Forks, pillows, napkins, and fireplaces. These are objects that we see at our own homes, and we often take these objects for granted. But like every man-made object, these daily household objects have their own share of intriguing stories in them.

See their stories unfold over at Smithsonian Magazine.

(Image Credit: Silberfuchs/ Pixabay)

Growing up near Tsiigehtchic, a Gwich’in settlement in the Northwest Territories, Margaret Nazon was trained in the strict art of beading, where she was taught that there are certain combinations that are acceptable, and some that are not.

In the community, she would watch her older sister and her friends’ mothers stitch beads into floral designs on velvet, stroud, and moose hide after their chores were finished for the day. At their invitation, she began learning how to decorate bracelets, headbands, and moccasins.

… She remembers experienced beaders requiring their students to tear out and redo any work that did not meet their standards of neatness and precision...

Unfortunately, her love wasn’t on the art of beading, but rather on the cosmos…

 The local priest, Jean Colas, taught her and other children about the constellations above. In a part of the world where winters bring long nights, the skies can be particularly vivid.

… and her love for it would soon appear in her beadwork in her sixties.

She remembers the day, over a decade ago, when her partner, Bob Mumford, showed her some Hubble Space Telescope images online. The swirling nebulae, star clusters, and galaxies reminded him of beadwork. Nazon agreed; she was particularly attracted to the whirl of colours and ocular shape of the Cat’s Eye Nebula. In the tradition that had characterized her beading experiences, she tried to create a precise replica of the image. This left her frustrated, and she eventually disassembled the piece.

When she read in more detail about phenomena photographed by the Hubble telescope, however, Nazon learned that many, including the Cat’s Eye Nebula, were composed of gases and other moving particles. This meant the colours and shapes captured would long have shifted by the time she saw them. That realization, she says, freed her to “go wild” with her designs. “If I make a wrong stitch, so what? I’m not a perfectionist. I don’t care if this colour doesn’t match with that one. It looks good to me.”

And the result of the freedom that she attained? These gorgeous masterpieces.

Awesome.

(Image Credit: Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre/ The Walrus)

Just when you thought that the Puzzle from Hell was the most difficult jigsaw puzzle of all, it would seem that another jigsaw puzzle would like to compete with the title. Introducing the Transparent Jigsaw Puzzle made by Little Flower Pot Shop.

The puzzle comes in several levels of difficulty according to the size and number of pieces in the box, but the finished puzzles are all the same size.

The puzzle can be pre-ordered on Etsy with shipping beginning June 2020.

No thanks. I think I’ll stick with jigsaw puzzles for kids.

(Image Credit: Little Flower Pot Shop/ Laughing Squid)

One of the most expensive things in this world is space exploration. NASA’s budget for this year, for example, is around $22.6 billion. Everything about space exploration is expensive, from making spaceships to shipping stuff.

We’re talking several thousand dollars per pound to get to the moon, at best. This is why long-term plans for establishing a presence on the lunar surface — including building moon bases — recognize that we’ll need to use any local material we can. And I mean anything. Even, apparently, urine.

That’s right. Human urine. How does our urine help in making lunar bases? According to European researchers, the most abundant component of urine (urea) can help in keeping 3D-printed structures workable while not compromising strength and stability during hardening.

Plasticizers are often used in geopolymers (think ceramics or simple concrete) because they make the initial mixture easier to shape while avoiding dilution with too much water, which would weaken the final product.

By combining simulated lunar soil with water and urea, the researchers made 3D-printed geopolymer cylinders that outperformed versions that didn’t include a plasticizer.

More details about this over at Discover Magazine.

I just hope that future lunar bases won’t smell.

Well, what do you think?

(Image Credit: Gregory H. Revera/ Wikimedia Commons)

The coronavirus pandemic is putting a horrible strain on healthcare systems, especially on the people who work in hospitals. They don't have the luxury of self-isolating or sheltering in place. These pictures and stories should make you appreciate them and their nerve-wracking, and sometimes heartbreaking, work all the more.

The government of Leon County, Florida implores you to engage in social distancing in order to reduce the spread of the coronavirus. Stay at least six feet apart from each other.

But how much is six feet? Floridians need a guideline that they can readily understand. Alligators are an ordinary part of Florida life (I proposed marriage to my wife next to an alligator pond). So it's sensible to tell Floridians that they should keep an alligator's worth of space between each other.

-via Dave Barry

Cosplayer Jojo says that quarantine hasn't changed her crafting routine. She's always making one cosplay or another. A few days ago, her choice was to send Mary Potter to Hogwarts. But will she be a teacher or a student?

Joanna Wood, an Etsy seller in Chester, UK, dyes skeins of yarn so that they resemble famous works of art, such as Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night, which is pictured above. Other featured artists include Claude Monet, Wassily Kandinsky, Mark Rothko, and Hokusai.

-via So Super Awesome

If you've never heard the term aquafaba before, you're in good company. It is a vegan secret, used to make a light, fluffy meringue without eggs. It is the liquid you drain from a can of chickpeas!

The starchy liquid is a great binder directly from the can, but what really makes it magical is that it whips and creates a foam. Aquafaba is therefore able to trap air, giving items structure at the same time it delivers a fluffy crumb and lift.

Whipped aquafaba can be added to recipes, such as muffins, to make them light and fluffy, or you can add sugar and vanilla and make a meringue for pies and candies.

As it does with egg whites, adding a stabilizing ingredient improved the structure of whipped aquafaba. In sweet recipes, we usually used sugar. But there’s another ingredient we often whip into egg whites to add stability: cream of tartar. But why?

Cream of tartar is acidic—when added to egg whites, it prevents the egg proteins from bonding too tightly to each other and denatures them so they can create a foam that traps air bubbles and water more quickly and holds them in place for less weeping.   

America's Test Kitchen whipped up some aquafaba meringue made with only aquafaba, with sugar, and with sugar and cream of tartar to compare the results. They also tested the juice from other kinds of beans to compare with chickpea aquafaba. Soy milk, coffee, vanilla extract, and now meringue -is there anything bean juice cannot do? Read about aquafaba and its properties at America's Test Kitchen. -via TYWKIWDBI

(Image credit: Hagar Or Ringel Maman (הגר אור רינגל ממן))

In 2017, researchers aboard the RV Polarstern drilled through and pulled up sediment from the ocean off the coast of Antarctica. When they examined the core, they were surprise to find a layer of a very different color at about 30 meters down. Geologist Johann Klages from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Germany, describes the discovery.

"The first analyses indicated that, at a depth of 27 to 30 metres (88 to 98 ft) below the ocean floor, we had found a layer originally formed on land, not in the ocean."

They were in uncharted territory, in more ways than one. Nobody had ever pulled a Cretaceous Period sample out of the ground from such a southern point on the globe. Even so, the researchers can't have been prepared for what closer examination with X-ray computed tomography (CT) scans would reveal.

Back on land, scans described an intricate network of fossilised plant roots. Microscopic analyses also found evidence of pollen and spores, all pointing to the preserved remains of an ancient rainforest that existed in Antarctica approximately 90 million years ago, eons before the landscape was transformed into a barren province of ice.

The find was surprising, as plate tectonics calculations put the sample even closer to the South Pole than it is today. The next step is to figure out how Antarctica was warm enough to support such an environment 90 million years ago. One theory says it had to do with the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Read about the discovery at ScienceAlert. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Alfred-Wegener-Institut/James McKay/CC-BY-4.0)

All of us, at least once in our lives, have had a job that we totally hated. It could be because of colleagues, the boss, or it could be just because we really hate the job and we don’t want to do it. This horse can totally relate to that kind of feeling.

He hates working so much, he pretends to die every time someone attempts to ride him. A hilariously goofy video that is going viral on Facebook shows Jingang the horse playing dead every time someone tries to ride him.

[...]

"This is literally me, pretending to be asleep when my mom shouts from downstairs to wash the dishes," wrote one person. "Unbelievable -- horse even has tongue hanging out and eyes rolled up!" laughed another. "That horse reflects my entire life," a third added.

(Image Credit: Facebook)

Servals are wildcats, although they act a lot like a house cat, hunting for birds and rodents. A house cat with long legs and big ears that make their faces look tiny. Yeah, sometime people keep them as pets, but it's not a good idea.

Do you know your classical pieces well? Are you fluent in speaking emojis? If so, then put your classical music and emoji knowledge to the test by guessing the title of the classical piece with only emojis as your clue.

I only got four out of 22. I really am bad at this.

Take the quiz over at Classic FM, and tell me your score afterward.

(Image Credit: Classic FM)

It would seem that church services in 16th-century England were really chaotic. Dogs would often crowd around the church and would sometimes attack priests when they handed out the communion bread and wafers on the church steps. With this being the case, churches decided to hire people who would shoo the dogs and prevent them from causing trouble.

The dog whipper carried a whip and a long pair of tongs using which he would grab a dog by its neck and physically remove him from the church grounds.

In those times, it was not uncommon for household dogs to accompany their owners, or willfully follow them to the church. Although the dogs would patiently wait outside for the services to be over, fighting would invariable break out among the pack gathered outside the church door. The dog whipper would then pull out his whip and begin lashing at those who made the most noise. The tongs came in handy when the dogs fought back, or when the pack became difficult to control.

Dog-whipping was not only the dog whipper’s job. Sometimes, he would also be the “sluggard waker”, tasked to wake up those who doze off during a church service.

A sluggard waker watched over the attending congregation and if any of them fell asleep, it was his duty to wake them up. He carried a long wooden pole, tipped with a brass knob or a fork, with which he knocked sharply on the heads of the dozing lads, or poked between the shoulder blades with the fork. Some sticks were tipped on both ends—a brass knob (or fork) on one end and a fox tail on the other. If the sluggard waker spied a drowsy female, he used the fluffy end to gently tickle her awake.

The dog whipper was paid in any way possible, such as cash or essential goods. One church in Birchington-on-Sea, in Kent, donated an acre of land to the dog whipper. There is a small park there now, called 'Dog Acre'.

Eventually, the profession faded from the late 18th century onwards, as churches began instructing the people to keep their pets at home. But the legacy of dog whippers live on through the relics found in various churches.

Dog-whipping in the church may no longer be relevant in today’s society, but I believe that churches are still in need of sluggard wakers to this day.

Well, what do you think?

Across the United States, around 3.3 million dogs go to animal shelters for refuge annually. Of this number, around 670,000 of them are euthanized (this could be because the number of animals that could be sheltered are beyond the capacity of animal shelters). Thankfully, this number is in decline because of an increase in the percentage of animals adopted. I believe this could not have been possible without kind-hearted people and institutions.

And speaking of kind-hearted people and institutions, this pizzeria helps shelter dogs get adopted with this genius idea: by attaching pictures of pups to the front of their delivery boxes.

The Just Pizza and Wings Co. restaurant in Amherst has partnered with the Niagara SPCA to attach photos of adoptable dogs to the front of their delivery boxes.

If the cute pictures aren’t enough to sweeten the deal for potential adopters, Just Pizza has also offered to give away free $50 gift certificates to anyone who adopts a dog from the shelter.

And, fortunately, things are going according to plan.

Since posting about the initiative on Facebook last week, the shelter has received an outpouring of support from customers, national news outlets, and social media users.

More details about this over at Good News Network.

(Image Credit: Just Pizza & Wing Co. / CNN)