People nowadays are becoming much more concerned with their health. Already, alternative meat products storm the market and get the headlines. Such is the case of the Impossible Whopper of Burger King, the “meatless Whopper” that uses the Impossible Burger (from Impossible Foods), a patty made up of soy and made to taste like meat. This burger made quite a commotion for some time in the market. However, much like its original whopper, it’s not that nutritious. Natural food cooked at home is, I believe, still the best.

Enter Lou Cooperhouse and his company BlueNalu.

His company, BlueNalu (a play on a Hawaiian term that means both ocean waves and mindfulness), is racing to bring to market what's known as cell-based seafood --- that is, seafood grown from cells in a lab, not harvested from the oceans. 

...unlike Impossible Foods, BlueNalu is not creating a plant-based seafood alternative like vegan Toona or shrimpless shrimp. Instead, Cooperhouse and his team are extracting a needle biopsy's worth of muscle cells from a single fish, such as a Patagonian toothfish, orange roughy and mahi-mahi.

Those cells are then carefully cultivated and fed a proprietary custom blend of liquid vitamins, amino acids and sugars. Eventually, the cells will grow into broad sheets of whole muscle tissue that can be cut into filets and sold fresh, frozen or packaged into other types of seafood entrees.

But unlike today's wild-caught or farmed fish options, BlueNalu's version of seafood will have no head, no tail, no bones, no blood. It's finfish, just without the swimming and breathing part. It's seafood without the sea.

With this kind of technology, I believe it would be a great alternative for us as we can still eat seafood without the need to fish, and we can also conserve the Earth’s natural resources in this way. However, I still believe that natural food is the best, and we humans only need to take care of the natural environment, instead of thinking more and more alternatives.

More of this story at NPR.

(Image Credit: Caroline Attwood/ Unsplash)

A massive LEGO 1x4 brick was found sitting on a truck in Billund, Denmark. What could this gigantic LEGO piece be for? Conner Flynn of Technabob says that this is likely for the LEGO headquarters.

This huge brick is likely making its way to the new LEGO headquarters in Billund, which is still under construction. The new LEGO campus will feature 52,000 square-meters of LEGO brick-inspired offices and a public park. It’s going to be a LEGO lover’s dream come true. The plan for the office complex was first announced in 2016 and the ground was broken in February of 2017 so they are making progress.

The said project should be completed in 2021.

(Image Credit: Mark John Stafford/ Twitter)

Most of us have problems and worries that seem to never disappear. Oftentimes, we carry these burdens every time, and more often than not, we let these worries get the best of us. This turns us into gloomy and anxious people. However, as with all problems, there is a solution, and for this one it is something easy to say, but hard to do — teach yourself to have a positive outlook in life (this requires training yourself). A positive attitude may lead to less anxiety and depression.

The latest evidence comes from a new study of caregivers — all of whom had the stressful job of taking care of a loved one with dementia. The study found that following a five-week course, participants' depression scores decreased by 16 percent and their anxiety scores decreased by 14 percent. The findings were published in the current issue of Health Psychology.

The course teaches eight skills to help people cope with stress. Techniques include mindfulness and deep breathing, setting an attainable daily goal, keeping a gratitude journal and — yes, it works — performing small acts of kindness.

More details of this at NPR.

(Image Credit: Nick Shuliahin/ Unsplash)

When she was 17 years old, Dee was dared to eat a pickle with her chocolate-drizzled strawberry ice cream. To her surprise, she loved it. Dee still enjoys this bizarre combination of ice cream and pickles after 32 years, and last April Fool’s Day, she enticed the customers at Pine Mountain Country Coffee House (the shop she owns along with her husband) to try it as well.

"How about something crazy for April.....ice cream and pickles! Try a Pickle Ice cream sundae! Not an April's Fool Day joke, it's really good, especially when you top it with chocolate sauce," Dee wrote on the Missouri mercantile's Facebook page.

But it wasn't until a few days later when Ken was poking fun at his wife over dinner that they decided to actually sell the "Pickle Split."

And so the Pickle Split came into their menu.

Would you try this?

(Image Credit: Pine Mountain Country Coffee House/ Facebook)

This is Suoi Tien Amusement Park, Buddhist-themed park located just outside Ho Chi Minh city (commonly known as Saigon). Most of the park really reflects the Buddhist theme like the golden dragon found at the entrance, and a garden full of Buddhas. But there are also things in the park that have nothing to do with the Buddhist theme such as the crocodile farm, coasters, and park rides.

The peculiar thing on this park, however, is its “Magic Castle” that seem to be a rip-off of the fantasy series Harry Potter. 

Really weird and a bit creepy for me.

(Image Credit: Your Mileage May Vary)

Tinney Davidson, together with her husband, moved to Comox, British Columbia in 2007. As their home was near a high school, they would wave to the students passing by their place. This would go on for many years. Even when her husband died, Davidson still continued this tradition.

“I just liked the look of the children and they all looked in and I thought, 'If they're looking in, I'll wave to them,’ ”...

Davidson will now move to an assisted living facility, and won’t be able to wave to the students. And so last week, hundreds of the students walked together to her place with flowers and “thank you” signs to bid farewell to the old woman.

(Image Credit: CBC News)

This photograph is entitled “The Human Touch” by James Gifford. This heart touching photo of a gorilla hugging its hooman caretaker wins the Human Nature Category of the 2019 Big Picture: Natural World Photography Competition. The Big Picture, via Instagram says this:

“Images like this have the ability to become ambassadors for the cause of wildlife conservation and for the call to be kinder and gentler toward nature and toward each other.” That’s how @CristinaMittermeier, BigPicture judge and @sealegacy co-founder, sums up the power of James Gifford’s “The Human Touch,” winner of our 2019 Human Nature category.

Alongside this photo are other award-winning photos. Check them out on New Atlas.

(Image Credit: James Gifford/ Big Picture)

Because she knows that her family “are a CURIOUS bunch”, New York-based comedian Mary Beth Barone gets ahead of their game and sends them an informational pamphlet about “everything [they] don’t actually need to know but will eventually ask”.

"I knew once I mentioned it to one person, everyone would have questions," she said. "So instead of answering them all in a flurry, I decided I'm just gonna foresee the line of questioning." 

She came up with a pamphlet titled, "I'm Going on a Date While We're on Vacation," made around 15 copies, and passed them around. She shared pictures of the pamphlet on Twitter on Wednesday, where it quickly took off. 

Genius!

(Image Credit: mary beth barone/ Twitter)

"The fish smell disappears in the early stages, then it smells like any other leather," says the owner of the only fish tannery in Europe and is also the sales manager of Icelandic company Atlantic Leather, Steinunn Gunnsteinsdóttir. The tannery has already processed lots of skins from different types of fish such as salmon, perch, cod, and wolffish, since 1994.

The tanning process takes between three and four weeks, and 19 employees now produce 10,000 skins, or nearly a tonne, of fish leather a month.

The company gets all its fish from sustainable stocks, via Icelandic, Norwegian and Faroe Island fishing fleets, and unlike the worst examples in the global cow leather industry its tanning process is as environmentally friendly as possible.

This fish skin is the fruit of several attempts of the Gunnsteinsdóttir family.

More details of this fishy story on BBC.

(Image Credit: Atlantic Leather)

The ancient Guatemalan people may have known magnetism over 2 millenniums ago. These plump sculptures called “potbellies” suggest this, as the sculptors of the ancient times purposely placed certain parts of the body such as the forehead, cheeks, and navel to magnetic sections of the rocks.

Lightning strikes probably magnetized sections of boulders that were later carved into stylized, rotund figures — known as potbellies — at the Guatemalan site of Monte Alto, say Harvard University geoscientist Roger Fu and his colleagues. Artisans may have held naturally magnetized mineral chunks near iron-rich, basalt boulders to find areas in the rock where magnetic forces pushed back, the scientists say in the June Journal of Archaeological Science. Predesignated parts of potbelly figures — which can stand more than 2 meters tall and weigh 10,000 kilograms or more — were then carved at those spots.

This only proves to us that our ancestors are really intelligent.

(Image Credit: Roger Fu / Science News)

Named after the explorer Ferdinand Magellan, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) makes an alluring spectacle on the dark, cold, space. This telescopic was ten months in the making, by the way. Looks like something taken out of a fantasy film, doesn’t it?

Spanning over 5 degrees or 10 full moons, the 4x4 panel mosaic was constructed from 3900 frames with a total of 1,060 hours of exposure time in both broadband and narrowband filters. The narrowband filters are designed to transmit only light emitted by sulfur, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms. Ionized by energetic starlight, the atoms emit their characteristic light as electrons are recaptured and the atoms transition to a lower energy state. As a result, in this image the LMC seems covered with its own clouds of ionized gas surrounding its massive, young stars.

(Image Credit: Team Ciel Austral)

Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan in his first solo show in Britain in 20 years makes a daring exhibition — a gold toilet. And of all places to display his masterpiece, what would be most fitting but a palace? This 18-karat gold toilet will be displayed at Blenheim Palace, home of the Duke of Marlborough.

"I am constantly inspired by the past and how nothing has really changed, so to show my work at Blenheim Palace -- a place full of history and humanity -- is significant to me," said the artist in a press release.

The exhibition, hosted by the Blenheim Art Foundation, will feature new works by the artist, but the main attraction is sure to be "America" -- the fully functioning gold toilet that will be plumbed into a room adjacent to the one in which Winston Churchill was born.

The work could be seen as a comment on the social, political and economic disparities in the United States, a press release announcing the exhibition reads.

The interpretations of the artwork vary from person to person. What is your interpretation of the artwork?

(Image Credit: Jacopo Zotti/ Menomenopiu Architects/ Maurizio Cattelan Archive)

Farming has always been a human-intensive-heavy labor. Robotic company Iron Ox aims to change that by making farming automated. The startup company which started last October, now sells a variety of leafy greens at Bianchini’s Market, San Carlos branch.

Despite claiming that their farming is “autonomous”, Iron Ox’s farming process is not fully automated. Humans are still needed in the job to plant the seeds, and the robots would be the one tending the plants. Then, the humans would pack the plants when they’re ready to eat. In other words, humans are still needed for a lot of work. But I guess, tending plants is one less thing to worry about, and this would be the first step towards fully automated farming.

More details of this at The Verge.

(Image Credit: Iron Ox)

Jianhui Liao, with his photograph entitled “Cauldron Noodles”, is the overall winner of the Food Photographer of 2019 contest. The said photo displays a birthday celebration of Nuwa, the mother goddess in Chinese mythology, in Shexian Country in the Hebei Province, China. In this annual festival, the people of the village celebrate the goddess’s birthday by wearing Qing Dynasty costumes and eating pots of noodles at noon.

Competition adjudicator Andy Macdonald presented Liao with the £5,000 prize money.

Macdonald said of the image: "It stood out from the rest in its category for the way in which [Liao] made the subject matter, a community feast, so beautiful and atmospheric.

There are also winners from other categories of the contest. Check them out on BBC.

(Image Credit: Jianhui Liao)

Why go away from your home and be independent if you can still stay at home with your family, especially with your mom? You’d have no worries with your shirts being unironed or going to work without breakfast — she will be the one to do those things. Those are just a few benefits of being a mammone, an Italian mama’s boy.

Some 72.7 percent of adult Italian men between ages 18 to 34 still live with their moms. They are emotionally and physically dependent to their mothers.

The reason for men staying at home may be as much economic as it is cultural: the Italian workforce suffers from a lack of upward mobility, which has caused the job market to stagnate as older generations stay in their jobs well beyond 60, the typical age of retirement. As a result, Italian millennials are both overeducated and underemployed. As of 2019, youth unemployment in the country of 60 million is at 31.9 percent. While Milan has more work opportunities for young people than other Italian cities, the average cost of renting a one-bedroom apartment is around $1,100, making staying at home a practical solution for young men saving money for their future.

What do you think about this?

(Image Credit: Bea de Giacomo)