In the late 1960s, young Alex Heard was at a family reunion, and there he would meet someone cranking up a strange machine. It was an ice cream maker, “the kind that looks like a big wooden bucket with a metal handle on top.”

At the reunion, I was fascinated by this gizmo, and I soon pitched in and did a long session of cranking, which was hard work. I didn’t mind. It was fun, and I wanted to share in the cheers that I figured would rain down when we were done.

Which is exactly what happened. The ice cream we produced was a bit soupy but delicious. Somebody suggested I put syrupy sliced yellow peaches on mine. I did. That made it even better.

This might have been what inspired him to make his own ice cream at home, and, decades later, he still does it, but now with his own ice cream maker at home.

Now, he has written a simple guide on how to make delicious ice cream at your own home. Check out his guide over at Outside Online.

Have you made your own ice cream before?

(Image Credit: Counselling/ Pixabay)

He was known for his phenomenal music in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, as well as his other magnificent musical works on hundreds of other films and television productions. His name: Ennio Morricone. While he may have passed away, his legacy — his compositions — will continue to live on.

Morricone died Monday in Rome at the age of 91. The Italian cultural ministry confirmed his death in a statement that called him "a musician of refined skill who with his melodies has been able to excite and make the whole world dream."

When Morricone wrote a score for a Western, he used sneaky tricks to make those evocative sounds, like whistles, animal calls, creaks, gunshots and groans…

Know more about Morricone and his life over at NPR.

(Image Credit: Georges Biard/ Wikimedia Commons)

“I choose a lazy person to do a hard job, because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it,” said Bill Gates once. That realization couldn’t have been more true: lazy people will always find an easy way, whether in the workplace, their own homes and lawns.

Check out this video of a man who probably got so tired of mowing his lawn that he decided to attach it on his SUV.

I don’t know if I should be happy or angry about this. But one thing’s for sure: whoever’s driving that car is indeed innovative.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: ViralHog/ YouTube)

Multiplying a dog’s age by 7 is a common method used to know how old a dog is based on human years. This, however, is an inaccurate method. Now, scientists have developed a new molecular tool, which, according to them, can tell a more accurate picture of a dog’s age in human years. The tool, which they describe as an “epigenetic clock”, drills into the rate of molecular changes in the DNA.

The work was carried out by scientists at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine, who worked with genome experts to examine blood samples taken from 105 Labrador retrievers, ranging in age from a few weeks to 16 years old.

[...]

Epigenetics has emerged as a valuable tool for tracking the physiological age of humans, and the UCSD team set out to explore its potential in doing the same for canines. The analysis of the 105 Labradors enabled them to tease out patterns of methylation change that revealed a truer picture of their [physiological] age.

[...]

One limitation of the research, as the scientists note, is that it was focused on one breed of dog, something they plan to expand on through further work. They hope that the formula could become a valuable tool for veterinarians as a way of offering improved diagnostics for dogs and treatment plans.

More details about this study over at New Atlas.

(Image Credit: Chiemsee2016/ Pixabay)

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fan bra concept

A post shared by nm (@nicolemclaughlin) on Jul 7, 2020 at 9:01am PDT

Need to stay cool this summer? I'm a fan of Nicole McLaughlin's product idea. Her functional fan bra is adjustable so that you can tilt the rotors directly at your face.

If you're not in a hot climate, then you might prefer McLaughlin's croissant bra, juicebox bra, cleaning wipes bra, or her sandwich bra.

Screen Junkies continues its series about summer blockbusters with a look at the Indiana Jones trilogy. Some might argue that there are four Indiana Jones movies, while others would tell them they are wrong. Anyway, in this video, the narrator tells us about three great films: Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, while we get to see the best action scenes from each of them. That in itself is worth a watch!

Who knew that you burned blueberry bushes in the spring to spur yield? The process was developed by the Passamaquoddy people of Maine long before Europeans arrived, and is still in use, although most commercial growers have mechanized the process. Not Nicolas Lindholm of Blue Hill Berry Company. He is among the few growers who burn the fields by hand, using a crew of volunteers, to produce organic blueberries.  

As Lindholm explains, the 12-14 inch tall blueberry bush we see above ground is only about one-third of the actual plant. Underground is a network of rhizomes—storage houses of energy and food—which work alongside certain strains of fungus to extract what few nutrients subside in the gravelly, acidic Maine soil. “There’s this whole underground world we can’t see, and burning everything aboveground helps enrich the whole thing.” In Lindholm’s case, burning also precludes the use of pesticides and herbicides he’d otherwise need to control pests and competing plant life.

Both hand- and mechanized burning preserve energy within the rhizomes of wild blueberry plants and produce higher yields the following year, but the ease of mechanized burners—often affixed to the back of a tractor—comes at a cost. “The oil that industrial growers use burns at a higher temperature that destroys a lot more of the duff layer,” says Lindholm, referring to the top layer of soil made of decomposed leaves and other organic material. A vast majority of growers today (Lindholm estimates more than 90 percent), including the Passamaquoddy themselves, burn in this fashion. Lindholm, on the other hand, spreads locally sourced straw over his fields to burn. By burning at a lower temperature, the straw protects a crucial soil layer while minimizing Lindholm’s ecological footprint.

Read about the difficult but rewarding process of growing blueberries in the traditional manner at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Greta Rybus)

For those who are planning to homeschool their kids, CNN has listed 9 educational documentaries for different subject areas. However, these are also good considerations for adults!

Their list includes Spellbound, He Named Me Malala, Jane, Apollo 11, Underwater Dreams, Chasing Coral, Elephant, Babies, and Elián.

What are your favorite educational movies and documentaries?

Image Credit: Evert F. Baumgardner via Wikimedia Commons

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Having to be productive after Sunday funday 👈🏻

A post shared by Bacon (@thebaconator) on Jul 30, 2018 at 7:45am PDT

We've read about a cat that has a sad face as an illusion. Now, here's a dog with RCF (Resting Concerned Face)... and it's not an illusion!

Part Pekingese, Dachshund, and Chihuahua, Old Man Bacon (complete with a white beard) has an Instagram account that is chock-full of him looking concerned and confused—like he’s just come to the realization that something has gone horribly awry. (Or, like the Jean Ralphio meme, he’s just realized that he’s taken on too much responsibility.) If you’re a chronic over-thinker or a worry wart, Bacon is bound to be your spirit animal.

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It wasn’t me! I did not eat dirt in the backyard!

A post shared by Bacon (@thebaconator) on Aug 8, 2018 at 11:33am PDT

Don't worry, though! He's a happy dog despite looking worried all the time. Here's a proof:

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Having a sleep over with a puppy has got me like 👅

A post shared by Bacon (@thebaconator) on Jan 9, 2018 at 10:48am PST

Image Credit: thebaconator via Instagram

February 20, 1826. People were inside a small theatre in the big city of London, waiting with their eyes open in the pitch black darkness of the room. Suddenly, there was light shining across the room — it was a replica of our Sun. When the viewers’ eyes finally adjusted from the sudden change in lighting, they realized that they are no longer in the theatre, but inside the Rosslyn Chapel in rural Scotland. It was magical, indeed.

The viewers were inside the work of a French inventor, Louis Daguerre. The diorama was one of his many inventions, a multimedia spectacle that took the mid-nineteenth century by storm. The first diorama was constructed in 1822, behind the Place du Château d’Eau (now the Place de la République). Daguerre’s studio was located in the 10th arrondissement, in Paris, rue Faubourg du Temple; the area was shabby and underdeveloped, consisting of old army barracks and a smattering of theaters. Once customers entered the theater, however, they soon forgot their dilapidated surroundings. They were transported, as it were virtually, to places and moments in history: the Black Forest; the Inauguration of the Temple of Solomon; the Great Fire of Edinburgh.

The modern cinema, as well as technological advancements like virtual reality, can trace their roots back to this amazing invention.

Learn more about Daguerre’s diorama over at JSTOR Daily.

(Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

It was 1943, and the city of Harvard in Clay County, Nebraska, decided to dispose of unused plots of land by selling them at $1.50 apiece. Upon seeing this great offer, a 16-year-old man named Robert Pinckney, who was the son of a local physician, decided that he wanted some for himself so that he can build victory gardens in summer. But upon seeing the list of plots on sale, Robert saw that the plot of land in which the jailhouse stands was also one of the properties on sale.

As any good and responsible citizen would have done, Robert informed the city council about their mistake. But they only laughed at him.

Robert decided that the best revenge would be to buy the plot, which he did.

And so the sale was made and the deed papers signed, and still the city refused to admit their mistake. They pretended as if nothing happened, and continued to house criminals in the jail. Once Robert put a lock on the jail, but the city officials smashed it and threw him off the premises.

So Robert hired a lawyer and sued the city for owned rent…

The jailhouse would then get a wide media coverage, making the city of Harvard famous. The jailhouse would also contribute much to the war effort, but how?

Find out the rest of the story over at Amusing Planet.

(Image Credit: Jimmy Emerson/ Flickr/ Amusing Planet)

The Mayan city of Tikal was a thriving city that has prospered and expanded for hundreds of years. But in the ninth century A.D, something happened in the city that made its citizens abandon the place, but what was it? It turns out that mercury and toxic algae are what drove the people out of the city, as these poisoned their drinking water, and since they were already struggling to survive the dry season, this made their situation worse.

Per the study, published last month in the journal Scientific Reports, the Maya sought to collect as much water as possible during the region’s rainy season, developing huge, paved plazas that were sloped to send water sluicing into the reservoirs for storage. As the researchers argue, this system inadvertently contributed to the city’s undoing.

To assess the factors at play in Tikal’s demise, the team took samples of sediments at the bottom of four of Tikal’s reservoirs. Chemical and biological analyses of layers dated to the mid-800s revealed the grim history of the lakes’ contents: As Ruth Schuster reports for Haaretz, two of the largest reservoirs were not only dangerously polluted with the heavy metal mercury, but also carried traces of enormous toxic algal blooms.

[...]

“The water would have looked nasty,” says co-author Kenneth Tankersley, an anthropologist at the University of Cincinnati, in the statement. “It would have tasted nasty. Nobody would have wanted to drink that water.”

More details about this sad story over at Smithsonian Magazine.

(Image Credit: Raymond Ostertag/ Wikimedia Commons)

How far is our Sun from our planet? How far is the Moon? How far are the stars that we see in the night sky? While some of these questions are already answered by today’s science, hundreds of years ago people did not know how to answer these questions, but they created ways to attempt to answer them.

Ingenious efforts to measure distances to them began in earnest in the 3rd and 4th centuries B.C., and astronomers and astrophysicists today, with high-powered telescopes and computers, still ponder the universe and attempt to tease out answers to millennia-old questions.

Two hundred years ago, a man named Joseph von Fraunhofer made one of the most important discoveries that would help astrophysicists today in calculating the distances of celestial objects. He had found “the hidden code in starlight.”

Learn more about Fraunhofer’s life, as well as his discovery over at Nautilus.

(Image Credit: Hans/ Pixabay)

Simpson Xin shared pictures of a stray cat in China who looks so distressed you have to wonder what it's worried about. Won't someone comfort the poor thing? But that's just an illusion, caused by the cat's unique facial markings. Here's a closer look.

Still, you'd think someone would want to take the cat in just for the internet points. We wouldn't be surprised if it became an Instagram star ...or whatever the Chinese equivalent of Instagram is. See more pictures of the cat with the perpetually furrowed brow at Bored Panda.

Japanese pastry chef Koki Kato layered cream, fruit, and mille-feuille cake inside hollowed-out melons, pineapples, and oranges. They're supposed to tantalize all five senses as you slice one open. These culinary marvels will overpower you with delight as you contemplate wondrously how Kato grew melons with cakes inside. You can see more photos at Sora News 24.

Photo: Cake.jp