Interesting Shares

A Big Cosmological Mystery

Discovery of a second ultra-large structure in distant space further challenges what we understand about the universe.

Once, drug dealers and money launderers saw cryptocurrency as perfectly untraceable.

Although RSS feeds are alive and still heavily used today, their level of adoption has suffered because of how difficult a handful of popular technology companies have made it to use them. Google, especially, has relied on the open web RSS protocol to gain so much market share and influence, but continues to engage in behavior that exploits the open web at the expense of its users. As a result, Google has single-handedly contributed to the reason many users who once relied on RSS feeds have stopped using them.

Before the 2024 Oklahoma legislative sessions begin, thousands of bills will be filed and most will never come close to becoming law.

One Oklahoma lawmaker, Rep. Justin Humphrey, R-Lane, decided to file a bill targeting "furries," or people in a subculture interested in anthropomorphic animal characters, in Oklahoma schools.

A Spanish streaming star bought an apartment building, but couldn't get rid of the last stubborn tennant, an 80-year-old woman.

The needless controversy surrounding the Tamil film Annapoorani, which was removed by Netflix, could have been avoided had the 'upper' caste people outraged over a dialogue actually read the very text they were seeking to defend.

Another needless controversy over culture and food, provoked, as usual, by Hindutva hot-heads has broken out. This time it’s over the recent Tamil film Annapoorani, starring the actors Nayanthara, Jai and Sathyaraj, directed by Nilesh Krishnaa.

The film’s story is interesting.

A Brahmin girl (Annapoorani, played by Nayanthara) dreams of being a chef. She enrols secretly (so as to avoid the disapproval of her strict vegetarian father, also a temple cook) in a hotel management course to learn how to cook gourmet food. There, she faces the dilemma of having to cook meat dishes. Her friend, a Muslim man (Farhan, played by Jai), convinces her that there is nothing necessarily wrong in cooking meat by citing a verse from Valmiki’s Ramayan, in Sanskrit, which features Ram and Lakshman hunting animals and cooking meat to assuage their hunger.

This exchange has Hindu zealots up in arms. Because some delicate ‘upper’ caste Hindu vegetarian sensibilities have been injured by the mere idea that Rama could be spoken of as eating meat, and that too at the time when the ‘pranpratishtha’ (life establishment) ritual around the idol of Ram in the new temple at Ayodhya is about to take place. Matters are further complicated by the fact that this occurs in the context of the film depicting a friendship between a Hindu woman and a Muslim man.

So, not just the question of culinary blasphemy, but also the civilisational catastrophe of ‘love jihad’ is invoked. Police complaints against the filmmakers have been filed in Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra. And now Netflix, the OTT platform where the film was being screened, has decided to remove the film. Zee Studios, the producers of the film, have offered an ‘apology’, needlessly, for having ‘hurt Hindu sentiments’.

The question is we need to ask is: Can Ram, Lakshman and Sita eat meat? Can we even think such a thought?

read more: https://thewire.in/religion/like-it-or-not-ram-did-eat-meat-in-the-ramayan

Incident involving Shchenki singer Maxim Tesli follows imprisonment of rapper Vacio for doing same at Moscow party

Katy Waldman is one of my favorite critics around. This piece is both insightful and beautifully written.

In week 2 of Rhik Samadder’s detox, he hopes to change his behavior by tracking it. Can he detach himself from his most intimate possession?

Famous, beautiful people love face yoga. But what is it and does it actually do anything?

ADDIS ABABA — World renowned Ethiopian-born chef Marcus Samuelsson has opened his first Africa-based restaurant in the capital Addis Ababa to showcase fusion cuisine inspired by his unique upbringing.

The location of the eatery, which opened last month, is emblematic of the heights reached by the chef since leaving Ethiopia as a child — it’s on the 47th floor of the nation’s tallest building, the headquarters of the Ethiopian Commercial Bank.

Samuelsson is now an internationally acclaimed chef, but his early years were shaped by unrest. His life as a toddler in Ethiopia was disrupted by the 1974 Ethiopian civil war that paved the way for the communist rule of Colonel Mengistu Hailemariam.

The chef, who turns 53 later this month, lost his mother during the conflict and was separated from the rest of his family to be adopted by a Swedish couple soon after and grew up in Gothenburg, Sweden. He moved to New York at 23 to work as a sous chef and swiftly worked his way up to become one of the youngest chefs to ever earn a coveted three-star review from the New York Times.

The new restaurant, named Marcus Addis, features delicacies from all over the world but its menu is designed to retain a traditional Ethiopia flavor that brings out Samuelsson’s global culinary experience.

“I am proud of my Ethiopian roots,” Samuelsson told Semafor Africa. “I want my new restaurant in Addis Ababa to be a vehicle for job creation, capacity building, a training hub that works for — not against — traditional local Ethiopian restaurants.”

The celebrity chef has a growing list of fine-dining restaurants in Montreal, London, New York and his signature eatery – Red Rooster – in Harlem. As for now, Samuelsson is determined to make his restaurant in Ethiopia the signature act of his homecoming.

The dishes are all influenced by his Ethiopian and Swedish background, combined with his adult life in New York. They include his favorite local dish Kitfo — a minced meat full of spices complemented by Ethiopian herb butter which he calls “the ultimate celebration dish of Ethiopia — and fried chicken with a side of Doro Wot, Ethiopian traditional chicken stew and the cuisine of Sweden.

To Samuelsson, the opening of a modern restaurant in Addis Ababa has been in the making for almost a decade, anchored by his dream of a memorable homecoming. To pay homage to Ethiopian culture, the restaurant has teamed up with a number of Ethiopian designers, including Anna Getaneh, a former international model.

“I want my cuisine to be delicious and to be rooted in modern-day Ethiopia,” said Samuelsson.

read more: https://www.semafor.com/article/01/07/2024/ethiopia-marcus-samuelsson-opens-addis-restaurant

Swearwords increasingly used for emphasis and to build social bonds, rather than to insult, say academics

Failatu Abdul-Razak is being cheered on and widely celebrated in west African country

Scientists have discovered that watching everyday mother-infant interactions can trigger similar brain activity patterns across different mothers. This neural synchrony, observed particularly in contexts showcasing mother-child bonding, highlights the profound impact of such primary attachments on our brains. The study, published in The Journal of Neuroscience, sheds new light on the neural underpinnings of human social connections.

Only two artworks fetched prices exceeding $100 million (€91.1 million) in 2023, in contrast to the six works that achieved this milestone in the previous year.

City streets are the testing ground for hundreds of self-driving cars in California, despite safety concerns and gray areas surrounding traffic laws.

Readers here shouldn’t need to be reminded that the Tolkien Estate, through its company Middle-Earth Enterprises, is known to be extremely aggressive with its enforcement of intellectual property over anything remotely to do with The Lord of the Rings. The estate appears to operate under the notion that it has control over words via trademark law that it absolutely does not. And, where it does have those rights, it enforces them in draconian ways.

Cameras capture 120 tigers in year to April 2023, but extinction risk remains in neighbouring countries

Researchers have developed a new, lightweight foam made from carbon nanotubes that, when used as a helmet liner, absorbed the kinetic energy caused by an impact almost 30 times better than liners currently used in US military helmets. The foam could prevent or significantly reduce the likelihood of concussion in military personnel and sportspeople.

Here we are again, at the end of another impossibly long, intense, and exhausting year of reporting the news that matters from the grassroots level. As we try to do with all our reporting, we have taken you to the front lines of struggle, publishing unique, thoughtful, principled, and in-depth video, text, and audio reports. And today, as we’ve done in the past, we want to take a moment here on the Real News podcast to reflect on the great work we’ve done with our audio reporting this year… from a hate church in Spokane, Washington, to the farming fields of rural Brazil, from Teamsters UPS rallies in Boston to worker-led protests at the Game Awards in LA, from Gaza to Austin, Texas, we have produced an incredible amount of audio-only reporting for our Real News listeners this year, and we’ve got a lot more coming in 2024.

Bjartmar Leósson says at first he was motivated by his anger at Reykjavík’s bike thieves. Now he empathises with them