A heavy week around here, one in which we’ve had lots of thoughts and conversations but hard to put into words:
Photo by Jamie Hagan on Unsplash
BALTIMORE, Md. (KSWB) — There’s nothing worse than being seconds from enjoying a full burrito or wrap only to have the ingredients fall out, deflating the entire experience. Can it ever be stopped?
Well, thanks to science, the answer is yes.
A group of students at Johns Hopkins University recently developed “Tastee Tape,” a product that aims to keep your food from creating a mess.
A group of chemical and biomolecular engineering seniors — Tyler Guarino, Marie Eric, Rachel Nie, and Eric Walsh — created an edible tape that uses an organic adhesive and a fibrous scaffold that is safe to cook with and consume, according to the university’s website.
“First, we learned about the science around tape and different adhesives, and then we worked to find edible counterparts,” Guarino said.
The students tested a “multitude” of ingredients in order to get the right combination for the perfect product that they say can “hold together a fat burrito.”
As for how they made it, that will remain a secret for now. The students have applied for a patent and are waiting to hear back.
Growing up as a child actor in Los Angeles, Melissa Gilbert always dreamed of living on a farm.
"I experienced the Hollywood version while working on Little House on the Prairie," Gilbert, 57, says in the latest issue of PEOPLE.
The actress played Laura Ingalls Wilder ("Half-Pint") on the beloved TV series from 1974-1983. "There were chickens, cows, I even had my own horse named Peanuts," she recalls. "I loved playing Laura because I wanted to be like her."
Now, nearly 50 years after her first days as "Half-Pint" to Michael Landon's TV "Pa," Gilbert — whose new book, Back to the Prairie: A Home Remade, A Life Discovered, is out May 10 — is finally getting her wish.
Gotta have a birding story, and this is it:
NEW YORK (WPIX) — Christian Cooper, the Black man who was bird-watching in Central Park the day a white woman falsely accused him of threatening her, is getting his own bird-watching TV show on National Geographic.
Cooper, an avid bird watcher, will host the upcoming show “Extraordinary Birder,” where he will showcase the “wild, wonderful and unpredictable” world of birds.
“Whether braving stormy seas in Alaska for puffins, trekking into rainforests in Puerto Rico for parrots, or scaling a bridge in Manhattan for a peregrine falcon, he does whatever it takes to learn about these extraordinary feathered creatures and show us the remarkable world in the sky above,” National Geographic said in a news release.
A premiere date for “Extraordinary Birder” wasn’t announced. The show is being made by the production company Lucky 8.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — For the first time, scientists have grown plants in soil from the moon collected by NASA’s Apollo astronauts.
Researchers had no idea if anything would sprout in the harsh moon dirt and wanted to see if it could be used to grow food by the next generation of lunar explorers. The results stunned them.
“Holy cow. Plants actually grow in lunar stuff. Are you kidding me?” said Robert Ferl of the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.
Ferl and his colleagues planted thale cress in moon soil returned by Apollo 11′s Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, and other moonwalkers. The good news: All of the seeds sprouted.
The downside was that after the first week, the coarseness and other properties of the lunar soil stressed the small, flowering weeds so much that they grew more slowly than seedlings planted in fake moon dirt from Earth. Most of the moon plants ended up stunted.
Results were published Thursday in Communications Biology.
The longer the soil was exposed to punishing cosmic radiation and solar wind on the moon, the worse the plants seemed to do. The Apollo 11 samples — exposed a couple billion years longer to the elements because of the Sea of Tranquility’s older surface — were the least conducive for growth, according to scientists.
“This is a big step forward to know that you can grow plants,” said Simon Gilroy, a space plant biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who had no role in the study. “The real next step is to go and do it on the surface of the moon.”
Moon dirt is full of tiny, glass fragments from micrometeorite impacts that got everywhere in the Apollo lunar landers and wore down the moonwalkers’ spacesuits.
And a feral hog story:
Josh Ritchey has become accustomed to seeing craters and ruts strewn across his fields—signs of unwelcome visitors on his Stephenville, Texas farm. Often, before harvest time rolls around, a good portion of his wheat and hay crop have been plowed over or rooted up. The culprit? Drifts of feral swine that demolish anything in their path.
“They’re very opportunistic. They can sniff a crop out right before it’s ready to harvest,” Ritchey says. “Sometimes, I feel like I’m fighting an inferno with a water pistol…There’s always more back a month later.”
In recent years, the fourth-generation farmer says feral swine have contributed to a 10-percent annual loss in his crops. He’s heard of neighboring producers that have lost up to 30 percent of their yields.
The most popular baby names of 2021 in Illinois:
Here's what other names made the top 10 in 2021 in Illinois (male names listed on the left, female names listed on the right):
Noah, Olivia
Liam Emma
Oliver, Sophia
Henry, Charlotte
Benjamin, Amelia
Alexander, Ava
Theodore, Isabella
William, Mia
Mateo, Evelyn
Logan, Camila
10 years ago, in 2012, these were the 10 most popular male and female baby names in Illinois:
Jacob, Sophia
Alexander, Olivia
Noah, Isabella
Michael, Emma
Ethan, Ava
Mason, Emily
Liam, Mia
Anthony, Abigail
Jayden, Sofia
Daniel, Elizabeth
(CNN)An apparently studious alligator had to be relocated after it was found wandering around an elementary school in Charleston, South Carolina.
Concerned passersby called police after observing the alligator on Tuesday, according to Charleston's Animal Control Supervisor, Courtney Bayles. The 6-foot reptile was spotted walking in roadways and through residents' yards before making its way to the elementary school.
"Our concern always when we respond to an alligator call is what public safety threats are there?" Bayles told CNN. "We don't want any harm to come to the alligator, we don't want any harm to come to people."
Bayles noted that when possible, officers will guide alligators to the nearest pond. But in this case, there was no pond immediately nearby. So her team captured the reptile, loaded it onto their truck and took it a pond further up the road.
Okay, the seeds sprouted. But.... stunted growth in soil that is essentially sterile from radiation exposure, full of tiny glass bits? What person who has ever actually grown a crop do those scientists think they're fooling? Yeah, let's run right up to the moon and plant stuff... Hubris.
Dana