The words we speak bear weight and they statements we make can spark change whether for good or bad. Now, it's harder for someone who doesn't have a platform to voice out their feelings and thoughts, if they are not in a position of authority or power, how can they get their feelings across? For women during the Civil Rights Movement, it was music.

AnneMarie Mingo conducted a study in which she interviewed 40 women who lived through and participated in the Civil Rights Movement. She wanted to know how "freedom songs" shaped the dynamic of the movement and found that it was not only soothing but it was also empowering.

“I wanted to learn what gave women the strength to keep going out and protesting day after day and risking all the things that they risked,” Mingo said. “And one of the things was their understanding of God, and the way they articulated that understanding, or theology, wasn’t by going to seminary and writing some long treatise, but by singing and strategically adding or changing the lyrics to songs.”

It may be seen as small and simple acts of resistance but it made a big difference for those who felt they had no voice. Music was transcendental.

“They were allowing it to open up new spaces for them, especially as women and as young people. They could use music as a way of articulating their own pain, their own concerns, their own questions, their own political statements and critiques. Music democratized the Movement in ways that other things could not.”

(Image credit: Joe Alper/Library of Congress)

The quest for knowledge and learning is endless. And we have the capacity to grasp as much as we can. Having that kind of mindset can help people improve and become better in life. But one discouraging thought that hinders them is that their intellectual ability is fixed, that it cannot be improved.

With the help of a growth mindset program as part of an experimental study, a research team found that when students undergo these growth mindset interventions, and they realize that they can enhance their mental capacity, it positively affects their performance.

Psychological "interventions" like the one tested in the NSLM do not change the curriculum or teachers, but rather change how adolescents think or feel about themselves or their schoolwork in ways that encourage them to stay motivated when school is challenging and take advantage of the learning opportunities available in their school environment.

People tend to give up when they feel that their efforts aren't producing any fruit or when they think that they have reached their limit and cannot make any more progress. But these interventions show that students can be encouraged to challenge themselves and desire to tackle even more difficult problems.

Both lower- and higher-achieving students benefited academically from the program. On average, lower-achieving students who took the program earned significantly higher grades in ninth grade, and both higher- and lower-achieving students selected more challenging math courses in 10th grade.

Lower-achieving students who attended schools in which the peer climate (the "norms") supported the pursuit of challenging work registered the largest improvements in grades as a result of receiving the program.

(Image credit: Nicole Honeywill/Unsplash)

When we think of pie, we always picture biting through a nice, flaky crust with a soft, moist texture oozing with filling. There are certain methods to arrive at that outcome. But when you want to make deep-dish pies or those which could hold its own, it would be best to go with the hot water crust pie.

Hot water crust is most certainly crisp—even more so than traditional pie dough. But its texture is more crumbly than flaky and while it isn’t (and shouldn’t be!) tough, it lacks the tenderness of pie dough. But this lack of tenderness has its benefits—namely, it aids in the structure of the baked dough.

Pies made with hot water crust, on the other hand, are meant to be unmolded. It’s quite dramatic and yields some very impressive pies.

Hot water crust pies yield other benefits when you want to make specific pies. Food52 gives us a list comparing hot water crust pies with traditional pies as well as a recipe on how to make one.

(Image credit: Mark Weinberg)

Cuba is still in a state of crisis. People queue for hours on end just to get their daily rations, which consists of no more than some rice and beans. One can also get some pork, chicken, and vegetables if they have enough money to buy it.

But even with so little, Cuban families are able to make do because of the magic touch of the Cuban mothers and grandmothers who can make a delicious meal even with scarce ingredients.

“Cuban mothers and grandmothers have to become magicians. We find food where it isn’t.” This means rustling up ersatz ingredients at a moment’s notice. “If a dry wine isn’t available, OK, then I’ll use vinegar. If fresh tomatoes are too expensive, then I add a little sugar for sweetness. Often, we are out of oil so I use the fat that comes from the frying pork to then cook the beans or the rice in for more flavour. It becomes an experiment of sorts.”

Hector, who has been helping Maria stir the pot, is keen to tell me how much he likes his gran’s cooking. When we sit down to eat, I can see why. The pork is tender and the beans are packed with flavour. Maria is indeed a wizard in the kitchen.

(Image credit: Marc Averette/Wikimedia Commons)

Every time I fly on an airplane, I always get a bit anxious and mentally prepare myself for the worst possible scenario that could happen i.e. a plane crash.

I have seen movies or shows wherein they depict or reenact what happens when an airplane falls from the sky, so in the event that I experience such a thing, God forbid, I at least would know what to do and what my options are. But nothing could fully prepare anyone for all the various circumstances that could happen.

Two weeks ago, pilot Matt Lehtinen faced exactly that scenario in which the engine of the plane he was flying malfunctioned, and so he had to make an emergency landing. Thankfully, he wasn't hurt. At that moment, he thought of documenting his experience so that others may learn something out of it.

“I’m going to take this vlog, just so people can learn from this experience, so something good comes out of it,” he says in the video, which he posted to YouTube.

Lehtinen survived the crash landing in the forest largely thanks to a unique feature on his aircraft: It’s equipped with a parachute, called a CAPS, that allows the entire plane to float to the ground in an emergency. When his engine lost oil pressure, he was left with no choice but to deploy the parachute.

Of course, despite surviving the crash, he still needed to find a way to communicate with people who will rescue him. And that would be very difficult when you're lost in the middle of nowhere. However, it didn't take too long before help came.

Hours later, Lehtinen managed to make contact with rescuers on his transponder. A C-130 transport plane then passed over his location and dropped a walkie-talkie so he could communicate with the rescue team more easily. Then, a Royal Canadian Air Force helicopter arrived and airlifted Lehtinen out to safety.

(Image credit: Matt Lehtinen via Jalopnik)

3219 South Central Avenue used to be the place where musicians would gather together after-hours and play music all through the night, into the morning. It was smack dab in the middle of the jazz scene in the 1950s. Many musicians came and went to hang out and have a great time.

One particular story that has become part of Jack's rich music history was the night Charlie Parker, or the Bird as he was fondly called by his peers, came out after being released from hospital and played at the Basket Room.

Word on the street lit up with musicians reporting that he was suited up and headed for Jack’s, alto in tow. Buddy would recall the evening in his memoir: “[Bird] had been quite ill, having problems with drugs and going through other things. There was an announcement that he was going to come and jam.”

All the tenor and alto players were there—Sonny Criss, Wardell Gray, Dexter Gordon, Gene Phillips, Teddy Edwards, Jay McNeely, and on and on. They all played and Bird sat there and smiled…. Finally, Bird got up there and I don’t think he played more than three or four choruses. But he told a complete story, caught all the nuances, tapered off to the end. Nobody played a note after that. Everybody just packed up their horns and went on home, because it was so complete, so right.”

There were plans to restore the building and make it a place where musicians could once again congregate and share their ideas, music, and lives with one another. However, an unfortunate thing happened. The building was burnt down, an apparent arson, for unknown reasons.

Now, Jack's Basket Room lives only in people's stories, its past recorded in memories and shared anecdotes.

-via Longreads

(Image credit: The Tom & Ethel Bradley Center/California State University, Northridge)

One of the deadliest wildfires in US history, the Paradise fire of 2018, has left nothing to Californians. No remnants, only lost memories. It's been nine months since the fire and residents of Paradise are still trying to pick up the pieces of their lives from the tragedy.

But what exactly led this disaster to befall Paradise? Mark Arax of California Sunday investigates and digs deeper on the matter to see the root cause of the fire.

With the reportorial skill and knack for narrative that Arax is known for, and the deep knowledge of a native, he looks beyond the tragic panorama of Paradise lost to identify the forces that put thousands of people at risk, and he finds a constellation of factors that other journalists have so far failed to connect:

the history of fire suppression and forest mismanagement in the Sierra foothills; political corruption; governmental negligence and rampant urban growth; a flawed relationship with the land beneath our feet; and PG&E’s corrupt “culture of arrogance.”

Read the full piece on California Sunday. -via Longreads

(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

It's a sad and furious thing to see someone with such great talent thrown by the wayside, ridiculed and mocked by her contemporaries simply because she's a woman.

But such were the times in which Karolina Pavlova, one of the great Russian novelists and poets of her time whose works were shunned because the literary circles of her time thought her works were "not feminine" among other insults.

She endured personal attacks from her peers who often condescended her for wanting to be considered their equal. Even her closest friends would later desert her, leaving her to die forgotten. Only a few people actually supported her to the very end.

To be more than charitable, we might say that Pavlova’s life and art were so badly misread by her contemporaries because she was such a unique phenomenon in Russia. Pavlova’s own verse—its feeling restrained, and lyric meditation or elegy being her preferred genre—was considered by her contemporaries, as it was by the modern Russian poet Vladislav Khodasevich, as “above all not feminine.”

Pavlova’s lyrics, such as the cycle of poems inspired by her love for Boris Utin, can hardly be termed cold or abstract, but even when her poems reflect personal emotion, the feeling is both intensified and generalized, as is true in the case of most good poetry.

One of her novels, A Double Life, seems to be inspired by her own experiences. It is also her ultimate expression of retaliation against the society that has repudiated her for being a woman who sought to stand on level ground with others in her fields of interest. Read more on The Double Life of Karolina Pavlova at The Paris Review.

(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons via The Paris Review)

Scientists will be testing the efficacy of drugs used to treat non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) on what they claim to be the first lab-grown human livers which have been genetically modified to be inflicted with NAFLD.

The team’s proof-of-concept studies using the mini livers are published in Cell Metabolism, and indicate how a human gene that is involved in key metabolic processes regulates fat accumulation in the liver. The studies may also explain why one drug candidate against fatty liver disease that seemed promising in mouse models, wasn’t effective in clinical trials.

NAFLD is a complex disorder that can increase the risk of diabetes mellitus, cardiovascular and kidney diseases, and potentially lead to liver failure, the authors explained.

There are several factors that could cause the development of NAFLD in people however, it's difficult to pinpoint exactly how it happens and what the underlying molecular mechanism is behind the disease.

(Image credit: University of Pittsburgh Medical Center)

Though we are living in the age of video on-demand and streaming services, TV is still a ubiquitous home fixture in many a living space. Today, manufacturers are still improving the design of TV with LG coming up with plans to make TV which could be rolled out like wallpaper and placed anywhere on your wall.

This just goes to show how television has made a deep impact in our lives not just with the type of content we consume but also in the way we incorporate them in our homes. TVs are not just devices that show pixels moving on a screen. They have become furniture which could add to the ambience of a living space.

The history of television’s place in domestic interiors fits into a much larger story about the look of technology in the home. Are pieces of consumer technology machines, furniture, or something else? In the second half of the 19th century, when the Singer Corporation began developing the sewing machine as a consumer product, it found that models that looked too industrial—that is, too much like factory equipment—failed to spark shoppers’ desire.

Early televisions had to do more than conceal their electronic innards and echo current design trends. They also had to frame and highlight the pictures they transmitted, and allow consumers to position them where people could watch, not just listen.

From wooden boxes to flatscreen designs, TV has come a long way in the last 50 years to make our lives more colorful and entertaining. And it seems that no matter what new trends may come out, the TV in some form or other is here to stay in the foreseeable future.

(Image credit: Roberto Nickson/Unsplash)

Spandex, Nomex, and of course, Kevlar. These are the contributions that Stephanie Kwolek, a chemist at DuPont, has made to society. Though she didn't initally want to become a chemist, she took a degree in chemistry intending to pursue medicine. When she was looking for a job, she stumbled upon DuPont and planned to work there temporarily.

However, she found the job more interesting than she imagined and stayed there for over 40 years. As a child, she had dreamed of becoming a fashion designer, inspired by her mother who worked as a seamstress. But she was also influenced by her father, who was passionate about science and nature. Her career in life married her passion for both.

Ten years into her permanent career as a chemist, Kwolek was cooking up synthetic fibers in search of a replacement for the steel used in tires (DuPont wanted something lighter to improve gas mileage in anticipation of a fuel shortage). Her work involved dissolving fragments of fibers called “polyamides” into a liquid and then spinning the liquid to form that fiber. Usually the liquids her group made were thick and clear, like corn syrup. What Kwolek came up with was thin, opaque, and milky.

This solution was so alien that the scientist running the spinneret (the device that spins the liquid polyamides into fibers, like a spinning wheel making thread) was afraid Kwolek’s stuff would break their machine. What she had made was stiff, five times stronger than steel, and resistant to fire.

But, she said, “It wasn’t exactly a ’eureka moment.” At first, she was afraid the tests were wrong, and hesitated to show her results to others. “I didn’t want to be embarrassed. When I did tell management, they didn’t fool around. They immediately assigned a whole group to work on different aspects [of the material],” she said.

She worked for thirty more years after that and retired but continued as a consultant for the company. She has received numerous awards for her contributions to science and society through the materials she helped invent and lived until the age of 90.

(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

With help from modern technology and equipment as well as improved communication and transportation infrastructure, it's much easier for us to find opportunities to study and analyze certain phenomena than it was 150 years ago. When astronomers had the chance to observe a solar eclipse with clear skies on 7 August 1869, they pounced on it.

Throughout the mid 19th century, such eclipse expeditions enabled astronomers to refine theories of solar and lunar motion to generate tables that would improve navigational accuracy. They also raised new questions about undiscovered celestial bodies, the nature of the solar corona, and the precision of observational techniques.

Apart from those questions, they also wanted to learn more about the observations made by astronomers who observed a solar eclipse in Europe on 8 July 1842 which reported that brilliant red flames were seen around the lunar disk.

The brevity of totality complicated the analysis, but technology brought hope. In 1840 New York University chemistry professor John Draper had made a one-inch-diameter daguerreotype image of the Moon and displayed it in New York City to great acclaim. By 1845 French physicists Armand Fizeau and Jean Foucault had built a camera shutter capable of just 1/60th of a second exposure and used it to photograph the Sun. The race was on to photograph the solar corona.

For more on the story and how the eclipse of 1869 paved the way for more expeditions as well as a better understanding, not only of the motion and compositions of the Sun and Moon but also improvements in scientific methods of observing astronomical objects and finding new celestial bodies, check it out at Physics Today.

(Image credit: Jongsun Lee/Unsplash)

Urban spaces are suffocating to live in, at least in my part of the world. Traffic bogs you down, sidewalks cause pedestrians suffering, and congestion continues to build up and bleed into our everyday lives. All these poorly planned networks of transportation and mobility make it unsafe and unhealthy for everyone.

Despite the problems caused by the changing landscape and dynamic of urban life, some cities in the world are able to come up with solutions or systems that would make one's daily commute and life easier.

Reminder: Amsterdam wasn’t Amsterdam until it was Amsterdam. The famed “bike capital” of the world was once as congested and car-choked as the worst Western cities. So how did it became so renowned for its livability and sustainability? The simple answer: by narrowing roads and ending free parking.

This solution doesn't necessarily apply to every city in the world. Each urban space has its own set of issues that its local government needs to address. All it takes is for them to examine what causes the congestion and how they can lessen, if not, completely remove the cause. Or better yet, transform it to benefit the wider population.

...no two cities are the same. But just as Amsterdam (and Copenhagen) did in the 1980s and ’90s, Seville, Spain, did more recently. Within 18 months — and the reallocation of about 5,000 on-street parking spaces — Seville’s bike network was built. It’s not perfect, but it works for commuters, parents, kids, the elderly and the disabled.

Paris is reducing city speed limits to 19 mph. Stockholm’s congestion pricing is a success. London has raised funding for bike/pedestrian projects and is building out a network by reallocating road space.

In the end, in order to make a more livable space, each one must make compromises or even sacrifices for the good of everyone. If it means reducing the number of cars on the streets or putting a hefty price on parking spaces, then so be it.

(Image credit: Norali Emilio/Unsplash)

The Planetary Society's project LightSail aims to demonstrate the potential for space propulsion using solar radiation through mirrors, which means one can control the direction and movement of a spacecraft depending on its orientation relative to the Sun.

So far, the Planetary Society was able to successfully launch the second phase of its project when LightSail 2 went live and has been sailing through sunlight in low Earth orbit for two weeks now. During that time, it has captured several photos and gathered data which will be analyzed by the LightSail team to monitor its performance.

(Image credit: The Planetary Society)

When there's a thunderstorm outside and you can see flashes of lightning, it would be best to stay inside. But we still have to exercise caution as certain unpredictable events could still happen.

Like say a toilet exploding inside a Port Charlotte home when lightning struck a septic tank in their yard which ignited the methane gases built up in the pipes causing the toilet to blow up and be shattered into pieces.

A significant amount of damage was done to the home, caused in a millisecond, leaving the family no time to react. Marylou Ward, a co-owner of the home, said it was the loudest sound she has heard. The Sunday morning blast shattered the bathroom toilet into hundreds of pieces.

“It used to be our toilet,” Ward said. “We have nothing now.” Ward and her husband are not only without a toilet, but the indoor plumbing is destroyed, along with the septic tank. “We come in here and the toilet was laying on the floor,” Ward said. “There’s all pieces everywhere. Pieces everywhere.”

-via AP News

(Image credit: Marylou Ward via Fox 13 News)