Loic Suberville gives us short and funny skits about the way languages are constructed and used. While no language is exempt, he has had a lot of fun with French as it is heard by English speakers. There seems to be a wide gap in how we use vowels.  



The latest in the French series is labeled as part 107, although the numbering seems a bit random, as there are not 107 videos (it's about language, not math). You can browse through a ton of these videos at Suberville's YouTube channel. -via Laughing Squid

Deep in the heart of the Amazon, in the riverside town of Maués, they grow a fruit you may have never heard of. Guaraná grows in other places, but Maués is the heart of its production, as guaraná is not only a prized fruit made into a daily drink, it's a tourist draw. They even have an annual guaraná festival.

Guaraná contains high levels of caffeine – as much as four times that of coffee beans, as well as other psychoactive stimulants (including saponins and tannins) associated with improved cognitive performance. And numerous research papers explore its potential in the prevention of cardiovascular disease, as an anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, antidepressant, intestinal regulator and even an aphrodisiac.

Maués might be dubbed the "land of guaraná" but the fruit's history long predates the town. The Sateré-Mawé indigenous people have been cultivating guaraná in their ancestral forests nearby for millennia. It was their ancestors who domesticated the species, learned of its properties and devised the best cultivation and processing techniques.

Guaraná has a traditional origin story that, yes, involves an eyeball, and long-held traditions on how to prepare and consume it. But it's also a moneymaker, working its way into South American sodas. It may even prolong life. Read about guaraná and what it means at BBC Travel. -via Digg

(Image credit: Anita Fortis)

Just found my new role model pic.twitter.com/f1HkBXSxyy

— human_not_bees (Beës) (@human_not_bees) April 25, 2021

Before you watch this video, remember that speed competitions involving food are often a bit gross, and should never be attempted in everyday life. She had the sandwich made and EATEN before he even got to the jelly! This one-on-one competition was over before it began, but it highlights the reasons why Guinness World Records has to establish rules and standards before they recognize any record holder. -via Metafilter

It's been 35 years since the world's worst nuclear disaster occurred in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union. A complicated series of events led to explosions and a fire that burned for days at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Pripyat, during which nuclear fallout rained over Ukraine and nearby Belarus.

April 26, 1986, started off like any other day for Alla Shapiro. The pediatrician, then 32 years old, was at work in the Pediatric Hematology Unit at the Children’s Hospital in Kiev, Ukraine. But everything changed when she learned that an explosion had occurred 80 miles north at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, just outside the city of Pripyat. In the hours that followed, hundreds of children arrived at the hospital by bus seeking treatment.

As a front-line worker, it was the first time that Shapiro and her colleagues were faced with treating patients during a disaster of Chernobyl's magnitude. Unfortunately, the Soviet government didn’t have any nuclear disaster protocols in place, and basic supplies were severely limited, leaving medical professionals to improvise and adapt. In the days and weeks that followed, Shapiro discovered that the government was misleading the public about its handling of the explosion, which was caused by a flawed reactor design, according to the World Nuclear Association.

Shapiro wrote a book about her experiences titled Doctor on Call: Chernobyl Responder, Jewish Refugee, Radiation Expert. She is now a consultant on the effects of radiation on human health. In an interview with Smithsonian, Shapiro describes the flood of children from Pripyat coming into her hospital coughing on radioactive dust, and the measures the staff took to care for them.

I want one pic.twitter.com/WiGHfOwked

— Sven Henrich (@NorthmanTrader) April 24, 2021

I want one, too! Last weekend, people on the streets of Los Angeles were treated to the sight of a guy surfing through the air on a real hoverboard. It wasn't a movie stunt- this is a real quadcopter that's strong enough to lift a person and controllable enough to stand on. It's made by Omni Hoverboards, Inc. and their website says to "Stay tuned for our consumer version". The hoverer in LA was most likely part of that promotion. Here's the company's demonstration video.



Let's just hope the first people who buy the consumer version are as good at staying upright as the guys in these videos. -via Geekologie

In the rush to colonize Africa, various European countries scrambled to claim lands, exploit their natural resources, raise crops using forced labor, and export Africans as slaves. By 1761, the French East India Company was in control of Madagascar and the Mascarene archipelago. The Mascarene Islands were uninhabited, and the French set about bringing in enslaved people to work the land. The preferred crops were coffee and sugar, which were in high demand around the world. They did not grow crops that would sustain the people who lived and worked there, so supplies had to be imported. Captain Jean de Lafargue was willing to take food to the Macarene Islands, but he was also open to making some extra money on the side.  

The governor gave Lafargue his new orders: go to Foulpointe, on Madagascar’s east coast, and bring back food. Oh, and don’t bring any slaves.

From the governor’s point of view, the proscription made perfect sense. The one advantage of having been abandoned by the navy was that its crews no longer stopped by, insisting on being fed, but even with that reduction in overall appetite, Île de France still needed victuals more than extra mouths to feed. Lafargue, though, had no intention of paying attention to the restriction: L’Utile was his first command, and one of the benefits of being captain of a Company ship was the possibility of engaging in trade on your own account. Indeed, it was an official perk: the Company had suffered so many losses from pilfering captains that it had eventually thrown up its hands and given them the right to merchandise for themselves, in the hopes that they would stick to their permitted limits and leave the Company’s goods alone. And Foulpointe was Madagascar’s main slave trading port.

L’Utile departed on 27 June. Three weeks later, on 22 July, it set sail for its return journey. In between, Lafargue had not only filled up the hold with flour, meat, wine, and other necessities, he had also negotiated the purchase of 158 Malagasy men and women, who cost him 10,000 livres. This was something over his yearly salary, but he could expect to sell them in the Mascarenes for twice that⁠—and the buyers would consider it a good deal as long as a slave lived more than three months.The slaves were shoved into the hold and walled up in a compartment separating them from the foodstuffs. The only mitigation in their situation was that L’Utile was not a specialised slave ship, and so they were not chained.

Lafarge's plan was to sell the Malagasy people on the island of Rodrigues, then continue to Île de France (now Mauritius) with the supplies. But on his secret route, there was the Island of Sand, a tiny, treeless, uninhabited volcanic island with a dangerous reef that had been badly plotted on various maps. You guessed it; L’Utile was shipwrecked when the island appeared where Lafarge wasn't expecting it. The surviving French sailors and the Malagasy worked together to built a boat, in which the Frenchmen sailed away, leaving the Malagasy behind. Read the incredible story of the castaways who lived on the island for 15 years at Damn Interesting. The story is also available as a podcast.

Masala chai is a delicious blend of tea, spices, and milk enjoyed by, well, everyone, but it has a special significance for the Indian diaspora. The traditional drink, correctly made, is a connection to home and family. While meaningful, it's not an ancient tradition. Indian people didn't drink tea until the early 19th century, when the British Empire needed a place to grow tea after China began closing off trade with the West. Plantations in India took a long time to produce quality tea, and the Indian Tea Association (composed of British plantation owners and tea traders) boosted sales of the inferior product by promoting tea drinking among Indians.

Chaiwallas—street or roadside stand vendors that sold tea—started adding masala to tea sometime between World War I and the 1930s. This innovation was likely inspired by those Ayurvedic and Muslim medicinal spice brews—and because the cheap tea tasted bitter and strong. The Association took notice in the 1930s and started inspecting tea stalls to prevent the practice from spreading, even sending out competing tea hawkers who didn’t brew with spices—the addition of spices, the Association believed, meant that less tea would be used per serving and thus lower profits. While my research is ongoing, I suspect that many chaiwallas did not scale down the tea: Most modern masala chai recipes call for just as much (or more) tea as a plain cup would. But the Association shut down those tea stalls that used masala, calling it an adulteration of the product.

As history proves, that wasn’t the end of masala chai. “Adding the spices was really an act of rebellion against the British,” says Sana Javeri Kadri, owner of Diaspora Co., a single-origin sustainable spice company that supplies turmeric and other spices to chai drinkers and manufacturers. “Therefore, as our national symbol or a national drink, it’s a very symbolic one.”

The history of masala chai is a fascinating story told at Epicurious. But there's more, as we get a rundown of the spices and a lesson in making authentic Indian tea, too.

First, the people at Bridge Kaldro Music Store in Christianburg, Virginia, put up a sign challenging the nearby shoe shop to a sign war. Super Shoes responded with an insulting sign declaring that their shoe strings are stronger than Bridge Kaldros' guitar strings. Cute, even if they were a little short on Ss. The signs were even posted online for a laugh.

They went back and forth for a while and then a sign insulted the Kabuki Japanese Steakhouse, which joined in. Before you know it, every business in Christainburg had a sign up referencing the other signs, and a Facebook group was founded to keep up with them all.

See the signs that started it all in chronological order at Bored Panda, and keep up with new ones at the Christiansburg, VA Sign War Facebook group.

The Panama Canal is an engineering marvel and changed shipping for the entire globe. But getting it built was no picnic. Sure, Panama was the natural place to put such a canal, but there was a mountain in the middle of the narrowest part of the place where the two continents meet. This TED-Ed video condenses the long story into a few minutes, which might make you want to study further. -via Damn Interesting

We know how devastating forest fires can be. We also know how hard it is to extinguish underground coal fires, which can burn for decades. In between those two disasters is the underground peat fire, called a zombie fire. Zombie fires can burn for years and spread unnoticed into new areas, ruining the environment as they go.

Just ask the firefighters who battled North Carolina’s Evans Road Fire in 2008, which simmered through swampy peatland. Engineers ended up pumping 7.5 billion liters of water from lakes to flood the area. It took seven months to drown the fire.

If you’ve got a big air tanker that can drop huge amounts of water on a zombie fire, good for you. But it’s not going to work. “No one fights smoldering fires, which are massive, with air tankers,” says Rein. “If they do, they’re doing PR. They’re telling everyone, ‘Don’t worry, we have it!’ But they don’t. They don’t. When I see these airplanes in a smoldering fire, I know they are completely desperate.”

That’s because deluging a zombie isn’t guaranteed to quickly kill it. Say you’re pumping massive quantities across a peatland like firefighters did in North Carolina. That doesn’t mean the water is getting to the right places as it trickles underground. “It creates a channel, and the fire in that channel is suppressed, but then the water doesn’t go anywhere else,” Rein says. Other parts of the fire can fester untouched. And so the zombie lives on.

However, scientists have developed a new weapon in the battle against zombie fires. Read how it can work at Atlas Obscura.

Alex and Junior at Tammy's Oberlin Hobby Farm are exploring a seesaw. For the goats, it's just practicing their balance, but they'll eventually learn how fun it is. We don't know for certain that it's Tammy recording and laughing, but her giggles are contagious. -via Boing Boing 

Back in 2012, we were introduced to a miraculous development that was supposed to make our ketchup slide out of the bottle with no waste. We haven't seen much about the technology since then, but now there's a campaign to roll out LiquiGlide for toothpaste tubes.

Today LiquiGlide, the company spun out of MIT’s Varanasi Research Group to develop ways to manufacture and commercialize the technology, announced a new $13.5 million round of funding. But more importantly for consumers, the company also revealed a new partnership with Colgate, which will be introducing a new recyclable toothpaste container that leverages LiquiGlide so that every last drop of the product can be squeezed out with minimal effort. If there’s a mangled tube of toothpaste in your bathroom that’s still filled with impossible to reach product, you’ll understand why this is so exciting.

Read how it works and see a demonstration at Gizmodo. I wasn't aware that getting the last bit of toothpaste out of a tube was a real problem since we went from metal to plastic tubes, but if you are really concerned about wasted toothpaste, notice that Colgate's advertising gif shows a person squeezing out about four times the amount of paste you need to brush your teeth.

In 1897, mail delivery in New York City sped up tremendously when a system of pneumatic tubes was laid underneath the streets. The same technology that allows multiple lanes at a bank's drive-through was harnessed to deliver messages and some surprising goods in the city in those same kind of cylinders.  

At 24-inches long and 8-inches wide, these cylinders could hold up to 600 letters. A team of 136 “Rocketeers” and dispatchers made sure the
system ran smoothly, transporting upwards of 95,000 letters per day.
The original tubes were less than a mile long, from the old General Post Office to the Produce Exchange. It quickly grew to cover both sides of Manhattan Island with a crosstown line. Extensions were added to the Bronx and Brooklyn using the Brooklyn Bridge. There is even a rumour that a popular Bronx sandwich shop used the system to send their sandwiches – the real submarine sandwiches! It took only 20 minutes for a canister to travel from the General Post Office to Harlem. A 40-minute mail wagon route was reduced to 7 minutes.

There was at least one case in which a cat was sent through the tubes, causing astonishment that the feline survived the trip. The New York pneumatic mail system ran until the 1950s, when it was discontinued due to the high expense of maintaining it. Read about the days of tube mail at Messy Messy Chic.

There's a new roundabout in eastern Kentucky, specifically in Rowan County near the Bath County line. Luckily, traffic was not coming from all directions when this video was taken, because these are NOT one way streets! The roundabout was constructed to improve traffic flow and reduce accidents, so what could possibly go wrong? They will definitely have to improve signage or something. -via Jalopnik

Fish sticks were introduced in 1953 by Birdseye, the company that made frozen food palatable and therefore popular. Fish sticks came to be extremely popular over the decades, believe it or not, because kids like them and families (and institutions) find them so convenient. An article at Hakai magazine explains why fish sticks were developed, how they are made, and why they've stayed with us so long. They are made from various kinds of mildly-favored fish with a battered coating that keeps them from sticking together in the freezer.  

The battered disguise may be needed because, at least in North America, seafood has often been second-tier. “We’ve mostly considered the eating of fish to be beneath our aspirations,” writes chef and author Barton Seaver in American Seafood. Traditionally, fish was associated with sacrifice and penance—food to eat when meat was unaffordable or, if you were Catholic, to eat on the many days when red meat is verboten. Fish also spoils fast, smells bad, and contains sharp bones that pose a choking hazard.

The advent of fish sticks made eating fish easier and more palatable for the seafood wary. “You can almost pretend that it isn’t fish,” says Ingo Heidbrink, a maritime historian at Old Dominion University in Virginia. In his native Germany, where a reported seven million people eat fish sticks at least once a week, companies changed the fish at least three times since its introduction, from cod to pollock to Alaska pollock, a distinct species. “Consumers didn’t seem to notice,” says Heidbrink.

Personally, while I served them to the kids at times, I avoid fish sticks because I ate them at school every Friday from first through sixth grade, and that's enough. But they proved to be quite popular among folks who stocked up for the pandemic. Read everything you ever wanted to know about fish sticks at Hakai magazine. -via Digg