Air fryers are quite nifty kitchen gadgets, and it is said to be healthier to heat your food or even cook them in an air fryer as opposed to pan-frying them with oil. However, have you ever tried baking with an air fryer?

I’ll be the first to admit that I was a longtime air fryer hater, often leaning on the retort that they’re “just little ovens.” But I’ve since eaten my words. Or rather, I’ve eaten kale rolls and lasagna in tins sized for two; a few cookies, baked fresh late at night; and small squares of fast focaccia — all of them made within minutes in the air fryer.

Bettina Makalintal of Eater shares her experiences with the air fryer and how you can bake using one.

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When hobbyist font designer Cindy Thomason was contacted by Warner Bros. telling her that the font she had designed would be used in The Great Gatsby, she was overjoyed at the prospect. However, she was quite surprised when all she earned for her font's appearance in the feature film was a measly $12, meanwhile, the software she used to design the font had cost her $100.

Thomason’s story isn’t an anomaly: Fonts are a ubiquitous commodity. Every font you see — on your computer screen, a street sign, a T-shirt, or your car’s dashboard — has been crafted by a designer. With 4.5k independent artists selling on MyFonts today, many struggle to attract customers and to make a living in an oversaturated market.  

It’s only getting harder, as designers must compete with and abide by the terms of one company that’s approaching behemoth status: Monotype.

Learn more about the font industry and Monotype at The Hustle.

(Image credit: Brett Jordan/Unsplash)

If animals can talk, what would they say? It might be a while before the technology shown in Pixar's Up where Dug is able to speak through a special collar that translates his thoughts into speech. However, it may be possible for us to hear plants scream.

Researchers from Tel Aviv University (TAU) have recorded high-pitched airborne noises emitted by water-stressed plants. The noises could be interpreted as an indication that plants cry out for help (please water me!), much like a distressed animal would.

Read more about it on ZME Science.

(Video credit: Marianne Guenot - Insider)

When I think about it, there are some obvious pros in having hamsters or guinea pigs as pets as opposed to cats or dogs. They're smaller, so feeding and cleaning them takes much less time. It's much easier to pet them, and they won't make much of a mess since you can just keep them in a cage. Even if you occasionally let them out, there won't be much risk of a big mess. And apparently, America is turning their pet obsessions to these little critters. The Hustle gives us a short rundown of what's happening in this rising trend of tiny pet lovers.

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And not just any animal's poo, but particularly in endangered species. Researchers from the University of Sheffield have discovered that certain endangered animals' waste contain bacteriophages which could help selectively kill bacteria.

Waste from animals including Guinea baboons, lemurs and Visayan pigs has been shown to contain bacteriophages that could be used in the fight against hard-to-treat diabetic ulcers, saving the NHS an estimated £1 billion a year.

Learn more about this discovery on Sheffield.

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Maram Kaire is one of the top astronomers in Senegal. When an asteroid that NASA had wanted to measure but couldn't because it was difficult to take a photo of it from their location, they contacted Senegalese astronomers since they knew that the asteroid had been passing directly over Senegal. Maram Kaire was one of them and he had expressed his desire to build a space agency for their country. Marco Werman of The World gets in touch with Kaire and talks about the fateful connection with NASA as well as other projects that he's been involved in.

(Image credit: Jean Luc Dauvergne/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY SA 4.0)

Have you ever wondered how paintings from centuries ago are maintained and kept seemingly in pristine condition? Art conservators working at the museums are actually responsible for preserving and ensuring the quality and safety of the items being displayed or kept in the museum. In the video above, Carnegie Museum of Art's chief conservator Ellen Baxter shows us how restoration is done on paintings.

(Video credit: Carnegie Museum of Art)

For those of us who write for a living, we know how important it is, not only to know how to write or exercise your writing skills, but also building a habit of reading or taking in as much as information as you can from various sources. Only then can we become more adept in the craft of writing. That is what Katharine Wu, a journalist writing for The Open Notebook, had discovered:

“To be a good or a great writer, you also have to be a good or great reader,” says Mary-Rose Abraham, a multimedia journalist who covers agriculture, food systems, and the environment. Doing so helps ensure that you’re “keeping up with what’s already been covered in [a] story, what’s lacking, and what you need to look at next.”

Staying on top of the news makes our own stories timelier; it can inspire new and interesting angles and provide pegs for ideas that have been lying dormant for months. Regular news consumption can also be a way for journalists to tap into new sources—and to take writerly inspiration from colleagues around the world.

In her article, she gives suggestions on how one can build a healthy media diet especially for journalists whose livelihoods depended on the stories that they tell.

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I am on a mission to find the best songs that can be played on this Fisher-Price piano:

# 1 - I Miss You by Blink-182 pic.twitter.com/Lfg9krWtgo

— Nathan W Pyle (@nathanwpyle) September 19, 2023

Nathan W. Pyle is the cartoonist responsible for the Strange Planet series about aliens adapting to live on Earth. It's now a television show. So Pyle is a busy man. But he stays focused on his most important job: being a dad. Pyle's Twitter feed is often filled with doting paternal reflections, including a recent research project into popular songs that can be performed on a Fisher-Price Laugh & Learn Light Up Piano.

Blink 182's "I Miss You" does well on the mere eight notes that the toy piano offers. The Twitter thread also has performances of songs by The Cure and ABBA.

Each country has its own peculiarities. Culture gives people a sense of identity and belonging, something on which they can be rooted. Their behaviors, perspectives, worldviews, norms, customs, and traditions rise from the particular culture in which they were brought up. In this modern globalized age, we can mingle with one another and learn from other people's culture.

However, sometimes, we cannot avoid being perplexed about certain things people do that would be considered normal in their culture. And that's what Nathan Koh of Rice Media set out to do. He collected tourists' opinions about things that Singaporeans did that confused them.

"Singaporeans not only walk fast, but I feel that they actually enjoy walking."

"I understand the concept of ‘choping’ seats with tissue packets, name cards, and umbrellas–I see it all the time and I do it too. It guarantees that I’ll have a seat. But ever so often, I’ll see a table ‘choped’ with phones and sometimes, laptops."

After reading several of these observations from foreigners, I feel like this may not be particular to just Singaporeans as I have seen this done by Japanese and Koreans as well. So, maybe there are actually some similarities in cultures as well and it would be great for us to learn from them, and take from that what we can.

(Image credit: Singapore Stock Photos/Unsplash)

Out of all the five senses, smell and taste don't get as much attention, especially the loss of it. Perhaps it's because we can still live a relatively normal life even without the full sensation of smell or taste, unlike sight or hearing. But Julian Meeks, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Rochester asserts the greater need for the loss of smell, or anosmia, to be studied.

Growing up, Julian Meeks knew what a life without a sense of smell could look like. He’d watched his grandfather navigate the condition, known as anosmia, observing that he didn’t perceive flavor and only enjoyed eating very salty or meaty foods.

The experience influenced him, in part, to study chemosensation, which involves both smell and taste. Meeks, now a professor of neuroscience at the University of Rochester, told Undark that neither gets much attention compared to other senses: “Often, they’re thought of as second or third in order of importance.”

Hannah Docter-Loeb of Undark sat down with Prof. Meeks to talk about anosmia and the struggle he's had to support the study of it.

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Sol Neelman is a sports photographer who once dreamed of being a pro wrestler. Now, he has published his third photobook titled More Weird Sports in which he documents sports like mashed potato wrestling and cosmic bowling.

Weird sports is loosely defined, but for Neelman’s purposes, it’s any athletic gathering he deems out-of-the-norm, often prizing performance art and a good time over competition and athletics.

Atlas Obscura's Roxanne Hoorn writes about the different weird sports covered in Neelman's new book.

(Image credit: Sol Neelman/Twitter)

With its shiny blue hue, this electric blue tarantula named Chilobrachys natanicharum surely mesmerizes those that gaze upon it, since it's quite rare to see anything in nature that would be akin to something like phosphorescence. Now, a study had given this explanation as to why the tarantula would have such a pigmentation:

According to the study, the secret behind the electric blue tarantula’s wild color comes from the unique structure of their hair and not from a presence of blue pigment. Their hair incorporates nanostructures that manipulate the light shining on it to create the blue appearance. Their hair can also display a more violet hue depending on the light, which creates an iridescent effect. 

Learn more about the electric blue tarantula on Pop Sci.

(Video credit: JoCho Sippawat/Pensoft Publishers)

At that moment, he drops everything else and hones in on trying to impress a potential mate. Researches have found that there is a mechanism in the zebra finch's brain that could help explain the way we shift priorities.

“The males stop worrying about anything else and, for the first time, we have found signs of that re-prioritization in the behavior of specific brain cells,” said Vikram Gadagkar, PhD, a principal investigator at Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute and a co-first author, along with graduate student Andrea Roeser of Cornell University, on a new paper in Nature that documents these findings. 

“Our findings could help explain what our brains are doing when they shift gears as different opportunities arise and as our priorities change,” said Dr. Gadagkar, who also is an assistant professor of neuroscience at Columbia’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons.

Eurekalert shares details of the findings by Dr. Gadagkar and his colleagues as well as a link to their paper titled "Dopaminergic error signals retune to social feedback during courtship".

(Image credit: Margaret Strickland/Unsplash)

The photo was posted by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) about a week ago, and it served as a testament of the capability of the camera system onboard its Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM), which had launched on September 6, to help SLIM land on the moon.

The image, which JAXA posted Sept. 21 via its SLIM account on X (formerly known as Twitter), was taken around 62,000 miles (100,000 kilometers) from Earth. The image is monochromatic, as the dual-camera, vision-based navigation system is designed to identify crater positions from data stored aboard the spacecraft.

(Image credit: JAXA/SLIM)