Easy to prepare, tasty, nostalgic, and usually high in carbohydrates (sorry, calorie-counters!). These are some of the words we could use to describe comfort food.
Comfort foods know no geographical boundaries, either. Wherever you are in the world, there will always be a dish that your fellow citizens are more than happy to gravitate towards.
Around the world, you find countless comfort foods, but which one is the best? Top chefs suggest these comfort foods that they believe are the best. Check them out over at CNN.
Remember that Getty Museum challenge to recreate famous artworks at home? You might consider the more difficult paintings, such as those by Pablo Picasso. Picasso's quasi-abstract cubist style presents some challenges, but folks are up for it. Behold, Northern Sparrow's awesome recreation of Picasso’s “A Woman With A Bird.” It required a bird, of course, and some illusion makeup paint. Good job! -via reddit
But that's not the only Picasso recreated. Continue reading to see more Picasso clones, some funnier than others.
[The scientists] found that bacteria belonging to the Methylococcaceae family have been hitching a ride on the feathery plumes that act as the respiratory organs of Laminatubus and Bispira worms.
As it turns out, the worms slowly digest the hitchhiking bacteria and thus absorb the carbon and energy that the bacteria harvest from the methane. That is to say, with a little help and some extra steps, the worms have become methanotrophs themselves.
Researchers have developed a system that could parse meaning from brain activity and translate it into text. Through a machine-learning algorithm, they have trained an AI by letting it listen to people as they speak. From the data they collected, the AI will be able to predict what the people were actually saying.
It's just a start, but it's pretty exciting: a system that translates brain activity into text. For those unable to physically speak, such as people with locked-in syndrome for example, this would be a life-changer.
To train their AI, Makin and co-author Edward F. Chang "listened in" on the neural activity of four participants. As epileptics, each participant had had brain electrodes implanted for the purpose of seizure monitoring.
The participants were supplied 50 sentences they were to read aloud at least three times. As they did, neural data was collected by the researchers. (Audio recordings were also made.)
Though the algorithm isn't able to translate with 100% accuracy yet, the researchers believe that this could form the basis for speech prosthesis in the future.
— One World Street Art (@StreetArtDream) April 4, 2020
People have found various ways to express how they have been feeling about the coronavirus situation in the world. Most have used social media as their outlet given that people are strongly urged to stay home and avoid going out as much as possible. But there are street artists who used this opportunity to reflect the current reality of the world through their art.
Dixiedo is another fox who lives at Save a Fox Rescue. When she was being recorded on a smartphone, her handler says, "Don't you do anything to my phone." So of course, Dixiedo makes off with it, as fast and as far as she can, laughing all the way. What's remarkable is that she manages to capture the chase from a variety of angles: front view, shadow view, and facial view. -via Boing Boing
Scientists analyze cores taken from glaciers to see what was happening in the atmosphere when that ice formed. One thing they can measure is lead pollution, which spiked during the Industrial Revolution because of so many factories built, and during the 1970s, due to leaded gasoline. But lead pollution goes back much further. The villages of Castelton in the UK is surrounded by medieval castles, and was once a hub of lead mining.
Here, farmers mined and smelted so much lead that it left toxic traces in their bodies—and winds blew lead dust onto a glacier 1500 kilometers away in the Swiss Alps. Loveluck and his colleagues say the glacier preserves a detailed record of medieval lead production, especially when analyzed with a new method that can track deposition over a few weeks or even days.
Lead tracks silver production because it is often found in the same ore, and the team found that the far-flung lead pollution was a sensitive barometer of the medieval English economy. As they report in a study published this week in Antiquity, lead spiked when kings took power, minted silver coins, and built cathedrals and castles. Levels plunged when plagues, wars, or other crises slowed mining and the air cleared. “This is extraordinary—lead levels correlate with the transition of kings,” says historian Joanna Story of the University of Leicester, who was not part of the study.
Most people associate lead pollution with the Industrial Revolution, when lead became widely used in paints, pipes, and ceramics. But researchers have long known that the Romans also absorbed high levels of lead as they smelted silver and other ores. Recently, scientists have identified startling spikes of lead deposited in medieval times in Arctic ice cores and in lake sediments in Europe. A study last year suggested most of the pollution came from mines in Germany.
Identifying human facial expressions that convey emotions is easy. Faces that show sorrow, pain, surprise, anger, and joy can be easily identified. The same cannot be said when it comes to animals. Charles Darwin might be correct in his proposal that the universal way emotions are communicated in animals and humans is through facial expressions, but it will be a pain in the butt to identify animal facial expressions, as analysis of these things will be subject to bias in human scoring. Thankfully, we have machine learning that can help us.
By applying machine learning to the facial expressions of mice, researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology, Germany, were able to identify distinct emotional states of pleasure, disgust, nausea, pain and fear, and even their relative strength.
Importantly, the study showed these weren’t merely a reaction to a sensory stimulus, but reflected the inner, underlying emotion.
Thanks to the invention of the electron microscope, we can now observe very tiny molecules that cannot be seen by the naked eye, or even by a regular light microscope, and that includes viruses. Thanks to this, we now can see clearly what the entities that attack the human body, and we can now easily anthropomorphize them. But what was it like before we could see these viruses? How did we portray them?
Back then, what we only knew was diseases were “invisible, supernatural, and terrifying.” And so we used representations that fit on these said qualities, like the Grim Reaper and demons.
"Little figures of demons that were physically attacking the body," offers Jared Gardner. He's a professor of popular culture at the Ohio State University with an interest in medical humanities and cartoons. He curated a recent exhibition on the topic called Drawing Blood. "A lot of the early anthropomorphizations are less about disease and more about pain," he explains. "Like little dogs biting our feet for gout, for example."
Times have been rough for all of us and in the midst of this whole crisis, we want to make sure that we and our families are safe and secure. So there's no wonder why many people went out to supermarkets and bought so much of a few particular items which could possibly last them for months. And many have received backlash for this hoarding behavior. But the thing is, it seems that this was the way our brains were wired by evolution.
The word “hoarding” might bring to mind relatives or neighbors whose houses are overfilled with junk. A small percentage of people do suffer from what psychologists call “hoarding disorder,” keeping excessive goods to the point of distress and impairment.
But hoarding is actually a totally normal and adaptive behavior that kicks in any time there is an uneven supply of resources. Everyone hoards, even during the best of times, without even thinking about it. People like to have beans in the pantry, money in savings and chocolates hidden from the children. These are all hoards.
Outside of ethical discussions, hoarding is normal behavior. Of course, that is not to say that in a crisis such as the one we are in now, engaging in excessive hoarding is justified. But with how uncertain things have become, one cannot blame them for doing what they can to survive.
We all need to stay at home and avoid as much contact with other people as possible. But that doesn't mean that we can't have fun with our friends despite social distancing. With the technology that we have today, it is possible to hang out and have game night without physically meeting up. Huff Post's Elise Foley has made a list of some great games which you can play with your friends through your computer.
We are a constant source of embarrassment and disappointment to our dogs. Fishing around in a toilet, especially in public, is something that no decent creature does. They Can Talk reminds us to try to live up to our dogs' hopes for us.
The Minneapolis Institute of Art has some rooms from the 18th century for public viewing. Associate Curator of Textiles Nicole LaBouff teamed up with Assistant Curator at the University of Minnesota’s Wangensteen Historical Library Emily Beck to recreate a period-specific alcoholic beverage to serve to visitors in order to give flavor to the experience. They consulted recipe books from the 1700s, which contained plenty of alcohol, often in medicinal preparations. Back then, the line between food, booze, and medicine was pretty much non-existent. Cookbooks contained recipes for "plague water," to ward off or treat bubonic plague.
The recipe on which Beck and LaBouff hoped to base their recreation, meanwhile, called for two dozen herbs and herbal infusions, including green walnuts, elderflower, juniper berries, and “Venice treacle,” an early-modern apothecary cure that included viper’s flesh, skink bellies, and opium.
When Beck and LaBouff set out to replicate plague water recipes, they realized that—unlike early-modern Europeans—they could not try this at home. Home distillation is illegal in the United States, and the daunting list of aromatics wasn’t available in the grocery store.
The historians turned to Dan Oskey, founder of Tattersall Distilling in Minneapolis, to recreate the drinks. Oskey, LaBouff, and Beck combed hundreds of historical recipes, settling on several sweeter, more straightforward options, such as pear ratafia, a fruity cordial, and milk punch, a rum-based brew that had fortified transatlantic sailors. Plague water was the most complicated. When Oskey encountered the recipe’s old-fashioned language, he says, his first reaction was, “What the heck does that mean?”
But they managed to come up with a nice cocktail using what they could find and reasonable facsimiles for what they couldn't. A couple of years later, the art center is closed to the public, and Tattersall Distilling has switched to making a more modern plague water: hand sanitizer. So Beck and LaBouff have made their Plague Water-Inspired Cocktail recipe public, along with the story behind it, at Atlas Obscura.
— Open Ocean Exploration (@RebeccaRHelm) April 2, 2020
Rebecca Helm is a biology professor at the University of North Carolina Asheville. She collected images and videos of the most cute and colorful creatures you've ever seen in one Twiiter thread! They aren't Pokemon, but they are just as charming and they have the advantage of being real. Shown above is the blue sea dragon (Glaucus atlanticus), a kind of nudibranch. But that's just the beginning.
Blue button jellies. They will hypnotize you with their floating tentacles. Can also trap tiny crustaceans. Excellent distraction during Pokemon Multi Battle. Can be defeated by blue sea dragon. Do not mix. https://t.co/7p9IjA4CFX
— Open Ocean Exploration (@RebeccaRHelm) April 2, 2020
Oh, there are a lot more of these in her Twitter thread, and they aren't limited to ocean creatures. There are birds, insects, land animals, and even a plant or two. Just the thing to make you appreciate the diversity of the world's wildlife. -via Digg
