There are a couple of ways to cook turkey. There is the safe way where you cook the turkey in the oven. But if you don’t want to cook the turkey the safe way, there is a dangerous way of cooking it, and that is by deep-frying it. High risk, high return, so they say. But if you’re not satisfied with the deep-frying method, then you can opt to a more dangerous method, and that is by killing the turkey by electrocution, which the Founding Father Benjamin Franklin did.

Franklin began to study electricity as he was approaching 40. His scientific interest on the subject was piqued when he saw a show by Archibald Spencer, a scientist/showman known for performing various parlor tricks involving electricity. Franklin was so fascinated by electricity that he tried to reproduce Spencer’s parlor tricks in his own home.

Through his experiments, Franklin was able to demonstrate that electricity consisted of a common element he called "electric fire," arguing that it flowed like a liquid, passing from one body to another. He studied how sparks jumped between charged objects, correctly concluding that lightning was merely a massive electric spark. And he coined several electricity-related terms we still use today: "charging," "discharging," "conductor," and "battery," for instance.

But the Founding Father did not yet find a practical application of his study, and this irked him greatly.

To that end, he conceived of throwing an electricity-themed dinner party. "A turkey is to be killed for our dinner by the electric shock, and roasted by the electrical jack, before a fire kindled by the electrified bottle," Franklin wrote to Collinson. Guests would drink their wine from electrically charged glasses so they would receive a subtle shock with every sip.

It was not clear if Franklin really did host such an elaborate dinner party, but at the very least we have knowledge that he experimented with electrocuting various fowl through the use of six-gallon Leyden jars.

A Leyden jar is basically a glass jar partially filled with water, with a conducting wire sticking out of its cork. The jar was charged by exposing the end of the wire to an electric spark generated by friction—created by, say, rotating a glass plate so that it rubbed against leather pads. There were no standard units of electricity back then, but modern estimates indicate that a pint-sized Leyden jar would have had the energy of about 1 joule.

While the electric shock produced was enough to kill chickens, Franklin was still frustrated as he found out that the turkeys recovered from the shock after several minutes. He had to combine several Leyden jars to successfully kill a ten-pound turkey.

But on December 1750, he would learn a lesson he wouldn’t forget.

Find out more about this story over at Ars Technica.

(Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

In 1910, the Los Angeles Times published a story about a boy who was tasked with opening a valve on a steam engine-powered water pump every so often in order to release the built-up steam. That was his whole job: staring at the whirring pieces of metal all day, and he got bored. One day, when the supervisor walked in, the boy was nowhere to be found. The pump, however, worked just as it should — the “lazy” boy, in his boredom, was able to create a mechanized release for the pump. It was the first iteration of the automatic steam engine.

Now, this story may be apocryphal but the boy’s behavior reflects a deeper truth. When we are feeling “lazy” and disinclined to do something, we often search for an easier way to do the undesirable task at hand. We try to streamline the process and save time and effort. We wind up making the task more efficient. In other words, laziness can drive innovation.

In recent years psychologists and business leaders have wisened up to this insight. It’s shifting our perspective of what “laziness” really means, and whether strategic idleness or our inclination toward ease may actually be powerful tools and great assets. Bill Gates is even reported to have said, “I always choose a lazy person to do a hard job, because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”

More about this over at Psychology Today.

(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)

If you thought that donor blood is pure, it’s time to change what you thought about it. Researchers studying 18 batches of donor blood found caffeine in all the samples. Traces of cough medicine, as well as anti-anxiety drugs were found in many of them, too.

The analysis was made as part of a study into how botanical dietary supplements and other drugs can interact together in the body, using mass spectrometry to identify the chemical composition of the molecules in the blood samples.

What the scientists set out to do was identify how dietary supplements might have adverse effects when they mix with existing prescriptions. But the team also ended up discovering how our lifestyles cause changes that live on in the samples when we donate our bodily fluids.

While caffeine may not be an issue for patients, the other drugs might be.

Check out ScienceAlert for more details.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: sabinurce/ Pixabay)

We may be gobbling turkey meat made in bioreactors and not in the farm as early as 2030.

Paul Mozdiak is thankful this Thanksgiving that people are now finally paying attention to his idea. He is a professor of poultry science at North Carolina State University. He is also an expert in growing avian muscle cells in a lab flask, which landed him in the cutting edge of “cellular agriculture”, the idea that animal protein could be manufactured in bioreactors rather than by animals.

The technology, also known as in vitro meat cultivation, may sound strange. But it has been drawing a following of environmentalists, animal-rights activists, and investors who think meat can be made by biotech companies rather than on farms.

“Years from now, when people are [in] the grocery store trying to decide if they want to buy traditional versus cultivated meat, I am 100 percent sure that cultured meat is going to be just as cheap, if not cheaper,” says Mozdziak.

[...]

Lab-grown meat is still far from being economical. In Mozdziak’s lab, his team grows cells as a thin layer inside plastic flasks. If the cells become too thick, nutrients can’t get in. Growing a turkey-size amount of white meat this way would require about 11,340 flasks and about $34,000 worth of growth serum.

More details about this over at Technology Review.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: mohamed_hassan/ Pixabay)

This is a bacterium that normally has a diet of simple sugars. Scientists, however, came and re-engineered the bacterium and transformed it into one that builds its cells by absorbing carbon dioxide, much like plants. This could lead into modified microbes that suck carbon dioxide out of the air, turning it into medicines and other high-value compounds.

“The implications of this are profound,” says Dave Savage, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved with the work. Such advances, he says, could “ultimately make us change the way we teach biochemistry.”

Check out Science Magazine for more details about this one.

(Image Credit: Kwangshin Kim/ Science Source)

I believe that the T in Thanksgiving stands for “turkey”. Thanksgiving won’t be complete without it. Turkey has become the symbol for the American holidays. But how do you catch a turkey for your Thanksgiving needs? This remote-controlled turkey might be your answer.

This crazy turkey on wheels was built by Wayne Stang back in 2012 as a decoy to attract a real turkey that he and his family could enjoy at the dinner table. The Robo Turkey rides atop the drivetrain and suspension of a Mad Torque Rock Crawler truck, making it capable of handling some seriously rugged terrain too. Apparently, the wheeled bird has been quite successful at luring in real birds, too.

What a clever way to catch a turkey!

(Image Credit: Technabob)

This is Little Runmo, a short film that Gooseworx created over a period of two years. The short film starts with Runmo, a video game character, dying twice from spikes. At his third life, Runmo hesitates to jump over the gap, and talks with Pikit, a one-eyed signboard. Pikit then wonders at what point in a pit does Runmo die, which sparks curiosity to the latter. Runmo then slowly goes down to the pit and finds himself on a wild adventure he never would have thought of.

Via The Awesomer

(Video Credit: Gooseworx/ YouTube)

Locked in orbit with a young blue star named LB-1, which is located around 13,800 light years away from the constellation Gemini, is this newly found black hole that researchers discovered. But what is so fascinating about this black hole? It is so massive that scientists are puzzled about it.

With a mass of about 68 suns, it is far heftier than other stellar-mass black holes (those with masses below about 100 suns) in and around the Milky Way, scientists say. That’s not just a record, it’s also a conundrum. According to theory, black holes in our galaxy that form from the explosive deaths of massive stars — as this one likely did — shouldn’t be heavier than about 25 suns.

[...]

“I never thought in my wildest dreams you could form a black hole this big [in the Milky Way],” says Michael Zevin, an astrophysicist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. “If the observations pan out to be correct, this is really going to have people scratching their heads.”

Get more details about this over at ScienceNews.

(Image Credit: NAOJ/ ScienceNews)

Animals like sharks, penguins, and turtles could help us monitor oceans through the transmission of oceanographic information from electronic tags. 

Thousands of marine animals are tagged for various research and conservation resources. At the present, however, the information gathered from them is not used widely to track climate change and other shifts in the ocean. 

Research vessels, underwater drones and thousands of floating sensors instead are used in monitoring the ocean.

However, large areas of the ocean still remain under-sampled - leaving gaps in our knowledge.

A team led by the University of Exeter says animals carrying sensors can fill many of these gaps through natural behaviour such as diving under ice, swimming in shallow water or moving against currents.

"We want to highlight the massive potential of animal-borne sensors to teach us about the oceans," said lead author Dr David March, of Centre for Ecology and Conservation on Exeter's Penryn Campus in Cornwall.

"This is already happening on a limited scale, but there's scope for much more.

More details about this over at EurekAlert.

(Image Credit: Miquel Gomila/SOCIB)

Find a telescope to see the ringed planet along with the moon on Black Friday (Nov. 29), provided that the weather will be clear. On Thanksgiving evening, the moon will dance with Jupiter and Venus, and the moon will be with Saturn on Friday night.

It will soon be time to bid a fond adieu to the showpiece of the solar system, the magnificent ringed planet Saturn. In about a month, Saturn will begin to disappear into the sunset fires. And Friday will bring one of the final opportunities for many skywatchers to make a positive identification of the ringed planet, as it will appear close to the waxing crescent moon. 

See instructions on how to spot Saturn over at Space.com.

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

It has been long known by scientists that the proteins that package DNA need a chaperone. But what this chaperone looks like, and how it acts, is unknown to scientists. It has been a mystery until now.

A team of researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder has cracked the puzzle of the Facilitates Chromatin Transcription (FACT) protein structure. This protein is partly responsible for making sure everything goes smoothly and no improper interactions take place when DNA temporarily sheds and replaces its guardian proteins, or histones.

The findings of this study might help us to understand genome and gene transcription, as well as cancer. It might also help us in the development of anti-cancer drugs.

"This is just the start for this protein. It's not the end," said Yang Liu, a research associate in the Department of Biochemistry at CU Boulder and one of the study's lead authors.

Check out PHYS.org to know more about the study.

(Image Credit: Liu et al. 2019)

It seems that we’re not the only ones who can benefit from VR. Farmers from Moscow put on VR headsets to cows to see if it improved their mood and milk production. The headset has been modified to match the structural features of the cow’s heads so that they could see properly.

The project subjected cattle to a simulated summer field with colors tuned for the animals' eyes, giving them a decidedly more pleasing landscape than a plain, confining farm.

It appears to have worked, at least on a basic level. The first test reduced the cows' anxiety and boosted their overall sentiment. While it's not certain how well this affects the quality or volume of milk, there are plans for a more "comprehensive" study to answer that question.

There are a few concerns, however, such as disturbing the cows and bringing them back to reality when you remove the headsets.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Ministry of Agriculture and Food of the Moscow Region)

More often than not, we find ourselves inspired by extremely motivated individuals who accomplish impressive feats. But sometimes we get inspired by people who seem to be unmotivated by life, such as this kid who bounces unenthusiastically.

The original video of the kid, titled, "I will never be as cool as my 2 year old nephew in a bounce house," was uploaded by YouTube user Todd Blass in May 2017, but because the boy is an absolute mood a clip has resurfaced online and been transformed into a meme.

(Video Credit: Todd Blass/ YouTube)

We live in a time where there is a concern over “fake news”. But it seems that we are not only concerned about fake news, as a new study finds that people distinguish between dishonest and biased information sources. A source may lose its credibility with people, even if they believe the source is honest, researchers found out.

That means untruthful – or “fake” – news isn’t the only issue for consumers.

“If you want to be seen as a credible source, you have to be objective, as well as honest and knowledgeable,” said Laura Wallace, lead author of the study and postdoctoral researcher in psychology at The Ohio State University.

The findings are significant because most research has suggested that source credibility is a combination of trustworthiness and expertise, Wallace said. Bias had not been considered, or was viewed as part of trustworthiness.

See more details about this study over at Ohio State News.

(Image Credit: Wokandapix/ Pixabay)

We humans are great at navigation. It’s how we managed to travel across the landmasses and sail across the wide oceans throughout the course of time. Our ability to navigate has enabled us to navigate our way around places (including space), and get from the bedroom to the bathroom and back to our beds at night. It is a natural, innate ability which we neither notice nor question.

But what is the mechanism responsible for our dependable senses of direction, especially in new and different environments? This is what UC Santa Barbara neuroscientist Sung Soo Kim zones in on.

“It’s a very flexible system,” Kim said of a network of neurons that fire in synchrony, serving to convert sensory cues into a stable sense of direction we hold in our brains. For example, he said, “When you walk into a really new environment, within a few moments, your sense of direction is already established. Once established, it becomes stable and you’re not confused about the direction you’re facing.

“Even if the lights are turned off,” added Kim, an assistant professor in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, “your brain maintains that sense of direction and updates it as you move around.”

Get more details about this over at The Current.

(Image Credit: Pexels/ Pixabay)