fact
From Flickr to BET, here are 11 examples of the game-changing enterprises women have founded.
Until recently, members of the public looking to peruse the Central Intelligence Agency’s declassified documents had to travel to the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. There, they were able to read the papers, but only from four computer terminals. Now, CNN reports, the CIA has published nearly 13 million pages of declassified documents online, allowing anyone to access them.
The online collection is called the CIA Records Search Tool, or CREST, Bloomberg reports. CREST contains declassified documents from the 1940s through the 1990s, including records of the CIA’s participation in the Vietnam and Korean wars and its activities during the Cold War. There’s even information on alleged UFO sightings and psychic research conducted under the organization’s “Star Gate” program.
For security purposes, many of the documents contain redactions, but aside from that, “none of this is cherry-picked,” CIA spokeswoman Heather Fritz Horniak told CNN.
The CIA hoped to get CREST up and running by the end of 2017. Thanks to new and improved technologies, they finished well before deadline.
Still, the CIA’s public archival efforts are far from complete. Because the organization declassifies most information that’s more than 25 years old, its records will only continue to grow in number. The CIA hopes that advancements in artificial intelligence and machine-learning tools will someday allow them to evaluate potentially sensitive documents before publishing them online.
[CNN]
January 18, 2017 – 2:30pm
Take a peek inside architectural photographer Matt Lambros’s new book, After the Final Curtain: The Fall of the American Movie Theater, which pays tribute to the once-lavish movie palaces of yesteryear.
Wednesday, January 18, 2017 – 10:00
For more than 100 years, movie theaters have been the place where people’s Technicolor dreams come true. But as technology has advanced and the age of streaming has engulfed us, many of the world’s most lavish movie palaces have been demolished, repurposed, or outright abandoned. Yet there’s still something compelling and magical about these long-dormant spaces—even those that have been left to crumble. Matt Lambros certainly sees it.
The Brooklyn-based architectural photographer has long had an interest in capturing the haunting beauty of these once-opulent places, which he has captured in a gorgeous new book from Jonglez Publishing, After the Final Curtain: The Fall of the American Movie Theater, which includes photographs and historical information from two dozen theaters across the country.
Lambros gave us an exclusive peek at some of the photos, which you can view below. To see more of Lambros’s work, visit his website or follow him on Instagram.
Matt Lambros // After The Final Curtain
A good batch of popcorn is all about timing: Remove it from the heat source too soon and you’ll end up with a bunch of unpopped kernels; leave it unattended too long and you’ll be stuck with a burnt, inedible mess. This video, spotted by Motherboard, invites you to slow down and appreciate the culinary chemistry at play, one glorious kernel at a time.
For their experiment, the filmmakers behind the Youtube channel Warped Perception used a Phantom Flex 4K high-speed camera to capture popcorn bursting at 30,000 frames per second. The video starts with the corn contained in its hard, glossy hull. This outer shell is good at containing the moisture and starchy endosperm in each kernel of popcorn, but as the steam builds the exterior eventually gives way.The sudden drop in pressure is what makes the starch and proteins in the endosperm puff up, and the comparatively cool air outside the shell is what sets it into its snackable form. You can watch the whole mouth-watering process below.
[h/t Motherboard]
January 18, 2017 – 9:00am
The list of celebrities who have tried their hand at writing cookbooks ranges from the not-so-surprising (Oprah) to the totally unexpected (Stanley Tucci?). Here are 11 famous, non-chef figures whose cookbooks you can buy.
When Oprah is obsessed with something, the whole world is obsessed with it. So it’s surprising that it took her until 2017 to release her favorite recipes. Food, Health, and Happiness: 115 On-Point Recipes for Great Meals and a Better Life is part cookbook, part memoir, and part lifestyle guide from the talk show host and cultural icon (and her favorite chefs). Oprah is an investor in Weight Watchers, so obviously each recipe includes calorie counts and how many Weight Watchers points each recipe is worth.
Coolio likes to describe himself as the “black Rachel Ray,” and has been dishing out cooking advice for quite a while. A whole episode of the reality TV show Coolio’s Rules was devoted to “Cooking with Coolio,” a segment that was later expanded into a web series. He describes his cookbook, Cookin’ with Coolio: 5 Star Meals at a 1 Star Price, as a guide to becoming a “kitchen pimp.” Some of the recipes include “Finger-Lickin’, Rib-Stickin’, Fall-Off-the-Bone-and-into-Your-Mouth Chicken” and “Banana Ba-ba-ba-bread.” In 2012, the rapper appeared on an episode of the Food Network show Rachael vs. Guy: Celebrity Cook-Off, competing in the cooking show under the tutelage of Guy Fieri.
The poet and civil rights activist might not be as well known for her cooking as for her verse, but she’s the author of two cookbooks, Hallelujah! The Welcome Table: A Lifetime of Memories with Recipes and Great Food, All Day Long: Cook Splendidly, Eat Smart. The former takes a memoir-inflected approach to laying out Angelou’s favorite dishes, while the latter was inspired by the author’s significant weight loss and includes advice on moderation and portion control.
Most culinary aficionados don’t think of the back of a tour bus as the most delicious food destination in the world, but nonetheless, Smash Mouth: Recipes from the Road: A Rock ‘n’ Roll Cookbook does exist. The band members’ favorites from their pit stops across the country include lobster sandwiches and “Pink Lady apple and arugula salad.” All the recipes were just solicited from real chefs by the band, but the book does have chapter-long cameos from famous/infamous contributors like Guy Fieri and Sammy Hagar. You should probably buy the book immediately, just based on the Amazon review that includes this tidbit about Sammy Hagar’s chapter: “The whole things about aliens! Wha?”
If you thought Stanley Tucci’s turn as a foodie in Julie and Julia was acting, flip open one of his cookbooks. His first, The Tucci Cookbook, is drawn from his family traditions in Italian cooking. And he followed it up with another family-oriented cookbook. Written with Felicity Blunt, his wife, The Tucci Table (2014) combines the Italian-American and British favorites Tucci and Blunt grew up with, respectively. It features recipes for everything from pasta alla bottarga to barbecue chicken wings.
In addition to her country music stardom, Trisha Yearwood has her own show on the Food Network, Trisha’s Southern Kitchen. She has published three cookbooks with co-authors since 2008. Her latest is Trisha’s Table: My Feel-Good Favorites for a Balanced Life. Unlike the fried chicken and barbecue pork featured in her 2008 book Georgia Cooking in an Oklahoma Kitchen, her newest recipes tend toward vegetarian alternatives like sweet pea burgers and edamame parmesan.
In October 2016, Ziggy Marley made his cookbook debut with Ziggy Marley and Family Cookbook: Delicious Meals Made With Whole, Organic Ingredients from the Marley Kitchen. The book highlights the Rastafarian and Jamaican cultures that influenced meals in the Marley household, and has contributions from not just Ziggy but his wife, his sister, and a handful of chefs. In addition to recipes like jerk chicken and fish stew, the book includes a hefty number of vegetarian and vegan recipes.
Television actor Tony Danza penned Don’t Fill Up on the Antipasto: Tony Danza’s Father-Son Cookbook with his son Marc in 2010. The family recipe book tells tales of the Danza clan’s large extended family dynamic alongside black-and-white photographs and nostalgic recipes like “Sunday Sauce and Meatballs.” Just about every Amazon review for the book mentions the meatballs, so they are obviously pretty spectacular.
Back in the ‘90s, talk-show cohosts Regis Philbin and Kathie Lee Gifford penned a cookbook made up of recipes from the show’s guests. In Cooking With Regis & Kathie Lee: Quick & Easy Recipes From America’s Favorite TV Personalities, chefs that appeared on the cooking segment contributed instructions for dishes like Mediterranean eggplant pie and yogurt chicken. Made for the show’s superfans rather than expert cooks, the easy recipes provide substitutions for more unusual ingredients.
Former Van Halen rocker Sammy Hagar dipped his toes/wallet into the culinary scene in 1990 with the restaurant chain Cabo Wabo, which he founded with the rest of the band. (He later bought them out when the place failed to turn a profit.) In addition to his chapter in the Smash Mouth cookbook, in 2015, he released Are We Having Any Fun Yet?: The Cooking & Partying Handbook. As the founder of Cabo Wabo-brand tequila and Sammy’s Beach Bar Rum, Hagar’s cookbook is heavy on the party aspect, but finds time to detail his favorite recipes from his favorite beach vacation spots (Cabo San Lucas being one of them, obviously) and from his time on the road.
In 2006, actor Morgan Freeman published Morgan Freeman and Friends: Caribbean Cooking for a Cause, donating the profits to his charity, Grenada Relief Fund, which was designed to help the island’s residents recover from 2004’s Hurricane Ivan. The cookbook is full of Caribbean food recipes from Freeman (like his grilled swordfish steak with lemon caperberry butter) and other celebrities. Some of the Hollywood figures who contributed Caribbean recipes include Tom Hanks, Ben Affleck, and Kenny Chesney (who has a house in the U.S. Virgin Islands), for instance.
January 18, 2017 – 8:00am
Universal and annoying, everyone knows what hiccups feel like. Scientifically, it’s the involuntary contraction of the diaphragm and a closure of the vocal cords – causing the classic ‘hic’ sound we associate with hiccups. In layman’s terms, the muscle just beneath your lungs tenses and relaxes quickly, pushing air up against your voicebox. Why do you get hiccups? Though hiccups are a reflex, meaning something our body does that we can’t control, unlike sneezing and coughing, which help clear our airways, hiccups seem to have no useful purpose whatsoever. Once started, hiccups have a regular rhythm, and usually go away
The post Why Do Hiccups Happen? appeared first on Factual Facts.
| Questions: | 5 |
| Available: | Always |
| Pass rate: | 75 % |
| Backwards navigation: | Forbidden |
5 Questions: Got Juice?
Wednesday, January 18, 2017 – 01:45
(Warning: This article contains spoilers from a 22-year-old movie.)
Nearly a quarter-century after its initial release, Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects still manages to surprise audiences—and make it onto just about every list of “The Best Movie Endings of All Time” ever compiled. As AMC wrote in just such a list, where the film nabbed the number 21 spot, “For two hours, Kevin Spacey’s spineless Verbal plays helpless lamb being lured to Chazz Palminteri’s slaughter. But with the drop of a coffee cup, and the shaking off of a limp, the true identity of a criminal mastermind is revealed.”
For fans who want to reenact the pivotal moment in which Palminteri’s customs agent Dave Kujan learned he’s been duped by Spacey, this simple white Kobayashi mug is the perfect prop. It’s dishwasher- and microwave-safe—and yes, it comes in one piece. Of course, if you plan on dropping it dramatically to chase after Keyser Söze, you’re going to have to do it in one take (or stock up and buy a couple). You can score one of the elegantly minimalist mugs on Firebox for only $13.
January 18, 2017 – 6:30am
In case you haven’t noticed, the ‘90s are back with a vengeance. Lisa Frank has a brand-new clothing line; TV execs are rebooting classic sitcoms like Full House and Twin Peaks; and your dad’s plaid flannel shirts are suddenly high-fashion. Now, Refinery29 reports, makeup giant Sephora has joined in: The company has released a line of tinted lip balms that’s reminiscent of the lipsticks that were manufactured by the now-defunct Bonne Bell Cosmetics.
The Sephora Collection Sweet Balms are sheer, tinted lip balms that come in an assortment of punchy pastel shades, including violet, pink, and coral. Their selling point, however, is their packaging: The balms come in plastic push-up tubes that look kind of like PEZ dispensers, or even the original Bonne Bell tubes you knew and loved as a tween.
The Sweet Balms are available for purchase on Sephora’s website and cost $6—a small price to pay for a huge dose of nostalgia.
[h/t Refinery29]
January 18, 2017 – 3:00am
As researchers and nutrition experts begin to discover—and admit—how bad sugar is for the body, there’s more awareness of just how much sugar is contained in some of our favorite foods, even the ones that we think of as savory, not sweet. As Co.Exist reports, Antonio Rodríguez Estrada’s photography project sinAzucar (“sugar free”) aims to illustrate how much sugar is in the food we eat in a way that people understand—with sugar cubes.
Each cube is worth 4 grams of sugar. The World Health Organization and other experts recommend that you only eat about 25 grams of added sugar a day, by some counts. Some health groups allow for a little more, like the UK’s National Health Service (30 grams) or the FDA’s proposed 50 gram maximum—which may or may not have been influenced by the powerful Sugar Lobby, which has fought anti-sugar research for decades, including opposing the new “added sugars” designation on nutrition labels. From a health standpoint, the less sugar, the better. Ideally, you should really only be eating a little more than six sugar cubes over the course of your day. Some of Estrada’s photographs show more than that in just one food.
Depressing as they are, some of the images are pretty obvious. Four Chips Ahoy! cookies (if you can manage to eat just four) have 8 and a half sugar cubes. An approximately 24-ounce Coke from Coca-Cola, one of the greatest targets of the fight against obesity, contains almost 20 cubes’ worth of sugar, by Estrada’s calculations. In the U.S., the biggest size of a McDonald’s soft drink, for example, is quite a bit bigger. Not to mention places like 7-11 that sell 64-ounce cups.
Some of the beverages on the list aren’t necessarily thought of as being as sugary as sodas, but are super-sugary nonetheless, like a Venti Starbucks white mocha, which contains some 20 sugar cubes of sweetness. A Powerade bottle, seemingly a healthier option than a Coke, has 9.5 lumps of sugar. (So if you’re drinking it after you work out, you’re probably undoing that healthy activity.) A flavored Activia yogurt, presumably part of a “balanced breakfast” contains four cubes’ worth of sugar.
And some of the other photos might surprise—and terrify—you even more. A frozen barbecue pizza has more than four sugar cubes’ worth (barbecue sauce is notoriously sugary, but a small Domino’s pizza has 13 grams of sugar—7 grams in the crust and 6 in the sauce). Just two pieces of toast adds up to a cube and a half.
The images can be a little misleading, though. The two Petit Suisse yogurt cups pictured have three cubes’ worth of sugar, but those are naturally occurring in dairy and don’t have the same health effects as added sugar. The same goes for the seven cubes of sugar in a 100 percent fruit and vegetable juice. Current research doesn’t support an association between obesity and eating naturally occurring sugars in milk and fruit, though many nutritionists recommend you eat sugary foods like fruit whole, rather than juiced, to maintain the benefits of the fruit’s fiber.
If you’re interested in eating less sugar, try The New York Times’ recent interactive quiz, which tests how little sugar you can eat in a day while consuming a selection of common meals and snacks.
[h/t Co.Exist]
All images courtesy of Antonio Rodríguez Estrada via sinAzucar.
January 18, 2017 – 1:00am
