While travelers have always been able to get a meal at a pub or an inn in America -as soon as there were pubs and inns- the fine dining restaurant only came into fashion in the 1830s, soon after the French began such businesses. Historian Paul Freedman has been searching and cataloguing the menus of early American restaurants, between 1838 and 1865, to see what kind of food they were serving.

For one thing, it was fashionable for European visitors to complain about American food. Famous visitors like Frances Trollope groused that it was “abundant but not delicate” in 1832. Ten years later, Charles Dickens’s first trip to America was “a culinary disaster.”

Americans were also renowned for eating with great speed: Delmonico’s scheduled an average of eight to ten minutes per course for their fourteen-course meal. Dinner was served from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. Food could still be had later in the evening, but choices were more limited.

These restaurants served things like frogs (six different ways), tripe, lamb testicles, and many varieties of macaroni and cheese. Read more about early American restaurant dining at Jstor Daily. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Albert Edward Sterner)

We love cats, but we must remember they are pointy on five ends. The term "murder mittens" refers to a cat's claws, and they can be as cute as they are dangerous. A subreddit collects images of murder mittens, and Bored Panda has a ranked gallery of 40 of them. It's rather heavy on black kittens, who are apparently quite proud of their teeny murder mittens.

(Image credit: Islandcoda)

What we call intelligence is a set of skills that work together. When you break it down to the basic components, you realize that we set pretty high standards for humans. A slime mold can find its way around, and even bacteria can sense and avoid toxins. If that’s intelligence, why do we accuse people who can’t keep up with a bank account with a lack of it? Because everything is relative, and a lot of people can not only balance a checkbook, but also invest in the future. It’s a good thing we learned to help each other out.

You probably enjoy looking out your window to see the world, but you've seen it a lot from the same viewpoint. Wouldn't it be great to see what someone else sees through their window? Window Swap lets you do just that. It's a never-ending gallery of submitted window views from all over the world. Some are static, others are videos of varying lengths -and the ambient sound is a bonus! Text at the top will tell you whose window it is, and where. You'll see mountains, cityscapes, pastures, industrial yards, gardens, crowds, rooftops, traffic, porches, patios, cats, and a lot of houseplants. Its like traveling the world as you sit in your home! Window Swap is also asking for submissions, so you can share your view with the world. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Harmut in Germany)

It appears that everything we know about piranhas is wrong. If you need to swim cross a river filled with piranha fish, first, make sure it's the right month. Then ask the fish to turn over and show you the color of their bellies. There's a lot more involved, spelled out in this video from RealLifeLore. In other words, good luck. However, you will learn a lot about piranhas in the first six minutes. -via Digg

Much of the cosmos remains a mystery to this day, and as we learn more about our universe, the stranger it becomes. A study last month in the Astrophysical Journal Letters reports that some planets have water in an exotic state between liquid and gas.

Olivier Mousis, a planetary scientist at Aix-Marseille University in France, and colleagues ran simulations of ocean-covered worlds in close orbits around their stars, where mini-Neptunes are often found. Intense stellar radiation would cause water on the planets to puff up into a diffuse layer of “supercritical” water between liquid and gas, topped by a steamy water vapor atmosphere, the team found. On Earth, supercritical water can be used to break down toxic waste.

Such extreme [sauna-like] worlds could bridge the divide between rocky and gaseous planet types…

(Image Credit: NASA / JPL / Voyager-ISS / Justin Cowart/ Wikimedia Commons)

With the recent release of Sega’s GameGear Micro, it would only be fitting if a very tiny device that could run Nintendo games was developed, and the FunKey Project just developed one. And not only can it run Nintendo games; it can also run games from the Sega GameGear, as well as games from the PlayStation 1.

The FunKey S is a teensy gaming system that’s small enough to fit onto your keychain, yet it’s capable of playing all kinds of retro games thanks to a relatively zippy processor, and a custom Linux-based operating system optimized for gaming. The miniature game system uses Open Source emulation software to run games from the GameBoy (Classic, Color and Advance/SP), NES, SNES, Sega MasterSystem, GameGear, Sega Genesis, Atari Lynx, NeoGeoPocket, Wonderswan and even the Playstation 1.

[...]

The makers of the FunKey S are currently raising funds for production over on Kickstarter, where you can get in on the gaming action for as little as $71. They’re hoping to start shipping the first orders by November 2020, so hopefully you can get one in time for the holidays if you order now.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: FunKey Project/ Technabob)

Scientists have known for quite a while that the dwarf planet Pluto has a strange orbit. Unlike other planets in our Solar System, Pluto’s orbit is tilted, which makes its revolution weird. Scientists, however, have found in November 2019 an orbit weirder than Pluto’s — the wobbly orbits of Naiad and Thalassa, Neptune’s moons.

Compared with Thalassa, Naiad's orbit is tilted by about five degrees – it spends half of its time above Thalassa and half of it below, in a linked orbit that's unlike anything else on record.

"We refer to this repeating pattern as a resonance," said physicist Marina Brozovic, from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory back in 2019.

"There are many different types of dances that planets, moons and asteroids can follow, but this one has never been seen before."

More details about this over at ScienceAlert.

(Image Credit: NASA/ JPL-Caltech)

A simple pat on the head. A hug. Holding hands. Or a light rub on the back. These are just some of the little gestures that we do whenever we are with our partner in life. But despite being little gestures, they can make great differences in a romantic relationship, so make sure you always shower your beloved with affection.

As it turns out, according to a new study by Sabrina Bierstetel of Wayne State University and Richard Slatcher of the University of Georgia, even the slightest touch or smile could be enough to make a difference in your partner’s life. Examining the effects of small expressions of affection on the levels of cortisol, the stress hormone, Bierstetel and Slatcher showed that even holding your partner’s hand can be enough to produce measurable health benefits.

More details about this over at Psychology Today.

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

It is already a well-established fact that exercise can have great effects on one’s brain. It helps in sharpening the mind and also helps in reducing the risk of age-related diseases such as dementia. It seems that those who do not exercise that much could also get the same positive effects for their brains, by getting blood from physically active ones. Such is the case for these mice.

This effect, traced to a specific liver protein in the blood, could point the way to a drug that confers the brain benefits of exercise to an old or feeble person who rarely leaves a chair or bed.

More details about this study over at Science Magazine.

(Image Credit: Shutterbug75/ Pixabay)

It has always been humanity’s dream to go to other planets like Mars and the gas giants, like Jupiter, beyond the asteroid belt. But it seems that it won’t be possible, at least not now, because of the massive obstacles such as the pressure, temperature and radiation in these planets.

In 1995, NASA’s Galileo mission sent a probe into Jupiter’s atmosphere; it broke up at about 75 miles in depth. Pressures here are over 100 times more intense than anything on Earth. At the innermost layers of Jupiter that are 13,000 miles deep, the pressure is 2 million times stronger than what’s experienced at sea level on Earth, and temperatures are hotter than the sun’s surface.

So clearly, no human is going to be able to venture too far down into Jupiter’s depths. But would it be safe to simply orbit the planet? Perhaps we could establish an orbital space station, right?

Well, there’s another big problem when it comes to Jupiter: radiation. The biggest planet in the solar system also boasts its most powerful magnetosphere. These magnetic fields charge up particles in the vicinity, accelerating them to extreme speeds that can fry a spacecraft’s electronics in moments. Spaceflight engineers have to figure out an orbit and spacecraft design that will reduce the exposure to this radiation. NASA figured this out with the triple-arrayed, perpetually spinning Juno spacecraft, but it doesn’t look as if this would be a feasible design for a human spacecraft. 

Instead, for a crewed spacecraft to safely orbit or fly past Jupiter, it would have to keep a pretty significant distance away from the planet. 

More about this over at Technology Review.

Do you think we’ll be able to overcome these obstacles in the future?

(Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Simon (Goddard Space Flight Center)/ Wikimedia Commons)

These Are All Cakes pic.twitter.com/ejArkJHaid

— Tasty (@tasty) July 8, 2020

What if someone you know and trust, perhaps all of your life, is secretly a cake? What if you are a cake and don't even know it? What if the universe is a cake that is about to be sliced open?

This compilation video of amazing creations by Red Rose Cake and Tuba Geçkil, a team of sorcerers in Turkey, will make you question reality. Will you eat the red cake or the blue cake?

-via The Mary Sue

View this post on Instagram

How I feel at the coast.

A post shared by Bridget Beth Collins (@flora.forager) on Jul 17, 2017 at 5:45pm PDT

Bridget Beth Collins is an artist Seattle who goes by the name Flora Forager. As she wanders the natural world, she finds leaves, flowers, moss, and other fruits of the living world. Collins arranges them into collages inspired by great works of art, popular culture, and her own vivid imagination.

For the baker, it is used to make the bread rise and expand. But for the scientist, baker’s yeast is an organism worth examining in order to understand more about biological processes and diseases.

A number of biologists in the University at Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences regularly grow the species in their labs, and a few took time to discuss the wacky, wonderful science of S. cerevisiae.

"Yeast is a fungus that grows as a single cell, rather than as a mushroom," says Laura Rusche, Ph.D., UB associate professor of biological sciences.

Though each yeast organism is made up of just one cell, yeast cells live together in multicellular colonies. They reproduce through a process called budding, in which a "mother cell" grows a protrusion known as a "bud" that gets bigger and bigger until it's the same size as the mom.

Learn more about the amazing characteristics of the baker’s yeast over at PHYS.org.

(Image Credit: Douglas Levere / University at Buffalo)

With the United Kingdom currently suffering from a “math crisis”, where half of all adults have math skills that are no better than kindergarten level, one would really be curious as to why this is happening.

To better understand the origins of the crisis, the researchers looked to the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), a long-term study of children born in the U.K. between April 1, 1991, and December 21, 1992. Both the children and their parents have provided data for the study from the birth of their child to the present day. In this new effort, the researchers looked at the home environment of the children and compared it to scores on math tests taken by the children as they grew older.

The study suggested two factors that could affect a child’s performance in school math classes: the educational attainment of the child’s parents, and the working relationship between the child and his/her parents.

While this study is not surprising, it is a good reminder for us to create a harmonious environment at our homes.

(Image Credit: Pexels/ Pixabay)