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"Holding Due North" captures a weathered juniper tree in Montana's northern Rocky Mountains, surrounded by star trails. At the very center is Polaris, the brightest star in the constellation of Ursa Minor.

https://www.livescience.com/15322-healthiest-backyard-weeds.html

The Five Healthiest Backyard Weeds


Broad-leaf plantain.
Credit: User:SB_Johnny

You likely have weeds in your garden or in your neighborhood that are striving in the heat and are actually far more healthful than almost anything you can grow or buy.

Far from famine food, these so-called weeds can be delicious if prepared properly. And they are absolutely free.

Just a few words of caution: Be sure to identify the weed properly. (The ones described here are easy to spot.) Avoid harvesting from anyplace you suspect pollution — such as from vehicle exhaust, lawn pesticide or doggy business. And remember that edible does not mean allergen-free.

Got your garden gloves? Ok, here we go.

Common dandelion from upstate New York.
Credit: UpStateNYer

Dandelion:

Dandelion is one of the healthiest and most versatile vegetables on the planet. The entire plant is edible. The leaves are like vitamin pills, containing generous amounts of vitamins A, C and K — far more than those garden tomatoes, in fact — along with calcium, iron, manganese, and potassium.

The leaves are most tender, and tastiest, when they are young. This happens in the spring but also all summer along as the plant tries to rebound after being cut or pulled. You can add them to soup in great abundance. Or you can prepare them Italian style by sautéing with a little olive oil, salt, garlic and some hot red pepper.

You can eat the bright, open flower heads in a lightly fried batter. You can also make a simple wine with the flowers by fermenting them with raisins and yeast. If you are slightly adventurous, you can roast the dandelion root, grind it, and brew it like coffee. It's an acquired taste. You might want to have some sugar on hand.


Common purslane.
Credit: ZooFari

Purslane:

If you've ever lived in the city, you have seen good ol' Portulaca olearacea, or common purslane. The stuff grows in cracks in the sidewalk. Aside from being surprisingly tasty for a crack dweller, purslane tops the list of plants with omega-3 fatty acids, the type of healthy fat found in salmon. [7 Perfect Survival Foods]

If you dislike the bitter taste of dandelion greens, you still might like the lemony taste of purslane. The stems, leaves and flowers are all edible; and they can be eaten raw on salads — as they are prepared worldwide — or lightly sautéed.

You should keep a few things in mind, though, before your harvest. Watch out for spurge, a similar-looking sidewalk-crack dweller. Spurge is much thinner than purslane, and it contains a milky sap, so you can easily differentiate it. Also, your mother might have warned you about eating things off the sidewalk; so instead, look for purslane growing in your garden, or consider transplanting it to your garden from a sidewalk.

Also, note the some folks incorrectly call purslane "pigweed," but that's a different weed — edible but not as tasty.


http://www.theprairiehomestead.com/2012/07/when-life-gives-you-weeds-eat-em-or-what-to-do-with-lambs-quarters.html

Lamb's-quarters:

Lamb's-quarters are like spinach, except they are healthier, tastier and easier to grow. Lamb's-quarters, also called goosefoot, usually need more than a sidewalk crack to grow in, unlike dandelion or purslane. Nevertheless, they can be found throughout the urban landscape, wherever there is a little dirt.

The best part of the lamb's-quarters are the leaves, which are slightly velvety with a fine white powder on their undersides. Discard any dead or diseased leaves, which are usually the older ones on the bottom of the plant. The leaves and younger stems can be quickly boiled or sautéed, and they taste like a cross between spinach and Swiss chard with a slight nutty after-taste.

Maybe that taste combination doesn't appeal to you, but lamb's-quarters are ridiculously healthy. A one-cup serving will give you 10 times the daily-recommended dose of vitamin K; three times the vitamin A; more than enough vitamin C; and half your daily dose of calcium and magnesium.



https://dspermaculture.wordpress.com/2015/03/28/broadleaf-plantain-plantago-major/

Plantain

Plantain, like dandelion, is a healthy, hardy weed as ubiquitous in the city as broken glass. You know what it looks like, but you might not have known the name.

Part of the confusion is that plantain shares its name with something utterly different, the banana-like plantain, whose etymology is a mix of Spanish and native Caribbean. The so-called weed plantain, or Plantago major, was cultivated in pre-Columbus Europe; and indeed Native Americans called it "the white man's footprint," because it seemed to follow European settlers.

Plantain has a nutritional profile similar to dandelion — that is, loaded with iron and other important vitamins and minerals. The leaves are tastiest when small and tender, usually in the spring but whenever new shoots appear after being cut back by a lawnmower. Bigger leaves are edible but bitter and fibrous. [World's Plants Growing Less Thanks to Warming]

The shoots of the broadleaf plantain, when green and tender and no longer than about four inches, can be described as a poor-man's fiddlehead, with a nutty, asparagus-like taste. Pan-fry in olive oil for just a few seconds to bring out this taste. The longer, browner shoots are also tasty prepared the same way, but the inner stem is too fibrous. You'll need to place the shoot in your mouth, clench with your teeth, and quickly pull out the stem. What you're eating are the plantain seeds.

The leaves of the equally ubiquitous narrow-leaf plantain, or Plantago lanceolata, also are edible when young. The shoot is "edible" only with quotation marks. You can eat the seeds should you have the patience to collect hundreds of plants for the handful of seeds you'd harvest. With time being money, it's likely not worth it.


Stinging nettles.
Credit: Uwe H. Friese, Bremerhaven 2003

Stinging Nettles

It sounds like a cruel joke, but stinging nettles — should you be able to handle them without getting a painful rash from the tiny, acid-filled needles — are delicious cooked or prepared as a tea.

You may have brushed by these in the woods or even in your garden, not knowing what hit you, having been trained all your life to identify poison ivy and nothing else. The tiny needles fortunately fall off when steamed or boiled. The trick is merely using garden gloves to get the nettles into a bag. [Video – Watch Gorillas Process and Eat Stinging Nettles]

Nettles tastes a little like spinach, only more flavorful and more healthful. They are loaded with essential minerals you won't find together outside a multivitamin bottle, and these include iodine, magnesium, potassium, phosphorous, silica and sulfur. Nettles also have more protein than most plants.

Like all weeds, nettles are free. But you get even more of a bargain if you boil them. You can eat the leaves and then drink the water as tea, with or without sugar, hot or cold. If you are adventurous — or, well, just plain cheap — you can collect entire plants to dry in your basement. The needles will eventually fall off, and you can save the dried leaves for tea all winter long.

Christopher Wanjek is the author of the books "Bad Medicine" and "Food At Work." His column, Bad Medicine, appears regularly on LiveScience.

https://www.livescience.com/62028-hawking-death-paradox-question-science.html?utm_source=notification
Stephen Hawking Never Answered His 'Most Interesting' Scientific Question

Stephen Hawking died today (March 14), leaving behind a massive legacy of work as an astrophysicist, science communicator, activist, and figure of pop culture admiration. And on the day of his death, a question he raised and worked on until the last years of his life remains unanswered: Can information really be lost to the universe?

Hawking's most famous paper, "Black Hole Explosions?," published 44 years ago in 1974, took a hatchet to the whole notion of black holes as physicists had previous understood them. And it was Hawking's first whack at that basic question.

"Classically, a black hole should be 'perfectly cold' in the sense that it absorbs everything but emits nothing. This is how they were understood in the early 1970s," Robert McNees, a physicist at Loyola University in Chicago, wrote in an email.

A black hole like that would radiate no energy, and no matter could escape from it. It would just… exist, cold, silent, and eternal. Hawking's paper made the black holes alive ­— and possibly mortal.

"When Stephen considered quantum mechanical effects in the mid-70s, he discovered that black holes should, in principle, radiate as if they were thermal objects with a temperature," McNees told Live Science. "If they radiate energy then their mass will decrease. And he found that as this happens, as they shrink, their temperature goes up and they radiate even faster."

Eventually, perhaps, the black hole would disappear entirely, or shrink to a little nubbin. Without fully reconciling relativity and quantum mechanics in a robust theory of "quantum gravity" (what physicists call a "theory of everything"), the final stage of that black hole evaporation remains a mystery.( Read more... )
Originally published on Live Science.

I want this on a t-shirt



Pythagoras of Samos -
Archimedes of Syracuse - Archimedes' principle the upward buoyant force exerted on a body immersed in a fluid, is equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the body and acts in the upward direction at the center of mass of the displaced fluid.
Nicolaus Copernicus - placed the Sun rather than the Earth at the center of the universe
Sir Isaac Newton PRS - laws of motion and universal gravitation
Charles Robert Darwin, FRS FRGS FLS FZS - science of evolution
Albert Einstein - theory of relativity
Democritus, a Greek philosopher, fifth century BC., small pieces of matter "atomos"
Euclid of Alexandria - "founder of geometry"
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz - calculus
Kurt Gödel - incompleteness theorems arithmetical functions
Michael Faraday FRS - principles underlying electromagnetic induction, diamagnetism and electrolysis
Niels Henrik David Bohr - atomic structure and quantum theory
Wolfgang Joseph Pauli - new law of Nature, Pauli principle" - spin theory, basis of theory of structure of matter.
Werner Heisenberg - uncertainty principle (the more precisely the position of some particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum can be known, and vice versa)
Richard Phillips Feynman - quantum mechanics
Norman E. Borlaug - extensive increases in agricultural production termed the "green revolution"
James Watson & Francis Crick - credited with discovery DNA double helix
Dame Jane Morris Goodall DBE - primatologist and anthropologist

On at least one of these a person could become an observational scientist *coughs* Voyeur.


https://www.livescience.com/56576-dog-and-cat-behaviors-explained.html
Photo Credit: 135pixels / Shutterstock.com

Why do cats stretch so much?
Cats like to stretch largely for the same reasons people do: It feels good, and it increases blood flow to the muscles, Andrew Cuff, a postdoctoral researcher of anatomy at the Royal Veterinary College in London, told Live Science in April 2016.

Cats sleep between 12 and 16 hours a day, meaning they're not moving for long amounts of time. When cats are sitting still or sleeping, their blood pressure drops, Cuff said. Stretching can reverse that, he added.

"As you stretch, it activates all of your muscles and increases your blood pressure, which increases the amount of blood flowing to the muscles and also to the brain," Cuff said. "This helps wake you up and make you more alert."

Stretching can also flush out toxins and waste byproducts that build up in the body during periods of inactivity, Cuff said. Moreover, when a cat stretches, it readies its muscles for activity, such as running after a mouse … or a treat.

Photo Credit: Iuliia Ilina | Shutterstock.com


Why do dogs poop along a north-south axis?
Dogs aren't just particular about their cozy "nests." Turns out, some pups like to poop while they are aligned with the north-south axis of the Earth's magnetic field. To come to this wacky conclusion, researchers spent two years observing 70 dogs as they defecated and urinated.

The dogs studied, which included 57 different breeds, tended to face north or south while pooping and seemed to avoid facing east or west, the researchers noted in their study, published in 2014 in the journal Frontiers in Zoology. Even so, the researchers are not sure how the dogs are sensing the magnetic field (if they are, in fact, sensing it) or why they'd have such a particular pooping position.

Are cats smarter than dogs?
Science doesn't have a clear answer on this one, so cat and dog lovers may forever debate whether Fluffy or Fido is brainier. But there are hints as to which fluff ball is most intelligent.

Cats' brains take up 0.9 percent of their body mass, compared with 1.2 percent for a dog's brain, but size doesn't necessarily matter here, experts say. That's because cats have 300 million neurons in their cerebral cortex, an area of the brain responsible for information processing. Dogs have 160 million neurons in that region.

However, it's hard to do experiments with cats because, well, they'd rather lick their paws than follow orders, scientists say. But one experiment showed that although both cats and dogs can solve puzzles to get food, cats will keep trying even if the puzzle is unsolvable, while dogs will go get humans to help them.

This doesn't mean either animal is smarter. It just shows the effects of how dogs were domesticated at least 20,000 years before cats were, and thus are more likely to interact with humans, the study researchers said.

Why do dogs wag their tails?
Is it true that your household canine wags his tail out of glee? Sort of. Dogs do wag their tails as a form of communication, research has found. But a little shimmy doesn't always say, "Come pet me." Perhaps surprisingly, in 2007, researchers found that whether the tail is swishing on the right or left side of the dog's body has meaning: A tail wag that's skewed toward the right indicates positive emotions, while a leftie wag suggests negative emotions.

The left-right difference may be linked to the differences found in the right and left hemispheres of a dog's brain, the researchers noted. In addition, research published in 2013 in the journal Current Biology revealed that a right-wagging tail tends to relax canine passersby, while a left wag seems to stress out other dogs.

The position of a dog's tail, even when it's not wagging, can also convey meaning. A tail held high above the spine may indicate arousal, while a tail tucked between the dog's rear legs can suggest fear, according to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

Limiting Your Child’s Fire Time: A Guide for Concerned Paleolithic Parents
https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/limiting-your-childs-fire-time-a-guide-for-concerned-paleolithic-parents




According to the most recent cave drawings, children nowadays are using fire more than ever before. And it’s no wonder: fire has many wonderful applications, such as cooking meat, warming the home, and warding off wild animals in the night. We adult Homo erectus, with our enlarged brains and experience of pre-fire days, can moderate our use, but our children—some of whom never lived during a time when you couldn’t simply strike two rocks together for an hour over a pile of dried grass to eventually produce a spark that, with gentle coaxing, might grow into a roaring flame—can have difficulty self-monitoring their interactions with fire.

You don’t want to be the bad guy, but you also want to make sure that your child engages in other activities, like mammoth hunting and the gathering of rocks and bones with which to make tools. So, how do you set appropriate boundaries for your child on fire usage without jeopardizing the family unit so crucial to the survival of the species? Here are some tips:

Establish clear but firm limits: Fire is nice, but there’s a time and a place for it. So institute specific fire-watching times, and stick to them. After dinner, when the fire is lit, anyway, is one good option, as well as early in the morning, when a fire is just the thing to warm a chilly cave. Those living in glacial areas may have a harder time curtailing the use of fire, but just remind your children that when you were their age several layers of animal pelts were enough to keep you perfectly warm. Remember, you’re the patriarch (or matriarch, depending on your community’s customs surrounding familial power structures), and you make the rules!

Have a designated “fire room” in your dwelling: Those with smaller caves or huts might find this suggestion difficult, but even establishing a “fire corner” can help to create separate “fire” and “non-fire” spaces in your living area. In the non-fire spaces, encourage traditional activities, such as conversation (as much as your current vocabulary will allow), arrowhead-shaving, or stick-drawing in mud or soft stones. Reminding your children of the pleasures provided by these traditional activities can help reduce the seductive lure of the fire’s dancing flame.

Watch for changes and communicate concerns: For many children, fire is a harmless, pleasant addition to their lives. But for some it can become an all-consuming passion. If your child seems to be growing unhealthily attached to the fire, don’t wait to talk to him about it. A few common fire-obsessed behaviors to look out for include:

• Distraction: ignoring people when they are in the same room as fire
• Preoccupation: talking or thinking about fire, even when there is no fire present
• Deception: going off to secretly find/make fires; lying about fire usage when confronted
• Anthropomorphization: talking to/interacting with the fire as if it were a sentient being, which the elders we consulted say is highly unlikely, though they have yet to entirely rule out the presence of powerful magical beings within the inferno

Commit to non-fire family time: This last tip is the most important, because, if all you’re doing is restricting your child’s behavior and environment, he’s bound to resent you. So introduce non-fire activities that the whole family can enjoy together, and commit to them on a regular basis. These activities will depend on your region and climate, of course, but hunting and/or gathering is always a great way to be active and insure your family’s survival. If your tribe has already discovered music, carve a bone flute and work on a family song. Believe in a god (or gods)? Carve some rudimentary icons in his/her/their image. There’s no end to the fun you can have when you put your significantly-larger-than-a-chimpanzee’s mind to it!

In the end, just remember that fire, like most innovations, is both a blessing and a curse. Sure, it’s made our lives easier, our survival likelier, and will probably lead to the greatest evolutionary paradigm shift in human history. But it’s also dangerous, destructive, and, yes, possibly infested with demonic forces that wish us ill. As with everything in life, balance is key. If you can imagine what it was like a few thousand years ago, when the first humans started walking upright, and how much grief they probably got from their parents, you’ll have some empathy for your children’s unique place in the evolutionary narrative. At the same time, don’t forget that you’re the boss, and that, until they mate and produce viable offspring, what you say goes. And, of course, it goes without saying that, in the (again, very unlikely) event that fire is both sentient and vengeful, we humbly beg its forgiveness for our insolence and pray to be spared our fleeting and insignificant lives.

Why Do We Cook So Many Foods at 350 Degrees?
BY STACY CONRADT

http://mentalfloss.com/article/502289/why-do-we-cook-so-many-foods-350-degrees?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=atlas-page&utm_campaign=atlasobscura


Whether you’re making mouthwatering blueberry muffins from scratch or finally giving in to that partially opened box of fish sticks that's been hiding in the back of your freezer for eight months, there’s a fairly good chance that you’ll be heating your oven to 350ºF. How can such vastly different foods require the same cooking temperature?

It’s all thanks to something called the Maillard Reaction. In 1912, chemist Louis Camille Maillard was the first to describe the magical transformation that happens to food when it's cooked at around 300 to 350ºF. The finer details of the process are still not totally understood, but according to Serious Eats, it’s generally agreed that the Maillard Reaction happens when heat transforms the proteins and sugars in food, creating a release of new flavors, aromas, and colors. On a primitive level, these delicious changes signal to humans that the food won't harm us and may also contain vital nutrients.

However, that doesn’t mean that we should cook everything at 350ºF. That’s just the baseline. For example, most breads need higher temperatures to rise quickly, and puff pastries do better in the 400ºF range because the steam released at that temperature helps the dough expand. But for many recipes, 350ºF is the golden rule.

By the way: you should thank your lucky stars for modern oven temperature dials, which are way better than the old method of sticking your arm inside to test the heat. Before temperature technology existed, Slate says, bakers would hold an arm inside the oven to see if they could stand it for more than 30 seconds. If they could, it wasn’t hot enough yet.

Okay remember this?:
Caterpillars Exploding From “Zombie Virus” Outbreak
http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/caterpillars-exploding-from-zombie-virus-outbreak/

Typically, oak eggar caterpillars stay relatively low and avoid climbing towards light sources to avoid getting eaten by birds and other predators. However, if they have the misfortune of being infected by this baculovirus, it messes with their response to light, causing them to climb to the top of plants in their dazed and confused state.

Their bodies then become a liquefied gloopy mess and pop, thereby spreading the infectious virus to other insects on the plants below and allowing the outbreak to continue.

And there's this:
Toxoplasmosis, a parasitic infection that can be transmitted through cat poop, causes mice to be less cautious about cats and therefore to get eaten the next part of the life cycle of the parasite.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/once-a-toxoplasma-parasite-infects-mice-they-never-fear-cats-again-9757150/

This study on the behavioral effects of toxoplasmosis: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2526142/

Although latent infection with Toxoplasma gondii is among the most prevalent of human infections, it has been generally assumed that, except for congenital transmission, it is asymptomatic. ... Possible mechanisms by which T. gondii may affect human behavior include its effect on dopamine and on testosterone.

So anyway........ the article's title says it all...
Toxoplasmosis May Be Linked To 'Crazy Cat Lady' Syndrome As It Alters Brain And Behavior
http://www.medicaldaily.com/crazy-cat-lady-toxoplasmosis-parasitic-infection-brain-and-behavior-390436
Do we NEED a reason to love cats?!

Anyway there's this article:

Could 'Zombie Deer' Disease Spread to Humans?
https://www.livescience.com/61504-chronic-wasting-disease-spread-humans.html?utm_source=notification

Deer in at least 22 U.S. states and parts of Canada have died from a neurological disease called "chronic wasting disease," according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

Chronic wasting disease can cause a number of symptoms in animals, including drastic weight loss, a lack of coordination, drooling, listlessness or a "blank" facial expression, and a lack of fear of people,... sound familiar?
It infects members of the deer (cervid) family, including white-tailed deer, mule deer, reindeer, moose and elk.

The disease was first discovered in Colorado in 1967, according to the CDC, and so far, no cases in humans have ever been reported.

The...infectious proteins that cause chronic wasting disease — called prions — don't easily jump between species, ... these proteins can evolve to infect other species, .. bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or "mad cow disease,"

..a study showed that macaque monkeys could get the disease from eating infected meat. Out of five monkeys that were fed infected white-tailed-deer meat, three tested positive for chronic wasting disease..

Well at least the deer aren't out to bite you while droning out 'brains'.

There is not enough Dramamine.