Flying Houses

The future ain’t what it used to be… (top to bottom) We’ll have ape chauffeurs. We’ll live in flying houses. We’ll have personal helicopters. We will have telepathy. We’ll finally make it to Mars. There will be “nanobots” capable of entering the bloodstream to “feed” cells. The new and improved Kowalski Heat Treating door greeter!

 

With the New Year approaching, it’s hard to imagine that we’re almost living in the year 2020. 2019 seemed ok to me, but 2020 is hard to get my head around – (has it been 20 years since we worried about the computers flipping to 2000??) Back then I vividly recall going to a New Year’s Eve party at the local lodge with a bunch of friends along with their kids.  We all were looking forward to what crazy things would be happening or not due to the new millennium!  I remember one of the Dad’s being a DJ and the kids all thinking is was so cool to be able to stay up late with their parents. Now fast forward 20 years, though we’ve seen plenty of impressive technological advances, like artificial intelligence and phones that unlock by scanning our faces, it’s not quite the world of flying cars and robot butlers people once imagined we’d be living in by now. In fact, decades ago, predictions about the futuristic and revolutionary changes we’d see in this far-off sounding year were quite lofty. Want a good laugh? Here are crazy 23 predictions about the year 2020 that at some point in time, people really expected to happen. Enjoy reading these while diving deeper to see what actually has happened and thanks to Bob Larkin and bestliviningonline.com for the info.

 

1 – Human feet will become just one big toe.
So, what’s going to happen to our feet—or, more specifically, our toes—in 2020? In a lecture at the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1911, a surgeon by the name of Richard Clement Lucas made a curious prediction: that the “useless outer toes” will become used less and less, so that “man might become a one-toed race.” This Little Piggy would get a whole lot shorter!

2 – We’ll have ape chauffeurs.
In 1994, the RAND Corporation, a global think tank that’s contributed to the space program and the development of the internet, said they expected us to have animal employees by the year 2020. “The RAND panel mentioned that by the year 2020 it may be possible to breed intelligent species of animals, such as apes, that will be capable of performing manual labor,” Glenn T. Seaborg wrote of the corporation’s prediction in his book Scientist Speaks Out. “During the 21st century, those houses that don’t have a robot in the broom closet could have a live-in ape to do the cleaning and gardening chores. Also, the use of well-trained apes as family chauffeurs might decrease the number of automobile accidents.” Yikes, who’s gonna tell them?

3 – We’ll live in flying houses.
Inventor, science writer, and futurist Arthur C. Clarke—who co-wrote the screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey—believed that the boring houses of 1966 would be radically different by the time we reached the 21st century, according to Inverse. Evidently, the houses of the future would have nothing keeping them on the ground and they would be able to move to anywhere on earth on a whim.  Oh, and it wouldn’t just be one home that would be able to relocate without the owner even needing to get out of bed and put on pants. “Whole communities may migrate south in the winter, or move to new lands whenever they feel the need for a change of scenery,” Clarke promised. Up 2, anyone?

4 – And our houses will be cleaned by hoses.
The New York Times’ longtime science editor Waldemar Kaempffert, who worked for the paper from the 1920s through the 1950s, had lots of opinions about how different the world would be by the 21st century. In a 1950 Popular Mechanicsarticle, titled “Miracles You’ll See in the Next 50 Years,” he predicted that by the 21st century, all you’ll have to do to get your house clean is “simply turn the hose on everything.”  That’s because Kaempffert imagined furniture would be made of synthetic fabric or waterproof plastic. “After the water has run down a drain in the middle of the floor (later concealed by a rug of synthetic fiber),” all you’d have to do is “turn on a blast of hot air” to dry everything. What about not-so-resilient material, you ask? Just “throw soiled ‘linen’ into the incarcerator!”

5 – We’ll eat candy made of underwear.
In the same Popular Mechanics article, Kaempffert predicted that all food would be delivered to our homes in the form of frozen bricks by the 21st century. “Cooking as an art is only a memory in the minds of old people,” he wrote. “A few die-hards still broil a chicken or roast a leg of lamb, but the experts have developed ways of deep-freezing partially baked cuts of meat.” And, thanks to advances in culinary technology, Kaempffert predicted it would even be possible to take ordinary objects like old table linens and “rayon underwear” and bring them to “chemical factories to be converted into candy.” No thanks!

6 – We’ll have personal helicopters.
Forget jetpacks and flying cars. Popular Mechanics was pretty sure back in 1951 that every family in 21st century would have at least one helicopter in their garage. “This simple, practical, foolproof personal helicopter coupe is big enough to carry two people and small enough to land on your lawn,” they explained. “It has no carburetor to ice up, no ignition system to fall apart or misfire: instead, quiet, efficient ramjets keep the rotors moving, burning any kind of fuel from dime-a-gallon stove oil or kerosene up to aviation gasoline.” Yes, but then, we’d imagine, your teenage son would ask to borrow the chopper, and you’d wake up the next day to discover your helicopter stuck in a tree. It’s always something!

7 – C, X, and Q will not be part of the alphabet.
When you’re curious about the future of language, you probably should ask someone other than an engineer about it. And yet, that’s what Ladies’ Home Journal did in 1900, asking John Elfreth Watkins Jr., the curator of mechanical technology at the Smithsonian Institution, for his educated guesses about the 21st century.  The man of science had no love for what he considered extraneous letters, and he boldly predicted that by the 2000s, “there will be no C, X, or Q in our everyday alphabet. They will be abandoned because unnecessary.” Instead, Watkins wrote, we’d be spelling mostly by sound and would only communicate with “condensed words expressing condensed ideas.” So, in 2020, we may say to our friends, “Me happy good, hi!”

8 – We will have both telepathy and teleportation.
Michael J. O’Farrell, founder of The Mobile Institute, has been an expert in the technology industry since 1985. But even the experts can make mistakes. In the 2014 book Shift 2020, O’Farrell predicted that 2020 would be the dawn of the “nanomobility era.” “In the pending nanomobility era, I predict telepathy and teleportation will become possible by the year 2020—with both commonplace by 2040,” he said. I think this already happened – Jackie already knows just about everything I’m thinking.  Beam me up Scotty.

9 – All roads will become tubes.
If you’re sick of asphalt roads and all the potholes that come with them, then you’ll wish Popular Mechanics was right about this prediction for the 21st century. In a 1957 article, the magazine predicted that every road and street in America will be “replaced by a network of pneumatic tubes,” and your car would only need enough power to get from your home to the nearest tube. Then, by the calculations of a Honeywell engineer, “they will be pneumatically powered to any desired destination.”

10 – Nobody will work and everybody will be rich.
In 1966, Time magazine reported that the 21st century would be a pretty awesome economic era for just about everybody. In an essay called “The Futurists,” they predicted that “machines will be producing so much that everyone in the U.S. will, in effect, be independently wealthy.” Without even lifting a finger, the average non-working family could expect to earn an average salary of between $30,000 and $40,000, according to Time. That’s in 1966 dollars, mind you; in 2020, that’d be about $300,000—for doing nothing.

11 – Mail will be sent via rocket.
As out there as it sounds, mail delivery via missile was successfully attempted in 1959. That year, a Navy submarine—the U.S.S. Barbero—sent 3,000 letters, all addressed to political figures like President Dwight D. Eisenhower, using only a rocket. The nuclear warhead was taken out and replaced with mail containers, and the missile was launched towards the Naval Auxiliary Air Station.  The mail was successfully delivered, and Postmaster General Arthur E. Summerfield was so excited by the “historic significance” of mail delivery via instruments of war that he predicted it would become commonplace by the next century. “Mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, to Britain, to India, or Australia by guided missiles,” he said. “We stand on the threshold of rocket mail.”  Though we never got rocket mail, we did get something better: email.

12 – We’ll finally make it to Mars.
We’ve been dreaming of putting humans on Mars for as long as we’ve known the red planet existed. However, it’s only recently that the venture has started to feel even remotely realistic. And yet, in 1997, Wired magazine’s Peter Schwartzand Peter Leyden picked the year 2020 as the time when “humans arrive on Mars.”  “The four astronauts touch down and beam their images back to the 11 billion people sharing in the moment. The expedition is a joint effort supported by virtually all nations on the planet, the culmination of a decade and a half of intense focus on a common goal.” Ah, sounds nice, doesn’t it?  NASA projects that the earliest we could get a human on the surface of Mars is 2030, and that’s only if we’re really, really lucky.

13 – Women will all be built like wrestlers. 
In 1950, Associated Press writer Dorothy Roe revealed some shocking predictions of what life on earth would be like in the 21st century, according to Smithsonian magazine. Among her more head-scratching forecasts were that the women of tomorrow would be “more than six feet tall” and would “wear a size 11 shoe, have shoulders like a wrestler, and muscles like a truck driver.” Their proportions, Roe wrote, would be perfectly “Amazonian,” all evidently thanks to science providing “a balanced ration of vitamins, proteins, and minerals that will produce maximum bodily efficiency.”

14 – We’ll wear antenna hats and disposable socks.
For a 1939 issue of British Vogue, product designer Gilbert Rhode was asked what he believed people in the 21st century would be wearing—and he had lots of thoughts. He imagined that, by 2020, we would have banished buttons, pockets, collars, and ties, and that men would revolt against shaving. “His hat will be an antenna, snatching radio out of the ether. His socks—disposable. His suit minus tie, collar, and buttons,” Rhode declared. He almost described a modern-day hipster living in Brooklyn, but we suspect even the antenna hat might be pushing it a little too far.  Goggle glasses perhaps?

15 – Everything—even baby cradles—will be made out of steel.
Thomas Edison played a role in some of the greatest inventions of all time, from light bulbs to movie cameras. But that doesn’t mean he only had good ideas. Take his vision of the future of steel, for instance: During a 1911 interview with Miami Metropolis, he predicted that “the house of the next century will be furnished from basement to attic with steel.”  And according to Edison, the steel obsession wouldn’t end there. “The baby of the 21st century will be rocked in a steel cradle,” he said. “His father will sit in a steel chair at a steel dining table, and his mother’s boudoir will be sumptuously equipped with steel furnishings.” All of this heat treated of course !!

16 – We’ll be able to vote electronically from home.
In the aforementioned 1997 Wired article, Schwartz and Leyden predicted that Americans would be able to partake in “e-voting,” voting in the presidential election from the comfort of their own home. They actually predicated we’d be able to e-vote as early as 2008, but at this point, even the possibility of e-voting in the 2020 election seems a little far-fetched.

17 – Everyone will stop drinking coffee and tea.
In 1937, Nikola Tesla predicted that “within a century, coffee, tea, and tobacco will be no longer in vogue.” “The abolition of stimulants will not come about forcibly,” he wrote. “It will simply be no longer fashionable to poison the system with harmful ingredients.” He’s hopefully right about tobacco, but the coffee and tea? Not just yet.

18 – There will be “blood banks” for teeth.
We already have blood blanks, where life-saving plasma can be donated and used to help patients who need emergency blood. So, what’s next, you might be wondering? Well, in a 1947 issue of Mechanix Illustrated magazine, journalist Lester David promised that in the future, we’d have “tooth banks,” too. “Picture the possibilities,” David wrote in the story, aptly titled, “How About Tooth Banks?” “Into the junk pile will go all artificial dentures, all bridges, plates, partial plates. All men and women of whatever age will be able to have human teeth imbedded inside their gums until the day they die.” I’m not sure I want someone else’s teeth in my mouth – eeewww!

19 – Everyone will be a vegetarian.
In 1913, Gustav Bischoff, former president of the American Meat Packers Association, predicted that humans’ diets would consist of mostly vegetables as the years went on. Because of a shortage of meat, he told The New York Times, even the wealthiest people in the future would be vegetarians.  With the new meatless products, we’re close.

20 – This prediction comes from just 15 years ago and it was made by futurist and computer scientist Ray Kurzweil. He wrote in his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology that by the 2020s, there will be “nanobots” capable of entering the bloodstream to “feed” cells and extract waste. As a result, they’ll render the mode of food consumption as we know it obsolete. A bold prediction for just 15 years into the future, don’t you think?

21- We’ll have robots as therapists.
Robots are the typical prediction for the future—and technically, we do sort of have robots now. But global trends expert Ariane Van de Ven had some bigger ideas for 2020. She explained in the aforementioned book Shift 2020 that she believed “there will be more robots used as therapists, companions, assistants, and even friends to help people in their everyday,” according to The Next Web. Yeah… not quite.

22 – Vacuums will be nuclear-powered.
Alex Lewyt, former president of Lewyt Vacuum Company, obviously wanted the world to be excited about vacuum cleaners. But when he predicted in 1955 that “nuclear-powered vacuum cleaners” would become a reality in the future, he maybe wasn’t making the most convincing sales pitch. If the choice were between having dirty floors or plugging in a mini-Chernobyl-waiting-to-happen, we’d probably stick with the crumbs and dust bunnies.

23 – There will be no need for futurists to predict the future.
In the 1900s and earlier in the 2000s, many futurists made their predictions as to how 2020 would look. But Dave Evans, the chief futurist for Cisco Visual Networking, actually predicted that he’d be out of a job by this time because, he forecasted, everyone would be able to predict the future themselves.  “By 2020, predicting the future will be commonplace for the average person,” he told Mashable in 2012. “We are amassing unprecedented amounts of data… New image and video analysis algorithms and tools will unlock this rich source of data, creating unprecedented insight. Cloud-based tools will allow anyone to mine this data and perform what-if analysis, even using it to predict the future.”

24 – Steve’s Bonus Prediction!
The Cleveland Browns Win the Superbowl Before 2030!!  I refuse to put a date on this, but like all of the predictions above – it could happen. Just one would be fine with me.

 

 


 

Thank You Norman

Norman Rockwell. Love this guy!!. 

 

For those of you who know me best, you already know how much of a little kid I am when it comes to Christmas.  I love it all – the lights, the presents, the goodies, going to Mass and celebrating our Lord, putting out cookies for Santa and the time with family and friends. (even the eggnog). I still get all giddy the night before Christmas and wake up extra early on Christmas morning. It will be even more fun this year as a Grandpa, now officially allowed to spoil the dickens out of the next generation.  For many years, KHT has featured the amazing work of Norman Rockwell, an American treasure, who could illustrate and paint like no one of his time.  A bit idealized at times, there’s still something magical about his work, especially when it comes to capturing the season of Christmas.  He had a knack of finding the right pose, the right expressions and the amazement inside all of us.  On behalf of the whole gang at KHT, I say Merry Christmas and Happy Chanukah to all – may the good Lord bless you and your families this season, and may the big guy in the red suit bring you joy and happiness again this year.  (“and no Rob, you’ll shoot your eye out”).  Special thanks to biography.com and the Norman Rockwell museum for the history and use of the images.  Enjoy!

Born Norman Percevel Rockwell in New York City on February 3, 1894, Norman Rockwell knew at the age of 14 that he wanted to be an artist, and began taking classes at The New School of Art. By the age of 16, Rockwell was so intent on pursuing his passion that he dropped out of high school and enrolled at the National Academy of Design. He later transferred to the Art Students League of New York. Upon graduating, Rockwell found immediate work as an illustrator for Boys’ Life magazine.

By 1916, a 22-year-old Rockwell, newly married to his first wife, Irene O’Connor, had painted his first cover for The Saturday Evening Post—the beginning of a 47-year relationship with the iconic American magazine. In all, Rockwell painted 321 covers for the Post.

Some of his most iconic covers included the 1927 celebration of Charles Lindbergh’s crossing of the Atlantic. He also worked for other magazines, including Look, which in 1969 featured a Rockwell cover depicting the imprint of Neil Armstrong’s left foot on the surface of the moon after the successful moon landing. In 1920, the Boy Scouts of America featured a Rockwell painting in its calendar. Rockwell continued to paint for the Boy Scouts for the rest of his life.

The 1930s and ’40s proved to be the most fruitful period for Rockwell. In 1930, he married Mary Barstow, a schoolteacher, and they had three sons: Jarvis, Thomas and Peter. The Rockwells relocated to Arlington, Vermont, in 1939, and the new world that greeted Norman offered the perfect material for the artist to draw from.

Rockwell’s success stemmed to a large degree from his careful appreciation for everyday American scenes, the warmth of small-town life in particular. Often what he depicted was treated with a certain simple charm and sense of humor. Some critics dismissed him for not having real artistic merit, but Rockwell’s reasons for painting what he did were grounded in the world that was around him. “Maybe as I grew up and found the world wasn’t the perfect place I had thought it to be, I unconsciously decided that if it wasn’t an ideal world, it should be, and so painted only the ideal aspects of it,” he once said.

Rockwell didn’t completely ignore the issues of the day. In 1943, inspired by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, he painted the Four Freedoms: Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want and Freedom from Fear. The paintings appeared on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post and proved incredibly popular. The paintings toured the United States and raised in excess of $130 million toward the war effort.

In 1953 the Rockwells moved to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where Norman would spend the rest of his life.

Following Mary’s death in 1959, Rockwell married a third time, to Molly Punderson, a retired teacher. With Molly’s encouragement, Rockwell ended his relationship with the Saturday Evening Post and began doing covers for Look magazine. His focus also changed, as he turned more of his attention to the social issues facing the country. Much of the work centered on themes concerning poverty, race and the Vietnam War.

In the final decade of his life, Rockwell created a trust to ensure his artistic legacy would thrive long after his passing. His work became the centerpiece of what is now called the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge.

In 1977—one year before his death—Rockwell was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Gerald Ford. In his speech Ford said, “Artist, illustrator and author, Norman Rockwell has portrayed the American scene with unrivaled freshness and clarity. Insight, optimism and good humor are the hallmarks of his artistic style. His vivid and affectionate portraits of our country and ourselves have become a beloved part of the American tradition.”

It is estimated he painted over 4,000 pieces of original art in his lifetime, along with thousands of test paintings.  Norman Rockwell died at his home in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, on November 8, 1978.

 

Watch This!

If you’ve ever been touched by Rockwell’s art, you must spend 46 minutes of your life with this beautifully produced show about his life at Biography.com

What’s New Einstein?

It’s hard to believe, but I flipped my calendar to January to book an appointment, and realized we’re closing in on the end of the decade – (just typing the numbers 2020 felt odd – something out of a sci-fi flick for sure).  It got me thinking about the amazing guys I get to work with here at KHT – the cast of “problem solvers” that come to work every day and tackle your PIA (Pain In the @%$) Jobs!  It’s a little stretch for me to call their work “decade worthy breakthroughs”, but I’ll be honest, some days the stuff they do truly amazes me – along with our beloved customers who trust us to solve their problems.  That said, I found this way-cool article from our friends at Smithsonian Magazine showcasing the “Top 20 Scientific Discoveries of the Decade” and just had to share.  I was surprised, and a bit disappointed, I did not find anything for life-saving drugs, fake beet juice burger meat or the latest IPA local brewery pub recipe – instead these are some real “biggies” – stuff you need to know about.  I chose a few of my favorites for this week’s post – for my information lovers and science geeks out there, here’s a link to the whole “Top 20” article HERE.

Detecting the First Gravitational Waves
In 1916, Albert Einstein proposed that when objects with enough mass accelerate, they can sometimes create waves that move through the fabric of space and time like ripples on a pond’s surface. Though Einstein later doubted their existence, these spacetime wrinkles—called gravitational waves—are a key prediction of relativity, and the search for them captivated researchers for decades. Though compelling hints of the waves first emerged in the 1970s, nobody directly detected them until 2015, when the U.S.-based observatory LIGO felt the aftershock of a distant collision between two black holes. The discovery, announced in 2016, opened up a new way to “hear” the cosmos.

In 2017, LIGO and the European observatory Virgo felt another set of tremors, this time made when two ultra-dense objects called neutron stars collided. Telescopes around the world saw the related explosion, making the event the first ever observed in both light and gravitational waves. The landmark data have given scientists an unprecedented look at how gravity works and how elements such as gold and silver form.


Shaking up the Human Family Tree
While primitive in some respects, the face, skull, and teeth show enough modern features to justify H. naledi’s placement in the genus Homo. Artist John Gurche spent some 700 hours reconstructing the head from bone scans, using bear fur for hair.  The decade has seen numerous advances in understanding our complex origin story, including new dates on known fossils, spectacularly complete fossil skulls, and the addition of multiple new branches. In 2010, National Geographic explorer-at-large Lee Berger unveiled a distant ancestor named Australopithecus sediba. Five years later, he announced that South Africa’s Cradle of Humankind cave system contained fossils of a new species: Homo naledi, a hominin whose “mosaic” anatomy resembles that of both modern humans and far more ancient cousins. A follow-up study also showed that H. naledi is surprisingly young, living at least between 236,000 and 335,000 years ago.


Revolutionizing the Study of Ancient DNA
As DNA sequencing technologies have improved exponentially, the past decade has seen huge leaps in understanding how our genetic past shapes modern humans. In 2010, researchers published the first near-complete genome from an ancient Homo sapiens, kicking off a revolutionary decade in the study of our ancestors’ DNA. Since then, more than 3,000 ancient genomes have been sequenced, including the DNA of Naia, a girl who died in what is now Mexico 13,000 years ago. Her remains are among the oldest intact human skeletons ever found in the Americas. Also in 2010, researchers announced the first draft of a Neanderthal genome, providing the first solid genetic evidence that one to four percent of all modern non-Africans’ DNA comes from these close relatives.


CRISPR
The 2010s marked huge advances in our ability to precisely edit DNA, in large part thanks to the identification of the Crispr-Cas9 system. Some bacteria naturally use Crispr-Cas9 as an immune system, since it lets them store snippets of viral DNA, recognize any future matching virus, and then cut the virus’s DNA to ribbons. In 2012, researchers proposed that Crispr-Cas9 could be used as a powerful genetic editing tool, since it precisely cuts DNA in ways that scientists can easily customize. Within months, other teams confirmed that the technique worked on human DNA. Ever since, labs all over the world have raced to identify similar systems, to modify Crispr-Cas9 to make it even more precise, and to experiment with its applications in agriculture and medicine.

While Crispr-Cas9’s possible benefits are huge, the ethical quandaries it poses are also staggering. To the horror of the global medical community, Chinese researcher He Jiankui announced in 2018 the birth of two girls whose genomes he had edited with Crispr, the first humans born with heritable edits to their DNA. The announcement sparked calls for a global moratorium on heritable “germline” edits in humans.


Making Interstellar Firsts
Future historians might look back on the 2010s as the interstellar decade: For the first time, our spacecraft punctured the veil between the sun and interstellar space, and we got our first visits from objects that formed around distant stars.  In August 2012, NASA’s Voyager 1 probe crossed the outer boundary of the heliosphere, the bubble of charged particles our sun gives off. Voyager 2 joined its twin in the interstellar medium in November 2018 and captured groundbreaking data along the way. But the interstellar road is a two-way street. In October 2017, astronomers found ‘Oumuamua, the first object ever detected that formed in another star system and passed through ours. In August 2019, amateur astronomer Gennady Borisov found the second such interstellar interloper, a highly active comet that now bears his name.


Opening doors to Ancient Civilizations
Archaeologists made many extraordinary discoveries in the 2010s. In 2013, British researchers finally found the body of King Richard III—beneath what’s now a parking lot. In 2014, researchers announced that Peru’s Castillo de Huarmey temple complex still had an untouched royal tomb. In 2016, archaeologists revealed the first Philistine cemetery, offering an unprecedented window into the lives of the Hebrew Bible’s most notorious, enigmatic people. The following year, researchers announced that Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre dates back more than 1,700 years to Rome’s first Christian emperor, appearing to confirm that it’s built on the site identified by Rome as the burial place of Christ. And in 2018, teams working in Peru announced the largest mass child sacrifice site ever uncovered, while other scientists scouring Guatemala detected more than 60,000 newly identified ancient Maya buildings with airborne lasers.


Changing the Course of Disease
In response to the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, public health officials and the pharmaceutical company Merck fast-tracked rVSV-ZEBOV, an experimental Ebola vaccine. After a highly successful field trial in 2015, European officials approved the vaccine in 2019—a milestone in the fight against the deadly disease. Several landmark studies also opened new avenues to preventing the spread of HIV. A 2011 trial showed that preventatively taking antiretroviral drugs greatly reduced the spread of HIV among heterosexual couples, a finding confirmed in follow-up studies that included same-sex couples.


Pushing Reproductive Limits
In 2016, clinicians announced the birth of a “three-parent baby” grown from the father’s sperm, the mother’s cell nucleus, and a third donor’s egg that had its nucleus removed. The therapy—which remains ethically controversial—aims to correct for disorders in the mother’s mitochondria. One 2018 study made precursors of human sperm or eggs out of reprogrammed skin and blood cells, while another showed that gene editing could let two same-sex mice conceive pups. And in 2018, Chinese scientists announced the birth of two cloned macaques, the first time that a primate had ever been cloned like Dolly the sheep. Though researchers avow that the technique won’t be used on humans, it’s possible that it could work with other primates, including us.


Discovering—and Rediscovering—Species
Modern biologists are identifying new species at a blistering pace, naming 18,000 new species a year on average. In the past decade, scientists described several charismatic mammal species for the first time, such as the Myanmar snub-nosed monkey, the Vangunu giant rat, and the olinguito, the first newfound carnivore in the Western Hemisphere since the late 1970s. The ranks of other animals groups also swelled, as scientists described newfound fish with “hands,” tiny frogs smaller than a dime, a giant Florida salamander, and many others. In addition, some animals, such as Vietnam’s saola and China’s Ili pika, were spotted once again after having gone missing for years.


Redefining the Units of Science
To understand the natural world, scientists must measure it—but how do we define our units? Over the decades, scientists have gradually redefined classic units in terms of universal constants, such as using the speed of light to help define the length of a meter. But the scientific unit of mass, the kilogram, remained pegged to “Le Grand K,” a metallic cylinder stored at a facility in France. If that ingot’s mass varied for whatever reason, scientists would have to recalibrate their instruments. No more: In 2019, scientists agreed to adopt a new kilogram definition based on a fundamental factor in physics called Planck’s constant and the improved definitions for the units of electrical current, temperature, and the number of particles in a given substance. For the first time ever, all our scientific units now stem from universal constants—ensuring a more accurate era of measurement.

You can nerd-out the nerdiest of your friends with this cool Planck’s Constant t-shirt! Get it HERE. Also makes for a darn nice Christmas gift for that special geek in your life. 
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Run, Run, As Fast As You Can – You Can’t Catch Me, I’m the ____!

 

What to listen to while you’re reading this week’s post:

  1. The Gingerbread Man, A Song for Children
  2. Gingerbread Man by Melanie Martinez – (Official Audio)
  3. The Gingerbread Man Song (From a scratchy 78 rpm record.)

 

Now that Thanksgiving is over, (and you’ve eaten the last piece of leftover pie, turkey, stuffing, gravy, cranberry sauce et.), and you survived Black Friday and Cyberweek, it’s time to turn our attention to more goodies – Christmas cookies.  Now I do have a few (actually many) favorites, but for me nothing says “the holidays are here” quite like gingerbread and gingerbread cookies – (ok, I’ll admit it – I love almost all the cookies!!).  There’s something special about the aroma filling the house of gingerbread cooking in the oven.  Occasionally Jackie tolerates my decorating expertise, but only for a little while, and then it goes back to the female masters in my life. I am normally able to decorate a single cookie!  Someday I will share my special cookie decorating talent.  I did some digging, and found this great PBS article, (special thanks to ToniAvey.com) along with some tidbits found on the internet.  Enjoy, and be sure to try the recipe below (and then box some up and send them to me at KHT HQ). My team is always willing to try new things!

 

  • No confection symbolizes the holidays quite like gingerbread in its many forms, from edible houses to candy-studded gingerbread men to spiced loaves of cake-like bread.
  •  In Medieval England, the term gingerbread simply meant preserved ginger and wasn’t applied to the desserts we are familiar with until the 15th century. The term is now broadly used to describe any type of sweet treat that combines ginger with honey, treacle or molasses.
  •  Ginger root was first cultivated in ancient China, where it was commonly used as a medical treatment. From there it spread to Europe via the Silk Road. During the Middle Ages it was favored as a spice for its ability to disguise the taste of preserved meats. Henry VIII is said to have used a ginger concoction in hopes of building a resistance to the plague. Even today we use ginger as an effective remedy for nausea and other stomach ailments. In Sanskrit the root was known as srigavera, which translates to “root shaped like a horn” a fitting name for ginger’s unusual appearance.
  •  According to Rhonda Massingham Hart’s Making Gingerbread Houses, the first known recipe for gingerbread came from Greece in 2400 BC. Chinese recipes were developed during the 10th century and by the late Middle Ages, Europeans had their own version of gingerbread. The hard cookies, sometimes gilded with gold leaf and shaped like animals, kings and queens, were a staple at Medieval fairs in England, France, Holland and Germany.
  •  Queen Elizabeth I is credited with the idea of decorating the cookies in this fashion, after she had some made to resemble the dignitaries visiting her court. Over time some of these festivals came to be known as Gingerbread Fairs, and the gingerbread cookies served there were known as ‘fairings’.  The shapes of the gingerbread changed with the season, including flowers in the spring and birds in the fall.
  •  Elaborately decorated gingerbread became synonymous with all things fancy and elegant in England. The gold leaf that was often used to decorate gingerbread cookies led to the popular expression “to take the gilt off of gingerbread.”  The carved, white architectural details found on many colonial American seaside homes is sometimes referred to as gingerbread work.
  •  Gingerbread houses originated in Germany during the 16th century. The elaborate cookie-walled houses, decorated with foil in addition to gold leaf, became associated with Christmas tradition. Their popularity rose when the Brothers Grimm wrote the story of Hansel and Gretel, in which the main characters stumble upon a house made entirely of treats deep in the forest. It is unclear whether or not gingerbread houses were a result of the popular fairy tale, or vice versa.
  • Most gingerbread men share a roughly humanoid shape, with stubby feet and no fingers. Many gingerbread men have a face, though whether the features are indentations within the face itself or other candies stuck on with icing or chocolate varies from recipe to recipe. Other decorations are common; hair, shirt cuffs, and shoes are sometimes applied, but by far the most popular decoration is shirt buttons, which are traditionally represented by gum drops, icing, or raisins.
  • According to the Guinness Book of Records, the world’s largest gingerbread man was made by the staff of the IKEA Furuset store in Oslo, Norway, on 9 November 2009. The gingerbread man weighed 1,435.2 pounds. See it HERE.
  •  The newest “largest” winning gingerbread house, spanning nearly 40,000 cubic feet, was erected at Traditions Golf Club in Bryan, Texas. The house required a building permit and was built much like a traditional house. 4,000 gingerbread bricks were used during its construction. To put that in perspective, a recipe for a house this size would include 1,800 pounds of butter and 1,080 ounces of ground ginger. Sounds more like a gingerbread resort! See it HERE.
  •  Gingerbread arrived in the New World with English colonists. The cookies were sometimes used to sway Virginia voters to favor one candidate over another. The first American cookbook, American Cookery by Amelia Simmons, has recipes for three types of gingerbread including the soft variety baked in loaves.
  •  This softer version of gingerbread was more common in America. George Washington’s mother, Mary Ball Washington, served her recipe for gingerbread to the Marquis de Lafayette when he visited her Fredericksburg, Virginia home. Since then it was known as Gingerbread Lafayette. The confection was passed down through generations of Washington’s.

Gingerbread Cookies Recipe
You will need: medium saucepan, large mixing bowl, sifter, wax or parchment paper, rolling pin, cookie cutter(s) of your choice, baking sheet, nonstick cooking spray or silicone baking sheet.

  • ¾ cup unsulphured molasses
  • ¾ cup butter
  • ¾ cup dark brown sugar
  • 4 ½ cups flour, plus more for rolling surface
  • 1 tsp baking powder
  • 1 tsp salt
  • ½ tsp baking soda
  • 3 ½ tsp ground ginger
  • 2 tsp cinnamon
  • 1 egg, lightly beaten
  • Royal icing (optional)
  • Sprinkles, cinnamon candies, or any other decorations of your choice (optional)

In a medium saucepan, heat the molasses to the simmering point. Remove from the heat and stir in the butter until it melts. Stir in the brown sugar. Allow to cool.  In a large mixing bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, salt, baking soda, ginger and cinnamon. Add the cooled molasses and the egg to the flour mixture and mix very well until a dough forms. You may need to use your hands to really incorporate the wet mixture into the dry mixture.  Wrap dough in wax or parchment paper and chill for 1-2 hours, or until firm enough to roll.  Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Transfer chilled dough to a lightly floured rolling surface and roll out the dough to one-quarter inch thickness. Roll out a quarter of the dough at a time.  Cut cookies with your choice of cookie cutter. I chose a traditional gingerbread man, but you can get creative with any kind of cookie cutter you’d like.  Transfer cut dough to a baking sheet that has been lightly greased with nonstick cooking spray or lined with a silicone baking sheet. Bake at 350 degrees F for 12-15 minutes. The cookies will puff up but won’t spread much.  Cool completely on a rack before decorating with royal icing, decorative sprinkles and candies.