film, like the earlier mummy movies, but an action movie with a generous dose of comedy. Of course it was a hit, maybe because it used some really safe themes and tropes that had been tested 18 years earlier, and even long before that. Hey, you can't go wrong doing what's been done before, as Hollywood discovered long ago.

The world's simplest Vinaigrette dressed green salad is the only side dish you need when serving a meal. A perfect simple salad is knowing how to make a properly emulsified vinaigrette, and applying just the right amount.....and washing and drying your greens thoroughly.

Via Amaze | Image: jeffreyw/wikimedia

People nowadays are becoming much more concerned with their health. Already, alternative meat products storm the market and get the headlines. Such is the case of the Impossible Whopper of Burger King, the “meatless Whopper” that uses the Impossible Burger (from Impossible Foods), a patty made up of soy and made to taste like meat. This burger made quite a commotion for some time in the market. However, much like its original whopper, it’s not that nutritious. Natural food cooked at home is, I believe, still the best.

Enter Lou Cooperhouse and his company BlueNalu.

His company, BlueNalu (a play on a Hawaiian term that means both ocean waves and mindfulness), is racing to bring to market what's known as cell-based seafood --- that is, seafood grown from cells in a lab, not harvested from the oceans. 

...unlike Impossible Foods, BlueNalu is not creating a plant-based seafood alternative like vegan Toona or shrimpless shrimp. Instead, Cooperhouse and his team are extracting a needle biopsy's worth of muscle cells from a single fish, such as a Patagonian toothfish, orange roughy and mahi-mahi.

Those cells are then carefully cultivated and fed a proprietary custom blend of liquid vitamins, amino acids and sugars. Eventually, the cells will grow into broad sheets of whole muscle tissue that can be cut into filets and sold fresh, frozen or packaged into other types of seafood entrees.

But unlike today's wild-caught or farmed fish options, BlueNalu's version of seafood will have no head, no tail, no bones, no blood. It's finfish, just without the swimming and breathing part. It's seafood without the sea.

With this kind of technology, I believe it would be a great alternative for us as we can still eat seafood without the need to fish, and we can also conserve the Earth’s natural resources in this way. However, I still believe that natural food is the best, and we humans only need to take care of the natural environment, instead of thinking more and more alternatives.

More of this story at NPR.

(Image Credit: Caroline Attwood/ Unsplash)

If European visitors to the US are confused about the different tax rates in each state, they must be completely surprised by the different in liquor laws from one state to another -or even by counties within states. Americans are confused, too. Liquor laws vary widely, from places where you can buy liquor around the clock to places where you can't buy it -or even possess it- ever. Some of those laws go back over 100 years.

And so dry counties persist—today an estimated 18 million people are unable to buy a legal drink where they live. Mostly these persist in the south, and a map of dry counties overlaid with one of the Bible Belt, not surprisingly, shows considerable overlap. (Although the penchant for dryness fades as you get closer to the Gulf of Mexico.) The states with the most dry counties are Kentucky, Arkansas and Tennessee. Fact: you can still get arrested for possession of alcohol in some dry counties, as a 69-year-old man in Culliman, Alabama, learned recently.

A survey of dry counties is complicated by the fact that there’s considerable variation in laws about what sort of sales are allowed (for instance, near-beer and wine only), and where sales can take place (bars and restaurants, grocery stores). All this confusion dates back to Repeal—once the U.S. Congress lifted the ban on liquor sales in 1933, it was left up to each state to decide if it wanted to outlaw liquor.

Read about the history of liquor laws across America and how the vary at The Daily Beast. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission)

Like Liam Charles, I like Twix chocolate bars (though Toblerone’s still the best for me). However, it still really is one chocolate bar you will never forget for the rest of your life.

Inspired by the his favorite chocolate bar, Liam Charles makes his ultimate chocolate bar, but unlike the 3-layered Twix bar, he makes it four layers. He states that “as soon as you take a bite, you’ll know what it’s meant to be.”

Like with all recipes, this takes a lot of ingredients, patience, and time.

Check his recipe at The Guardian.

(Image Credit: Yuki Sugiura/ The Guardian)

While the original Star Wars movie was awesome for a lot of reasons, the light saber battle between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader was not one of them. The weapons were cool, but the fight choreography is not what we've become used to since 1977. FXitinPost has redone scene 38 and made it more of what we'd expect from a duel between a legendary Jedi Master and the powerful Sith Lord he trained. Now if they only could have done something about the way it turned out. -via Digg

Dog fighting, along with other blood sports, was a lucrative pastime in London in the early 1800s. Those who bet on the outcomes made those who staged the matches quite wealthy, for little to no effort. The animals were the ones who paid the price. But the animal that brought the sport to light was not a dog, but a monkey! Jacco was a violent monkey, believed to be a macaque, who overtook the sport in the 1820s.  

Jacco reportedly defeated 14 dogs during his time in the Pit. His technique? Jumping on their backs, thus avoiding the jaws, and going for the throat, “clawing and biting away,” Lennox wrote, “which usually occupied him about one minute and a half, and if his antagonist was not speedily withdrawn, his death was certain. The monkey exhibited a frightful appearance, being deluged with blood — but it was that of his opponent alone …”

In other accounts, Jacco was given a stick to defend himself against the trained canines. It’s this version that was favored by the New Hampshire rock band Scissorfight, which released the song “The Ballad of Jacco Macacco” in 1999. “I think it’s entirely probable if such a thing was available, he would have used it,” Griggs says of the stick story.

Jacco's backstory varied according to who was doing the telling, but you can read a few versions of the monkey's adventures, and the influence he had on dog fighting even after his final defeat, at Ozy.