Month: March 2017

Having a big pile of debt hanging over you can be totally overwhelming. That’s where the method we call “The Genius of Small Goals” comes in handy.

by James Hunt

From Coca-Cola to carbonated water, there isn’t a fizzy drink around that tastes better once it has gone flat. As soon as you break the seal on the bottle, it’s a race against time to finish off your soft drink before the precious bubbles that make the drink taste better are depleted. The last thing you want to do is speed up that process. 

That’s why we had to know: Does laying a bottle on its side make a soft drink go flat more quickly? Or is it nothing more than a consequence-free way to cram more and more of them in the fridge?

To figure out the answer, you first have to understand why fizzy drinks go flat at all. The carbonation in soft drinks is a result of additional carbon dioxide being dissolved into the liquid, which is then sealed under pressure. When the container is opened, the difference in pressure allows the carbon dioxide to form into bubbles, which then rush to the surface and escape back into the air. As each bubble bursts, the drink becomes a little less fizzy.

This process can theoretically continue until the drink contains the same amount of carbon dioxide as the atmosphere around it—though the drink will seem flat long before that point.

So does it matter if the container is on its side?

The answer: Not really. While it’s true that a bottle that is lying down will have a greater area of contact between the liquid and the air inside the bottle, that’s a small enough factor that any effect on the speed of carbon dioxide dissolution will be negligible. Since carbon dioxide bubbles form, or  “nucleate,” on the side of the bottle, increasing the surface area between the drink and the air might actually make it go flat slightly slower if the bottle is on its side—but again, this effect isn’t pronounced enough to make much of a difference over anything other than very short time scales.

What really matters when it comes to keeping a drink fizzy is the pressure inside a sealed container. As the carbon dioxide escapes, it builds up the pressure in the air within the bottle, until it’s high enough to prevent bubbles forming, which keeps the liquid fizzy. The pressure inside an opened bottle of soda that has been resealed is virtually the same, whether or not it’s standing up or on its side.

Things that do help keep drinks fizzy include chilling (carbon dioxide dissolves into air more readily at higher temperatures) and screwing the cap on tightly to help keep the pressure within the bottle high.

Squeezing the bottle doesn’t help, unless you keep it squeezed until the next time it’s opened—otherwise, the carbon dioxide will just escape the liquid and deform the bottle back to its original shape. Indeed, the fact that there’s no air inside the bottle will effectively suck extra carbon dioxide out of the drink in an attempt to equalize pressure inside the container, so squeezing the bottle actually makes the drink go flat more quickly than the alternative.

And finally, those repressurizing pumps? They’ll only work if you pump in something that contains more carbon dioxide than the drink. Air doesn’t, so the extra air you pump in creates a high-pressure mix of mostly oxygen and nitrogen, which—if anything—helps forcibly displace the carbon dioxide in the drink by encouraging oxygen and nitrogen to dissolve.

Whew. Knowing all that, the main tip for keeping your drink from going flat before you finish it? Keep it cold until you’re ready to drink it, then chug it down. Your dentists and doctors might not thank us, but your taste buds will.

Have you got a Big Question you’d like us to answer? If so, let us know by emailing us at bigquestions@mentalfloss.com.

The world’s top musicians and athletes can make their crafts seem effortless. But scoring a three-point shot or tearing through a guitar solo isn’t achieved through raw talent alone—such skills take hours to master.

This video from TED-Ed breaks down the science of effective training, starting with the impact it has on our brains. Similar to how exercise builds muscle, repeating the same action over and over strengthens the nerves delivering that message. Nerve fibers, or axons, are insulated with a substance called myelin that reduces energy loss and allows information from the brain to reach muscles more efficiently. Studies have shown that practice can bulk up these tissues, resulting in what some people think of as “muscle memory.”

But not all types of practice are created equal. TED-Ed goes on to suggest some tips for making sure whatever you’re trying to learn sticks. One effective tool is visualization. In a 1996 study, two groups of participants were asked to practice free throws. The first group completed the physical act of throwing a basketball while the second simply visualized going through the motions. The subjects who used their imaginations to practice improved by 23 percent and the physical players improved by 24 percent. So whether you want to master cooking, coding, or a new language, you have the tools to practice your skill no matter where you find yourself.

[h/t TED-Ed]

Here’s a distressing statistic: More than 60 percent of hearts and lungs collected for organ transplant are thrown away. That’s because the window of time in which a newly harvested organ is safe to transplant is very small: about four hours for hearts and lungs; eight to 12 hours for livers, intestines, and pancreases, and 36 hours for kidneys. Meanwhile, people who need organ replacements are waitlisted for years.

Scientists have made great progress in freezing tissue and organs, but they haven’t yet figured out a way to safely thaw them out. We may have gotten one step closer to solving that problem: A paper published today in the journal Science Translational Medicine describes a new method of safely defrosting cryopreserved human tissue.

Vitrification is a preservation method in which the liquids inside an organ are transformed into crystals or glass through deep cooling. It works well until it’s time to reheat the now-fragile tissue, which tends to crack unless the heat is perfectly distributed. If we could just spread that heat evenly, vitrification could be an answer to the puzzle of longer-term organ storage.

In the current study, researchers at the University of Minnesota developed a solution made with magnetic nanoparticles and injected it into pig hearts and arteries, as well as human skin tissue, before they were frozen. Then they applied electromagnets to the frozen tissue. Sure enough, the vibration of the nanoparticles was quick, gentle, and uniform enough to reheat the tissue samples without damaging them. The nanoparticles were then completely washed out of the tissue.

 
Pig hearts and skin cells are, of course, not the same as whole organs, and it will likely be years before the technology can be translated to human hearts and kidneys. “We are cautiously optimistic, but we’re not declaring any victory yet,” senior author John Bischof said in a press briefing. “There are some huge scientific hurdles ahead of us.”

Nor should we put all our chips on cryonics. “Cryobiology and cryonics don’t really mix,” Bischof said. “We try to stay science-based. While it’s attractive to think that maybe one day we’ll be able to freeze down and bring back whole people, or their heads, we are still so far away from that.”

Sleep is a funny thing. We literally can’t live without it, yet there’s still a lot about it that we just don’t understand. Now, new insight into the unconscious hours of African elephants may muddle the matter further, as a study in the journal PLOS One finds that the massive beasts spend barely any time asleep at all.

Scientists have hypothesized that the size of a mammal’s body is negatively associated with the amount of time it spends sleeping; in other words, big animals sleep less than small ones. Current record holders for shortest sleep time are the domestic horse (two hours, 53 minutes) and pony (three hours, 20 minutes).

While generally accepted, the theory has been tough to test, since you can’t exactly invite a whale into the laboratory for an overnight sleep study. Many studies have focused on captive animals for this reason, but there’s often a big difference between the lives of animals in zoos and those roaming free.

To check in on the sleeping habits of the wild African elephant (Loxodonta africana), researchers focused on the middle-aged matriarchs of two different herds. The scientists fitted each elephant with a collar to monitor her location and body position. (Elephants have two sleeping positions: lying down, which allows for deep REM sleep, and standing up, which is more of a shallow-sleep, nap-type situation.) They also implanted a small movement tracker at the tip of her trunk. Then both elephants were released to go about their lives as usual. The researchers took the trackers back 35 days later and reviewed the data they’d collected.

As it turns out, the elephants had been living remarkably busy lives. Like high-powered businesspeople, they rarely lay down—just once every three or four nights. The rest they did get—mostly while standing—was shallow and brief, averaging about two hours per night. Some nights they just kept walking and never slept at all.

“Studies of sleep in captive elephants have shown that they sleep for four to six hours per day,” study co-author Paul Manger of the University of the Witwatersrand said in a press statement. “However, the current study shows that in their natural habitat, wild, free-ranging elephants sleep only for two hours per day, the least amount of sleep of any mammal studied to date.”

What this means for elephants and other mammals remains to be seen. With just two participants, this was a very small study, and the researchers only tracked movement, not sleep itself. One of the two elephants was also caring for a calf, a responsibility that likely cut into her sleeping time.

Some of our favorite historical figures were born in March. We couldn’t possibly name them all, so here are just a few of the famous lives we’ll be celebrating.

1. JEAN HARLOW: MARCH 3, 1911

Actress Jean Harlow became a breakout star in 1930s Hollywood, where she earned the nickname the Blonde Bombshell. She got small parts in movies beginning in 1928, and became famous when she appeared in the 1930 Howard Hughes film Hell’s Angels , while still a teenager. Hughes had been working on the film for some time with actress Greta Nissen, but when 1927’s The Jazz Singer introduced sound technology to film, Hughes decided Hell’s Angels would be a talkie. Nissen had a thick Norwegian accent, and was dropped from the production. Upstart Harlow, in contrast, had a pleasant and relatively deep voice. The following year, she starred in six movies. Harlow went on to appear in a total of 43 movies, but her career was still brief. She unexpectedly died of kidney failure in 1937, at just 26 years old.

2. ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING: MARCH 6, 1806

English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning began writing poetry as soon as she learned to write, at age four. Browning’s most familiar poem is Sonnet 43, also known as “How Do I Love Thee?” but her larger body of work had a huge influence on poets like Emily Dickinson and friend Edgar Allan Poe. Like many writers and artists of the time, Browning was addicted to the opioid drug laudanum, which she began taking at age 15 after an injury. By the time she met her future husband, poet Robert Browning, she was taking an astounding 40 drops of laudanum every day.

3. GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ: MARCH 6, 1927

Gabriel García Márquez, the author of Love in the Time of Cholera, was once a starving young reporter for a newspaper in his native Colombia, writing novels in his spare time. When he wrote a series about shipwrecked Colombian sailors and connected their deaths with corruption in the navy, it made him an instant enemy of the government. The newspaper sent García Márquez abroad, and he lived in Europe for years. He later worked as a journalist in Cuba and the U.S., but was living in Mexico in 1967 when his breakout novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, was published. For the next several decades, his novels told stories of characters who were affected by politics, culture, and the forces of history. García Márquez was awarded the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature.  

4. JACK KEROUAC: MARCH 12, 1922

Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac dropped out of Columbia University in 1941 after an injury ended his football career. He spent ten days in the Marine Corps in 1942, then returned to New York, where he met aspiring writers Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. While he wrote continuously, Kerouac didn’t make much money until his 1957 novel On The Road was published, six years after he wrote it. The acclaim for that novel was the highlight of Kerouac’s literary career, although he wrote extensively afterward. What you might not know about Kerouac is that he was obsessed with fantasy baseball, and even invented his own version. Kerouac created a series of cards with teams, diagrams and possible outcomes, which he could deal to play imagined games all by himself. It was a hobby he hid from his friends at the time.  

5. ALBERT EINSTEIN: MARCH 14, 1879

Albert Einstein’s birthday is easy to remember because  March 14 (3/14) is also Pi Day. The theoretical physicist who developed the general theory of relativity spent his childhood in Germany, but left Europe when Hitler came to power in 1933, and became an American citizen in 1940. As a kid, Einstein did have a few brushes with authority in school, but the persistent legends about him getting bad grades actually aren’t true. The rumor of his failing marks in math came about because his school switched their grading system. In one term, a grade of one on a scale of one to six was the highest grade, then in the next term the scale was reversed, and a six became the highest grade. Amateur historians are to blame for the mix-up. Sorry, Al. 

6. EDITH NOURSE ROGERS: MARCH 19, 1881

Edith Nourse Rogers is remembered for being one of the first women to serve in Congress, but she had an extremely accomplished career long before she joined the House of Representatives. Rogers was a nursing volunteer with the YMCA, the Red Cross and at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center during World War I, and in 1922, President Warren G. Harding appointed her to a position visiting veterans and inspecting military hospitals—one she held with presidents Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. In 1925, her husband, Representative John Jacob Rogers, died, and Rogers was tapped to serve out his term. She went on to be reelected again and again, eventually becoming one of the longest serving Congresswomen in history. Rogers championed veterans and veteran rights throughout her career, and helped to author legislation that created the Women’s Army Corps and the GI Bill. 

7. FRED ROGERS: MARCH 20, 1928

Fred Rogers worked in television from 1951 until his death in 2003. Thirty-three of those years were spent as the host of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, which means that more than one generation of children grew up knowing the gentle and generous TV host. Strangely, he went to work in television because he hated it: Rogers was appalled at the banality and violence of TV programming, and wanted to use the medium to instead promote education and understanding. He was also an advocate for Public Television, and testified before Congress about the potential for TV to create more productive citizens.   

8. JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH: MARCH 21, 1685

The German composer Johann Sebastian Bach was renowned as a gifted organist during his lifetime, but the genius of his compositions was only recognized after his death. Bach held many positions during his career. In 1708, he went to work as a musician for the Duke of Sachsen-Weimar. Within five years, he was up for a promotion to capellmeister, a.k.a. the director of music. Bach was passed over in favor of the retiring director’s son, which made him so angry that he left to work for a rival court. The Duke of Sachsen-Weimar was so angry over losing his organist that he had Bach jailed for 30 days. Bach, of course, used the time to write more music.

9. FLANNERY O’CONNOR: MARCH 25, 1925

Born in Savannah, Georgia, Mary Flannery O’Connor wrote two novels and thirty-two short stories—many of which are considered master examples of the Southern Gothic style—before she died at age 39. The prolific writer also kept a prayer journal, and a collection of her correspondences was released in 2007. O’Connor was diagnosed with lupus in 1952, and after living in Iowa and Connecticut, she returned to her family farm to live the last twelve years of her life. There, she raised a flock of around 100 peacocks (and peahens). O’Connor had always been fascinated with birds, and even used peacocks as stand-ins for Christ in her work.

10. PATTY SMITH HILL: MARCH 27, 1868

Patty Smith Hill, in collaboration with her sister Mildred Hill, wrote possibly the the best-known song in the world: “Happy Birthday.” Patty was the principal at the Louisville Experimental Kindergarten School at the time (1893), and wrote the lyrics while Mildred wrote the music. The song was originally “Good Morning To All,” but Hill adapted the lyrics for other occasions, including birthdays. The song went on to have a litigious history, which Hill blamed on her publishing company. It is now in the public domain.    

Love it or hate it, mayonnaise is everywhere—in sandwiches, salads, and even on French fries. But as Mashable reports, Japan is set to take the creamy condiment craze to new heights: Kewpie, the Japanese mayo brand, is launching two pop-up restaurants featuring mayonnaise-based menus.

Kewpie will open a “mayonnaise cafe” in Tokyo’s Shibuya district for the entirety of March (fun fact: March 1 is “Mayonnaise Day” in Japan). The second pop-up will arrive in Nagoya, in central Honshu, on April 3, and remain open through April 30.

Calm your fears, mayo-phobes: neither establishment will sell big bowls of mayo with spoons on the side. Instead, they’ll use the condiment to marinate chicken, add extra flavor to omelets, and make a custard-like dessert. (There’s even mayo pizza!) Dishes will range in price from around $3.50 for a small dessert to about $14 for the chicken chop.

That said, Kewpie mayo isn’t your grandma’s Hellmann’s, meaning these dishes will likely taste much different from what American eaters would expect. As Kotaku explains, the Asian condiment is made from egg yolks and apple or rice vinegar, which gives it a taste that’s richer and sweeter than American mayonnaise, which is typically made from whole eggs, distilled vinegar, salt, and sugar.

This isn’t Kewpie’s first foray into the restaurant industry: In March 2016, one of the brand’s pop-up cafes served dishes including Taro Miso Mayonnaise Gratin, fries with different-flavored mayos, and more.

[h/t Mashable]

Since its founding over a century ago, Planters has joined the ranks as one of America’s most recognizable—and best-loved—brands. But there’s more to the peanut purveyors than their nattily outfitted mascot. Go nuts over these little-known tidbits about the snack company.

1. PLANTERS WAS FOUNDED BY AN ITALIAN IMMIGRANT.

Amedeo Obici was just 11 years old when he was sent from his home in Oderzo, Italy, to live with his uncle in Pennsylvania. As a young man in Wilkes-Barre, he worked at a fruit store that also had a peanut roaster. Inspired, he bought a roaster of his own, and after years of experimenting with roasting and salting peanuts, he founded Planters Peanut Company in 1906 with friend and fellow Italian immigrant Mario Peruzzi. The two chose the name “Planters” because they thought it sounded dignified. When they needed to cut costs a few years later, they moved their operation closer to the peanut-fertile lands of Suffolk, Virginia.

2. OBICI PROVED HIMSELF TO BE A MASTER MARKETER.

To promote sales of his fledgling peanut company, Amedeo Obici devised an innovative marketing strategy: He inserted one letter of the alphabet into each bag of peanuts and gave away a free bag—later, the reward was upgraded to gold watches Obici bought for a $1 each—to anyone who collected the letters of his last name, O-B-I-C-I.

3. MR. PEANUT WAS DESIGNED BY A GRADE-SCHOOL STUDENT.

The iconic brand mascot was born in 1916 when 14-year-old Antonio Gentile submitted a sketch of the anthropomorphic peanut to a contest sponsored by the company. (A commercial artist later refined the design to include the familiar monocle, top hat, and cane.) Gentile was said to be awarded $5 for his winning sketch, but Obici was so taken with the youngster he ended up paying his way through college and medical school.

4. ONCE UPON A TIME, THERE WERE PLANTERS RETAIL STORES ACROSS THE U.S.

The 1930s were a period of rapid growth that saw the company open about 100 Planters Peanut Shoppes from coast to coast—the two most famous were located in New York’s Times Square and along the Atlantic City boardwalk in New Jersey. After Planters was acquired by Standard Brands, Inc. in 1961, the stores were either closed or sold; today, around a dozen stores still operate independently in the eastern U.S.

5. THERE’S A GROUP DEDICATED TO COLLECTING PLANTERS MEMORABILIA.

Founded in 1978, the Peanut Pals is a group of roughly 300 collectors across the U.S. and Canada who are Mr. Peanut obsessives. The nonprofit organization took their name from a 1927 Planters advertising pamphlet. Every year, they host a convention for fans to show off and sell their Planters and Mr. Peanut wares—everything from housewares and clothing items to old posters and oversized peanut tins. This year’s convention will be held May 15-18 in Las Vegas, if you’re looking for some gifts for the legume fan who has everything.

6. MR. PEANUT WAS A STAR ATTRACTION AT THE NEW YORK WORLD’S FAIR.

New York City hosted both the 1939–’40 and the 1964–’65 World’s Fairs, where the dapper mascot was a huge draw. The souvenir peanut bowls from 1939 can still be found on various resale sites, and today a wooden pin in Mr. Peanut’s likeness can fetch upward of $100 at auction.

7. THE COMPANY ENCOURAGES FANS TO TAKE A STAB AT SETTING WORLD NUT RECORDS.

Yes, the World Nut Records are a real thing, and they reward participants who set records for doing any number of silly feats that involve Planters nuts. Recent category winners have included “Most Peanuts Hit With a Baseball Bat in 15 Seconds” and “Largest Group to Lie Down and Spell ‘Nuts.'”

8. A TRAVELING NUTMOBILE IS STAFFED BY BRAND AMBASSADORS KNOWN AS THE PEANUTTERS.

In 2014, ahead of last year’s 100th birthday of Mr. Peanut, the company hired nine recent college grads to drive three 27-foot-long Nutmobiles around the country to celebrate (shell-ebrate?), making stops along the way at stores, sporting events, and concerts. The foam-and-fiberglass Nutmobile—which has its own pun-packed blog—weighs in at 13,000 pounds. But this wasn’t the first Nutmobile—in 1935, a Planters salesman made his rounds in a shell-shaped car. That Nutmobile predated even the famous Oscar Mayer Weinermobile!

9. PLANTERS HAS BEEN COMMENDED FOR THEIR SUSTAINABILITY EFFORTS.

In 2015, the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality recognized Planters’s 409,000-square-foot dry-roasting facility in the state with an environmental award for being “zero waste” certified for land-filled materials, and for reducing energy and water consumption. Additionally, Planters is a founding member of the African Cashew Initiative, which educates African nut farmers on sustainability efforts, and the company has opened various urban green spaces and parks.

10. BUT THEY’RE NO STRANGERS TO CONTROVERSY.

A 49-year-old Florida man sued Planters in 2010 after breaking his tooth on a 1-inch rodent bone found in one of their cans of nuts, causing him to rack up a $15,000 medical bill for oral surgery. “Scientists at that lab confirmed it was a bone, but could not determine what part of the process it was introduced to the peanut canister,” reported the Sarasota Herald-Tribune at the time. “The lab found no evidence of surface heating, meaning it was not in there when the peanuts were roasted. But it is coated with the same material as the nuts.” Planters would not comment on the lawsuit. A similar suit was filed four years earlier in Illinois.

11. BILL HADER HAS BEEN THE VOICE OF MR. PEANUT. (AND SO HAS ROBERT DOWNEY JR.).

Saturday Night Live alum Bill Hader was tapped in 2013 to voice Mr. Peanut in ads; Hader is, ironically, highly allergic to peanuts. He took over the role of the monocled mascot from Robert Downey Jr., who was hired to voice the character in 2010, marking the first time Mr. Peanut had ever spoken.