If you put the proper amount of sugar and spices in it, no one will know there are carrots in your carrot cake. Or zucchini in your zucchini bread. But you might be shocked if you found out that delicious chocolate cake you just ate was made with sauerkraut. The recipe for sauerkraut cake has been published many times, at least once under the title Don't Ask Cake. That one leaned on the habit of cooks serving the cake first and then daring the guests to identify the secret ingredient. Who came up with the idea of putting sauerkraut in chocolate cake? There's one origin story that reminds me of how we were served sauerkraut at least twice a week at my school cafeteria, but it may well be apocryphal. Bakers have long used vegetables, like carrots, to boost a cake's nutrition, and acids such as vinegar were used to make a cake rise before baking powder was invented. The history of sauerkraut itself is just as murky. We get both in an article at Atlas Obscura, as well as a recipe for sauerkraut cake, which they say is really tasty. In a good way.

The world illustrated in the movie Black Panther: Wakanda Forever centers on the fictional nation of Wakanda, which has a Pan-African culture that takes its cues from many parts of the continent. The story, as well as that of the previous movie Black Panther, is a work of Afrofuturism, in which elements of African culture that were destroyed by colonialism are recovered and celebrated. The new movie adds another lost culture to the mix. While the underwater society called Talokan brings to mind the lost city of Atlantis, the particular vision of this culture is derived from Mesoamerica: the Maya, Toltec, and Aztec civilizations of Central America and Mexico before the conquistadors arrived in 1502. Read how Black Panther: Wakanda Forever celebrates lost cultures on both sides of the Atlantic at The Conversation. -via Geeks Are Sexy

The Talokan society and their leader Namor are based on the Marvel Comics character Sub-Mariner of Atlantis, based on Greek mythology. The movie version is changed to Talokan to move away from the colonial implications of the Atlantis legend, and to move Mesoamerican influences in. Read the specific ways Talokan is based on Mesoamerican civilizations at Smithsonian. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is now playing at a theater near you.

Food Insider gives us a glimpse inside the Akshaya Patra Foundation's central kitchen in Bangalore, India. Every day, they feed 75,000 school children a freshly-made hot meal. Watch them turn tons of rice, dal, tomatoes, squash, and other ingredients into a tasty lunch in wholesale fashion. Four hours of cooking and delivery, then they prep tomorrow's ingredients, then wash everything down, every day. This goes on in 65 kitchens across India serving two million children. The Akshaya Patra Foundation is the world's biggest free school meal provider. Contrast this operation with pre-packaged ultra-processed food from Aramark or Sodexo warmed up for American schools that produce tons of packaging waste.

There are those arguing in the comments that there is no such thing as vegetable biryani, because biryani has meat. Without meat, it is called pulao. That might be a case of making the narration easier for the audience, since the term biryani is more familiar to a global audience. -via Digg

Beatrice Wood was right there at the birth of what we call modern art. In the early 20th century, she rejected her parents' high society plans for her and ran off to France, where she began a life as a painter, illustrator, sculptor, actress, potter, writer, and groundbreaker. Wood was the last surviving member of the American Dada art movement, where she earned the nickname "the Mama of Dada."

But the most surprising fact about Beatrice Wood was that she was the inspiration for the character Rose in the 1997 movie Titanic. James Cameron saw a documentary about Wood and was determined to get to know her better. Wood was not on the RMS Titanic, but the character had her personality. Before Wood died at the age of 105, she ascribed her longevity to "art books, chocolates and young men." Read about Beatrice Wood's life and how Cameron used it for an immortal fictional character at Messy Nessy Chic.

The John Lewis Christmas ad has dropped! The video is titled The Beginner. A middle-aged man is determined to learn how to use a skateboard, and of course he's having a hard time. Yet he soldiers on, risking injury and embarrassment to master the sport, or at least stay on the board. Be prepared to have your heartstrings grabbed when it starts to make sense. It all has to do with the reason why the guy is putting so much effort into skateboarding. The story is simple but effective.

John Lewis is a British department store we Yanks only hear about around Christmas time, because they have a history of touching ads that work to benefit a different cause every year. You can find out more about this year's public service campaign here. Watch a behind-the-scenes video here. And see John Lewis ads from previous Christmas seasons in our archives. -via Fark

You've heard jokes about octopuses who become baseball pitchers, but that's just because they have so many arms. Sea creatures don't really throw things, do they? It turns out they do, indeed. The act of throwing an object at a target had only previously been observed in primates, birds, elephants, and mongooses. But octopuses in the wild do it, too, and they most often do it underwater. An octopus will use its tentacles to throw debris out of a nest, or to defend against unwanted mating behavior, or to argue with another octopus (they are not social animals).

These creatures have a unique method to their throw, to overcome the difficulty of tossing objects underwater. They use their tentacles to gather up objects, such as seashells, and lob them in the right direction. As they release, they also send a jet of water from their siphons to propel the object through the water. Throwing behavior is more often seen in darker colored octopuses, and in females. Such tossing has been captured on video. -via reddit

(Image credit: Peter Godfrey-Smith et al)

The more you look into fungus, the bigger that kingdom is. Mushrooms are only a small portion of the many funguses that exist all around us. But there are more mushrooms, and more types of mushrooms, than we'll ever see. Mycologists know them, and how they develop strategies for survival. The war between death-eating mushrooms and sap-sucking mushrooms is waging all around us, but we'd never know about it if it weren't for mycologists who study such things and Minute Earth who is glad to tell us about it. The ruthless competition between these types of mushrooms has benefits for the world at large. Death-eating mushrooms break down organic material and capture nitrogen runoff, and sap-sucking mushrooms benefit the trees they live off by extending their ability to draw nutrients from the soil. The scientists studying this phenomena, who are introduced at the end of this video, are looking into how the mushrooms in this war can be harnessed to repair some of the damage we've done to the environment.

A comb unearthed in 2017 in Israel comes from the ancient Canaanite city of Lachish. It dates back to somewhere around 1700 BCE. An inscription, rendered in the Canaanite alphabet, was only recently deciphered. It contains seven words.

Believed to be the oldest known sentence written in the earliest alphabet, the inscription on the luxury item reads: “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.”

That just goes to show how we've always been keen on labeling our possessions. While it's a pretty mundane thing to write down, this is an exciting discovery, as the written Canaanite language it contains is made up of an alphabet invented not long before the comb was made. Previous written language used symbols for complete words, but the Canaanite alphabet introduced the idea of using symbols for the different sounds of language, beginning a system we still use today. Read about this discovery at the Guardian. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Dafna Gazit, Israel Antiquities Authority)

Can John Green distinguish Dr Pepper from other similar drinks just by taste? I certainly couldn't, as I dislike carbonation and I also avoid sugar and cold drinks. I do like sassafras tea, although it's hard to get these days. The first time I drank Dr Pepper, I thought it tasted like a mix of a root beer and a cola. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Cola is cola, but the distinctive taste of Dr Pepper has been copied, with varying levels of success, by just about every soft drink producer we have. Dr Pepper is supposed to be a blend of 23 flavors that only three people are privy to, and not all that many guess sassafras as I do. The company says, however, that there is no prune juice in the drink, as was rumored.   

The last minute of the video is an ad for Dr Pepper socks, which are sold for charity. Be warned the rest of this video could send you running for the insulin.  -via Metafilter

The history of human flight is often presented as if the whole idea only occurred to us in the late 19th century, and then the race was on, which the Wright Brothers won when they flew an airplane on December 17, 1903. But there were pioneers of flight hundreds of years earlier, with some successes like hot air balloons and gliders. Yet there were many more failures.

Albrecht Berblinger was one such pioneer in the early 1800s. A tailor by trade, he devoted all his spare time and money to developing flight. He invented what was essentially a hang glider, which he demonstrated in front of royalty in 1811 on the banks of the Danube River in Ulm, Germany. Berblinger knew something was wrong, and hesitated. But the crowd would not stand for him to back out, and the demonstration was a horrible failure. Berblinger's reputation was ruined. However, modern engineers say that his flying machine was soundly designed, and should have worked. Read the story of Berblinger's flight and why it failed at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: Draughtsman/Zeichner)

Nuclear waste products are bad news wherever we put it. But wouldn't it be safer for humans if we got it as far away as possible? Sure, but that's not as easy as it may sound. Kurzgesagt explains why we haven't done it already. First, it would be expensive and we don't have the infrastructure. We might be able to overcome those mundane problems in the future, opening up several scenarios for launching nuclear waste into space. But in every one of those scenarios, the danger involved is terrifying.

The first scenario I thought of is one they don't even address. We launch nuclear waste into deep space, and it is eventually intercepted by extraterrestrials. Their response would be, "You spent years and billions of dollars on space exploration and this is what you send us? This means war!"

This video is 9.5 minutes long; the rest is an ad.

A notice from the National Park Service falls somewhere in between "preaching to the choir" and the Streisand Effect. There is probably a better idiom that I can't think of right now. The Sonoran Desert toad, also called the Colorado River toad, lives in the western US and northern Mexico. Its skin glands secrete toxins, as the park service tells us: 

These toads have prominent parotoid glands that secrete a potent toxin. It can make you sick if you handle the frog or get the poison in your mouth. As we say with most things you come across in a national park, whether it be a banana slug, unfamiliar mushroom, or a large toad with glowing eyes in the dead of night, please refrain from licking. Thank you. Toot!

The "toot" is from the toad's call, described as a low pitched toot. The Facebook post has gone viral for its odd warning, as if droves of people would normally try to lick a toad in its natural habitat. But CNN tells us that the toxin the toad exudes is a powerful psychedelic that causes "euphoria and strong auditory hallucinations." So we know who the warning is for, but those who would deliberately lick a toad in the forest for its psychedelic effects now know what to look for.  

The rest of us cringe at the idea of handling a wild animal, much less licking its skin. The real value in the warning is for parents, to keep children from trying to pet toads -or any wild animal, for that matter.

(Image credit: Wildfeuer)

They taught us that animals can be divided into warm-blooded or cold-blooded categories, depending on whether they generate their own heat or depend on the sun to provide it. But it turns out that the divide is not so clear, and that different species have varying methods for staying warm enough to thrive. While many animals can be described as one or another, there are also many species that fall somewhere between, which tells us that heat-generating strategies are really a spectrum. Or maybe not, because the word "spectrum" suggests a straight line of gradients, while animal species are really all over the chart.   

This video is only 2:40 in length. The rest is an ad. -via Geeks Are Sexy

The City hall in Perth, Scotland, is being transformed into a museum. City officials launched an online poll to come up with a name for the museum, and more than 450 people submitted their ideas. When the dust settled, you would expect that Museumy McMuseumface would be the winner, but that's not the case.

More than 60% of respondents voted for a name they believed encompassed both the history of the building and the stories of the community.

That was Perth Museum.

While it seems like a wasted opportunity to those far away, Perth residents are happy with the results. While the name campaign was waged online, one thinks that maybe the actual voting was limited to those with a local address. Now that's the way to run a serious internet naming poll. Perth Museum in the old City Hall will open in 2024. -via reddit

(Image credit: Perth and Kinross Council)

Shomphole Wilderness Camp is a private getaway to nature in Kenya's Rift Valley. Wildlife photographer Will Burrard-Lucas (previously at Neatorama) is one of their favorite visitors. He teamed up with camp management to build a watering hole for wildlife in the very dry valley. For Burrard-Lucas, it was an opportunity to make taking pictures of animals easier for himself and for other visiting photographers.

The process involved not only digging a pond, but running five kilometers of pipe to supply the water. They also erected a relatively luxurious hide for photographers, with beds and a toilet, so they can observe creatures who came by without being seen. There is also carefully-designed lighting for nighttime water hole photography. When the project was ready, it didn't take long for wildlife to show up. Read about the project and enjoy the lovely images that resulted at Burrard-Lucas' blog. -via Digg