My parents don't understand why I don't eat certain foods. I particularly don't like okra and the bitter melon, partly because of the taste, but mostly because of their texture. According to Rhonda Miller, who has been researching mouthfeel at the Texas A&M AgriLife research facility, the way we eat our food and how we manipulate food in our mouths can be a key determining factor to what kind of food we like.

There are a few types of eaters based on texture or mouthfeel. There are the chewers and crunchers who use their molars to chew the food, and then there are the suckers and smooshers who use their tongue and palate to swirl food in their mouths. There are further nuances between each type. Although chewers and crunchers use their molars, chewers are less vigorous and eat slowly, while crunches are the loud eaters. Smooshers relish their food with their tongue and the roof of their mouth, while suckers suck the flavor of the food before chewing.

Miller has been doing research on beef products and how these eating behaviors affect what kind of beef each eater would thoroughly enjoy. In her study, she found what kind of burgers each of them enjoy. Read more about it on Futurity.

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Sarah Gundle had met her friend Becca in university and they clicked. Through all of her life moments, Becca had been her voice of reason, and the person who encouraged her to take risks and live her life to the fullest. So, it came as a shock to her and to Becca's friends and family when one day, she was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. It seemed awfully like something from a movie, but for Sarah, it was real and unnerving.

And for years after Becca's death, Sarah had been sending one-way text messages to her friend's phone number, until one day, five years later, she received a reply for the first time. The message read, "I'm sorry, who is this?". It was surprising because Sarah knew that nobody could have been using her friend's old phone number. She read that if it hasn't been used for 90 days, it would be unusable. But there it was, somebody had sent her a reply from her friend's old phone number.

A short conversation between them followed, with Sarah explaining that the number used to belong to her friend who died five years ago. The person on the other end offered their condolences. But the last five words Sarah received shook her to her core. It read, "But please, don't text again." To read the rest of her story, check it out on Huff Post.

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The stigma behind mental health issues and talking about them has slowly crumbled, and people are more open to talk about their feelings and struggles with their peers and coworkers. Indeed, in workplaces where a healthy number of millennials and Gen Zs abound, the language of therapy has seeped into the daily dictionary of employees.

Certainly, having a workplace where people are aware and care about others' mental health as well as their own is a good thing. Then, it will be much easier to cope with the stress that work might entail. People will be more understanding and helpful to address and resolve issues that workers might be going through.

There is a caveat however, in that the growing usage of therapy-speak in the workplace must also be coupled with the proper actions. There might be instances that top management may be using these words without showing any genuine concern as they carry on with existing practices that make employees overworked but underpaid. Or, the language may also be misused and miscontextualized.

So, although it has good points, there are things to watch out for as well, which Amanda Montell points out in her article on Harper's Bazaar.

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When textspeak or chat lingo started gaining prominence, there must have been people, mostly our not so tech-savvy parents or grandparents, who were confused by the acronyms and abbreviations that suddenly popped up in their online conversations with family. Nowadays, acronyms like LOL, LMAO, and ROFL are more commonplace, and people generally know what they mean, but there are still a lot of Google searches being made about other acronyms and initialisms.

Letter Solver did a study on which acronyms were the most searched. They categorized these acronyms and initialisms into five different areas: gaming, tech, business, dating, and US states. Yes, your state's abbreviation can be confusing. Just ask people what the abbreviations for Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, Maine, and Michigan are, and, unless you have specifically searched about them before (as I have), it can get really puzzling.

One thing to note about the study is that there are certain initialisms which might have two or more different meanings, so the number of searches for some initialisms may have been conflated. By the way, the difference between an acronym and an initialism is that an acronym is pronounced like a word (like SCUBA) and initialisms have the individual letters spelled out when you say them (like CEO). Mental Floss explains 25 of the most confusing abbreviations but if you want to check the full list of abbreviations, check out Letter Solver's study.

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Physics may have given us a piece of the puzzle as to how the Great Sphinx of Giza had been carved by ancient humans. A study suggests that nature had something to do with it. Leif Ristroph, along with fellow researchers from New York University, have observed how wind and other forces naturally eroded clay and other land formations to create what is called a "yardang". These yardangs are elongated protruberances, from which the people of ancient Egypt might have been inspired to form the Great Sphinx.

Ristroph and his team wanted to test out a controversial hypothesis by the Egyptian geologist Farouk El-Baz on how the Great Sphinx as well as the pyramids were constructed. El-Baz had asserted that the head of the Great Sphinx had been carved out naturally as a yardang and ancient Egyptians merely added details of its features. Afterward, they just dug out a ditch around the head to form the body. El-Baz also suggested that these formations were possible because the ancient Egyptians were aware of the phenomenon whereby the wind erodes the sand and clay to form conical structures which could survive for ages.

Conducting experiments in a lab, Ristroph and his team were able to approximate how the phenomenon occurred and might lend credence to El-Baz's theory. Despite not fully recreating the natural conditions that could have brought the Great Sphinx and the pyramids about, Ristroph and his team were confident that the results of their experiments may provide a possible explanation behind the phenomenon.

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Ruling the galaxy with an iron fist can be stressful. When things get a little rough, Darth Vader takes some personal time for a video consultation with his therapist Master Garian. Vader repeats a series of positive affirmations that we know he has no intention of fulfilling. It only take five minutes before the session is interrupted, but Vader puts an end to that. Throughout this video, I was expecting Vader to slow down his breathing to a point where he just dies, but that doesn't happen. Master Garian's soothing voice may or may not have done Vader any good, but I feel quite relaxed. You can thank Auralnauts for this odd but calming interlude.

Have you seen the latest Godzilla movie, Godzilla Minus One? The giant lizard we all know and love is infinitely recognizable, but if you were to watch that movie and the original 1954 Godzilla, the two titular monsters are very different. You don't normally see movies that are 70 years apart in a double feature. Godzilla fans generally see them when they are new, although the earliest ones make a good weekend binge.

Godzilla stays so familiar to us because while every movie changes him, they only change a little. There are officially 37 movies in the Godzilla franchise (with another one coming next year). It's the longest continually running film franchise ever. Each production aims to improve over those that have gone before, but you can't change the monster too much or fans will rebel. If you look through all the movies, you will be struck by how much bigger Godzilla has become. But the design has also become more like a natural, if fictional, reptile, and therefore more believable. Film technology has advanced so that we see ever more realism and more "bling" at the same time, in order to bring more thrills. Read about the changes in each iteration of Godzilla, movie by movie at Polygon. Then be on the lookout for the differences in the big guy in the TV show Monarch: Legacy Of Monsters starting November 17 on Apple+ TV and the movie Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, set to hit theaters on April 12, 2024.  -via Digg

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Historically, the toughest armies are made up of the fiercest warriors. Modern armies depend on technology and brainpower, but still require tough warriors. Over thousands of years, rulers have shaped their societies to produce brave fighters that will risk their lives for glory, honor, and victory. Weird History highlights eleven of history's fiercest fighting forces of the past and what they accomplished. Not all of them were official armies led by government rulers, but they all had a leader who knew how to motivate their fighters, whether by patriotism, rewards, fear, loyalty, cultural manipulation, or survival instinct. Or some combination of those techniques. Some you know about from history class or the movies, but there will be a couple of armies that are new to you.  

The question Tom Howell posed to himself was, "Is it normal to know only five people in your neighborhood?". He has been living on the same street for 15 years, and a recent New Year's Eve Party put his neighbor knowledge to the test, wherein he found that he actually had an abysmal score. So, in order to get to know his other neighbors, he asked them how many neighbors they can name, and gave them a sheet to fill out.

With that cheat sheet, he was literally able to know all his neighbors' names. But then that poses the interesting issue of the "middle ring" which was mentioned by the sociologist Marc Dunkelman in his book The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community. The "middle ring" refers to that group of people with whom you must socialize despite not liking their company.

Of course, living in the suburbs might be a factor to whether or not you know your neighbors is a good or bad thing. It might be different if you were living in an apartment complex or in the city where people's social lives usually do not revolve around the people within their immediate vicinity. How many of your neighbors do you know?

(Image credit: Tom Howell)

It's with good reason. The town of Fenton has a population of 226 people. It's the size of about 20 blocks, and the major thing that helps keep the town running is its collection of fines and forfeitures from traffic tickets. In 2022 alone, it raked in a whopping $1.3 million on traffic fines alone.

That's where the mayor is the judge comes in, because these traffic fines were collected through the "mayor's court", which is a special court that can only be found in Louisiana and Ohio. Mainly, it processes traffic tickets, which surprisingly come up to the thousands each year. From the collections gathered, the town is able to support itself and pay for the salaries of the people in the courtroom. But the mayor's court has been challenged for its fairness in passing judgment given the conflict of interest that having the mayor as the judge brings.

So, in order to investigate on the matter, a team from Pro Publica and journalists from WVUE were sent to Fenton to look into what goes on in the mayor's courts proceedings, and how the traffic cases were handled. Check out their full report here.

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Just as streaming has become a burgeoning threat to the TV and film industry, cable TV way back when was seen as a threat by the film industry. The reason being television production was just more efficient and cost-effective compared to films at the time, and a lot more profitable. Of course, later on, HBO became a big boon to the film industry, aiding with the economics of releasing a film, but that almost never happened due to a campaign that targeted cable TV altogether. That was the Save Free TV campaign.

It basically wanted the public to support a petition to prevent cable TV from existing. They wanted to assert that consumers should not have to pay for TV programs to be transmitted to their TVs at home. However, the reality of the situation was that cable TV providers just wanted to see whether the technology would be viable, instead of attempting to uproot network TV or movie theaters. But the big players who had large stakes in TV ads aggressively pushed for the ballot and the campaign was a success. The public voted against cable TV. Then, it was challenged in California's Supreme Court which ruled in favor of cable TV.

Still, the proponents of free TV kept pushing. But it was for naught as the Federal Communications Commission had already approved cable TV technology and handed out licenses. So that's why the US now has a multitude of TV shows to watch, not just from its big three networks.

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This new property in Victoria, Australia is an interesting piece of architecture. From the side, it looks like two cargo containers one on top of the other, with the top container placed perpendicular to the one below it, and a large portion hanging on both sides, yet it's completely balanced, and has no sign of falling over. The property is called View Hill, and is priced from $13.5 million to $14.85 million.

It was designed by architect John Denton, using the concept of cantilevered minimalist architecture, which is typically seen in bridge construction wherein there is a long projecting beam or girder fixed at only one end. Inside, it has five bedrooms and three bathrooms. The bedrooms are located on the eastern side of the first floor, where the living room, kitchen, and dining room are situated. On the second floor, there are two offices, a powder room, and a wine room. Outside, one has an idyllic view, a 60-hectare vast expanse of grass and vineyards.

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Archaeology tries to understand how humans in the past lived, what kind of customs or traditions they had, through the things that they left behind or have been preserved. With these artifacts, we're able to paint a picture of what human societies and cultures were like, and how they could have evolved through time. Most of these artifacts are stored in museums or archaeological collections.

But there are some artifacts that are dubious or even dangerous, as Mark Warner, an archaeologist, and Ray von Wandruszka, a chemist, both from the University of Idaho found. They sifted through 500 artifacts over 15 years and found many weird items from the gross to the deadly. Oddee shares a list of six examples of the most dangerous and disgusting archaeological artifacts that the two have found.

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In a city of more than 8 million people, you're likely to meet all sorts. New York City is known the world over, and many dream of visiting or even living there. And at the heart of New York stands one of the finest luxury hotels in the city, The Belvedere Hotel. To some, it might be a great accommodation when they want to explore and experience as much of New York as a leisurely trip could afford them. However, with rent stabilization, the Belvedere also serves as a home to many who ventured to come to New York in search of better pastures.

Room 208 was one such room and it was where Hisako Hasegawa stayed for more than 40 years. Not much was known about her, even by those who daily met her along the hallways or those living next to her. She was born in Japan in 1934, and she moved to New York in the '70s. What people can say was that she was overall kind and genial with everybody. The hotel staff liked her as she would always greet them and even give them thank you cards for their small acts of kindness.

Renee Querijero lived right across from her and Hasegawa would sometimes initiate some small talk, but she didn't say much else about herself to anyone. Until one day in 2016, Hasegawa passed away in her apartment at the age of 82. She was buried on New York's Hart Island, America's largest public cemetery. Her story has been recorded by Radio Diaries in its series The Unmarked Graveyard.

(Image credit: Belvedere Hotel NYC)

Our Thanksgiving celebration is modeled after the 1621 harvest feast of the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag. But there were at least a couple of feasts between Europeans and Native Americans before that. One notable feast occurred in 1566 when the notoriously fierce Calusa people hosted the Spanish governor of Florida, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés. The Calusa ruled southwestern Florida from a manmade island now called Mound Key near Fort Myers, where they had built a city of around 4,000 people.

King Caalus hosted the event in a dining hall that could hold 2,000 people, and served a variety of fish and oysters. Avilés brought a retinue that included a band, with fifes, drums, trumpets, a harp, and a guitar. They also brought biscuits, wine, molasses ...and tablecloths. King Caalus gave Avilés his sister as a wife. A good time was had by all.

But it didn't last. The Calusa weren't all that keen on sharing Florida, and the Spanish wanted to rule. Within a year, relations fell apart, and the Calusa would have nothing to do with Europeans afterward. Read about the Calusa culture, the feast, and what ultimately happened to them at Atlas Obscura.