Author: Shaunacy Ferro

The Mausoleum of Augustus, the final resting place of the powerful Roman emperor, is about to get a major facelift, according to The Telegraph. An Italian telecommunications company, Telecom Italia, has pledged more than $6.4 million (€6 million) through its TIM Foundation, as first reported by the Italian paper Corriere della Sera.

The mausoleum—which also holds the remains of the emperors Tiberius and Nero, his immediate successors—is the biggest tomb ever built in ancient Rome, but it has suffered from major neglect in recent years. It dates back to 28 BCE, right around the time Augustus—the grandnephew and adopted son of Julius Caesar—took power. At different points in history, it has served as a fortress, a bull-fighting ring, and a concert hall.

It was meant to be restored in time for the 2000th anniversary of the emperor’s death in 2014, but the project hadn’t even started by then, thanks to bureaucratic roadblocks. The restoration will include multimedia projections of Rome, past and present, adorning the walls of the tomb. The projections are supposed to be created by Oscar-winning Italian directors, but the president of Telecom Italia, Giuseppe Recchi, hasn’t specified who might be involved.

The project is expected to take a little over two years (800 days).

[h/t The Telegraph]

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.

1. OPRAH

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.

2. COOLIO

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.

3. MAYA ANGELOU

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.

4. SMASH MOUTH

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?”

5. STANLEY TUCCI

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.

6. TRISHA YEARWOOD

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.

7. ZIGGY MARLEY

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.

8. TONY DANZA

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.

9. REGIS AND KATHIE LEE

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.

10. SAMMY HAGAR

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.

11. MORGAN FREEMAN

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.

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.

Most people who own pets can attest to the fact that they, just like us, occasionally let out a toxically smelly fart. But what about animals in the wild? For the curious, a legion of animal specialists recently created a collection of answers, as Popular Science alerts us.

Twitterer Dani Rabaiotti posed a question about whether snakes fart to ecologist and snake expert David Steen. The discussion led to a hashtag, #doesitfart, and subsequently a Google Doc collecting all the answers researchers and animal experts could think of.

@AlongsideWild a family member asked me the other day if snakes fart and i did not know the answer to their question. So do they? ??

Dani Rabaiotti (@DaniRabaiotti) January 8, 2017

Some of the answers are surprising. For instance, snakes do fart! So do mussels, in their own way. There’s commentary and description, too. “Hell yes” bobcats fart, one contributor writes. Animals that eat squirrels apparently have quite noxious gas, according to that researcher. Snakes fart, too. The Burmese python’s gas is “Thick, and … meaty?” per one entry. “If it were a color it would be brownish-yellow.” The more you know. Please peruse this Google Doc at your leisure.

[h/t Popular Science]

Loneliness and isolation among seniors in the U.S. is considered an epidemic. Social isolation can change a person’s genome in potentially harmful ways, comparable to what obesity or smoking does to you—increasing risks of heart attacks, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and more. But how do you pull solitary seniors, who may be physically unable to leave their homes, from isolation?

Some companies think technology is the answer. There are virtual reality experiences designed for older adults and anyone else with limited mobility. And then there are robot pets, designed to socialize with older people, including a seal, a dog, and a cat. In the future, though, the home robot friend designed for seniors may look more like a tabletop art piece, according to fuseproject’s Yves Béhar, the designer behind products like the Jawbone UP and the SodaStream.

Fuseproject created an artificial intelligence console, ElliQ, designed to keep older people engaged and connected to friends and families, as part of a partnership for a technology company called Intuition Robotics. ElliQ suggests TED Talks and audiobooks, plays games, reminds people of their appointments and medications, arranges rides, and can even tell you that you should go for a walk if you’ve watched a lot of television that day.

It’s meant to be an easy way for older people to communicate with their families via Facebook, Skype, and similar technologies. Its screen can pull up videos and photos, and remote family members can even access data about their loved ones’ environments (including the indoor temperature). As time goes on, ElliQ learns preferences and can pull up recommendations based on prior requests or input from other family members. It’s kind of like Amazon’s home helper robot Alexa, but created for people who spend a lot of time alone, but still don’t quite understand how their Facebook timeline works.

The robot is on display as part of NEW OLD, an exhibit at the Design Museum in London, running until February 19. In February, Intuition Robots will begin a trial of the technology among people in the San Francisco area.

All images courtesy fuseproject and Intuition Robotics.

UK-based needlework artist Humayrah Bint Altaf doesn’t do typical embroidery projects. Intricate patterns and flowery flourishes don’t dominate her work; bugs do. The expert in needlework, as Vice recently highlighted, makes amazing embroidered images of beetles, butterflies, and other natural wonders.

The three-dimensional images require intense dedication to get every bead and stitch just right, and they often have to be begun anew at some point in the process. Her images of insects shine with metallic stitches that reflect the light just like a real beetle might. Here are a few of her amazing creations from Instagram.

[h/t Vice]

Even elephants are getting on the quantified-self movement. The health of some zoo elephants is now being monitored through fitness trackers, according to NPR. It’s called the Elephant Welfare Initiative, a national endeavor to study how elephants in captivity are faring and what steps can be taken to improve their health and happiness.

As part of the program, caretakers keep detailed logs about their elephants’ activity and behaviors. (The animals aren’t wearing any devices a la Fitbit.) Fitness tracking software, developed by an organization called AWARE (Animal Welfare Assessment, Research and Education), then provides suggestions about how to change up the animals’ routines to benefit their well being.

AWARE found several important factors for elephant health while tracking hundreds of elephants for several studies published in July 2016. For instance, having more space doesn’t necessarily make elephants healthier, but elephants that have lots of social time exhibit fewer nervous tics, and reproductive health in female elephants can improve by giving them puzzle challenges. The studies found that soft soil or sand was better for the elephants’ joints. Not to mention, the tracking of the animals’ movements can reduce their obesity rates. Two elephants at the Fresno Chaffee Zoo have each lost about 2000 pounds while taking part in the program, which is currently being implemented in 40-some zoos around the country.

Elephants are highly intelligent, social animals, and some critics argue that zoos will never be able to provide the kind of environment they need to really thrive. Zoos don’t have the space to support the large, complex social networks elephants have in the wild, and elephant families are often separated as young elephants born in captivity are sent to other institutions. Many zoos have closed their elephant programs, though there are still 78 zoos in North America that keep the pachyderms. However, some zoos that have pledged to end their elephant programs are continuing to keep their current elephants until they pass away, and others are planning to keep hosting elephants for the foreseeable future, so a little bit of tracking can help those institutions keep their elephants as happy as possible while in captivity.

[h/t NPR]

Among the many upsides to being British royalty, there is this: You never have to use a last name. For one thing, everyone already knows who you are. There’s only one Queen, for instance, so it’s not like Elizabeth has to specify which one she is.

However, the British royal family does have a last name, as Business Insider reminds us. The British royal family’s last name is technically Windsor, but that’s a relatively new development.

Before 1917, royals were usually known by the territory they ruled or the Royal House of which they were a member, as the Royal Family’s website explains. For example: The full name of Queen Victoria’s eldest son, King Edward VII, was Albert Edward Saxe-Coburg-Gotha—a mouthful he inherited from his father, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.

In 1917, though, Edward’s son, George V, was presented with a conundrum: His surname sounded somewhat German, which was an unwelcome association during World War I, so he named his family after Windsor Castle. Since then, any descendants of Queen Victoria (aside from married women) bear the last name Windsor.

In 1960, to make things more confusing, Queen Elizabeth II and her husband, Prince Philip, decided to add their own spin to the Windsor name, distinguishing their descendants from the rest of the royal family. So her children and their children can use Mountbatten-Windsor as their surname on official documents such as marriage and birth certificates. (Fans of Netflix’s The Crown caught a glimpse of the discussions that went into the surname decision, though the series didn’t tell the full story.)

Kings and queens are welcome to change the last names of their family at will, since it’s a matter of precedent rather than an official decree. And royals sometimes adopt other names when it’s convenient. Princes Harry and William used Wales as their last name while serving in the military, adopting their father’s designation as the Prince of Wales.

With such a complicated naming protocol, it’s no wonder most Royal Family members go by their titles instead.

[h/t Business Insider]

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

EpiPens, the auto-injectors that reverse severe allergic reactions, have become obscenely expensive in the last decade, with costs rising more than 450 percent since 2004—and you can’t always get the generic version. A set of two EpiPens costs $600, though the devices only cost the UK’s National Health Service (not the consumer) about $69. Even members of the U.S. Congress have demanded an explanation for the rising costs—in part because, since 1997, it has been misclassified as a generic drug.

CVS is now stepping in to give consumers another option, according to Ars Technica. The drug store is debuting a generic epinephrine auto-injector in a partnership with Impax Laboratories. This generic version of Impax’s Adrenaclick will cost only $109.99, and Impax is making coupons available to reduce the price to just $10 for some patients.

Last year, under intense scrutiny over the price of EpiPens, Mylan began selling a generic version, but that still costs $300. Hopefully, competing with the CVS alternative, sold at 9600 pharmacies around the country, will force Mylan to bring down its prices to a more reasonable rate.

[h/t Ars Technica]

Wish you had David Attenborough’s Planet Earth gig? A luxury travel company wants to make your movie star (well, documentary star) dreams come true. The UK-based Luxury Travel Advisors is launching tours that allow clients to star in their very own wildlife documentary, according to The Telegraph.

There are three different tour options, with eight to 12-day journeys in Brazil, the Arctic, and Africa. Each one includes a five-person documentary film crew that follows the group of up to four guests on their journey to scope out South America’s jaguars and toucans, the Arctic’s polar bears and foxes, or Africa’s big cats and rhinos. The company plans to expand into trips to India, Yellowstone National Park, and Bermuda (where you’ll be able to swim with sharks!). Afterward, you’ll get a private HD screening of your trip’s footage for friends, family, and whatever Animal Planet producer you can get to show up.

The company calls it “A true combination of luxury travel, responsible ecotourism, conservation and a true once in a lifetime experience.” There are no prices listed on the website, which probably means you can’t afford it.

[h/t The Telegraph]