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Food Life Recipe Reprints from other. Uncategorized

Arkansas Green Beans Recipe.

Visits: 7

Arkansas Green Beans Recipe.

Ditch your ordinary green bean recipes and try this incredible Arkansas Green Beans recipe instead! Featuring bacon and a savory sauce, this dish takes an old classic to a new level. It’s the perfect recipe for potlucks, holidays, parties, or family dinner! It’s sure to become your new go-to side dish.

Prep Time10 minutes 
Cook Time30 minutes 
Total Time40 minutes 
Course: Side Dish
Cuisine: American

 

Servings: 10

Ingredients

  • 5 (15 oz.) cans green beans, drained or 4 (16 oz.) bags frozen
  • 12 slices bacon fried and chopped
  • 2/3 C. brown sugar
  • 1/4 C. butter melted
  • 7 t. soy sauce
  • 1 1/2 t. garlic powder

Instructions

  • Preheat oven to 350°. Layer the green beans and bacon on the bottom of a 9″ x 13″ baking dish.
  • Mix together the brown sugar, butter, soy sauce, and garlic powder. Stir well.
  • Pour the brown sugar mixture over the bacon and green beans. Bake for 30 minutes at 350°. Alternatively, you can cook this in a slow cooker set to low heat for 5 to 6 hours.
  • Serve with a slotted spoon and enjoy!

Notes

Tip: Not a fan of canned green beans? No problem! Easily substitute 4 (16 oz.) bags of frozen green beans.

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Life Links from other sources. Music Reprints from other.

Raspberries Frontman, ‘All By Myself’ Singer, Eric Carmen Dead at 74.

Visits: 28

Raspberries Frontman, ‘All By Myself’ Singer, Eric Carmen Dead at 74.

Singer Eric Carmen, who was first known in the early 1970s as the frontman of the Raspberries, and later achieved solo success with hits like “All By Myself” and “Hungry Eyes,” has died at the age of 74.

“It is with tremendous sadness that we share the heartbreaking news of the passing of Eric Carmen,” the singer’s wife, Amy Carmen, wrote on his website. “Our sweet, loving and talented Eric passed away in his sleep, over the weekend.”

“It brought him great joy to know, that for decades, his music touched so many and will be his lasting legacy,” she added. “Please respect the family’s privacy as we mourn our enormous loss.”

 

 

Carmen’s wife concluded with “Love Is All That Matters…Faithful and Forever,” a callback to her husband’s song, “Love Is All That Matters,” from his 1977 solo album “Boats Against the Current.”

The singer’s cause of death and exact date of death has not yet been revealed.

In his early years, Carmen — who was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio — had his first big hit, “Go All the Way,” with the Raspberries after the band signed its first recording contract in 1971 with Capitol Records.

The song reached No. 5 on the Billboard singles charts.

Listen Below:

“Critics hailed the band’s unique twist on Beatlesque power-pop, citing Carmen as a pop visionary,” Cleveland.com reported.

“Bruce Springsteen and Courtney Love both are fans of the band’s music. Kiss, Cheap Trick, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and Guns N’ Roses cite them as an influence,” the outlet added.

The Raspberries had a few more hits after that, such as “I Wanna Be With You” and “Let’s Pretend,” before eventually breaking up in 1975.

 

 

But others may say that Carmen achieved greater success as a solo artist, with hits like, “All by Myself,” “Almost Paradise (Love Theme From Footloose),” and “Hungry Eyes,” among others.

Listen Below:

Notably, singer Celine Dion covered “All by Myself” on her 1996 album, “Falling Into You.”

While attending college at John Carroll University in the late 1960s, Carmen joined a band called Cyrus Erie, whose guitarist, Wally Bryson, had been playing with Jim Bonfanti and Dave Smalley in one of Cleveland’s most popular bands, the Choir, which scored a national hit in 1967 with the song, “It’s Cold Outside.”

After Cyrus Erie and the Choir ended, Carmen, Bryson, Bonfanti, and Smalley got together and created the Raspberries.

 

 

Carmen’s first solo album in 1975 had three Top 40 singles. The singer went on to release another three solo albums, achieving one more hit in 1978, “Change of Heart.” In 1984, his song, “Almost Paradise,” reached No. 7 on the Billboard charts after it was covered by Mike Reno and Ann Wilson for the film, Footloose.

In 1987, Carmen reached No. 4 with his song, “Hungry Eyes,” which he had written for the film, Dirty Dancing. The singer made it to the Top 40 carts again a year later, with his song, “Make Me Lose Control,” which peaked at No. 3.

Carmen lived in Los Angeles for a time, but eventually moved back to Cleveland in the mid-1990s, “and basically went quiet for several years,” Cleveland.com reported.

 

 

At the end of 2004, the Raspberries got back together, and the band played a few shows in Cleveland, before performing eight concerts around the United States in 2005.

In 2014, the movie Guardians of the Galaxy gave the Raspberries another moment in the spotlight when it included “Go All The Way” in the film’s soundtrack.

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Return Of An Icon — The 2024 Chevelle 70/SS Is Here.

Visits: 27

Return Of An Icon — The 2024 Chevelle 70/SS Is Here. An old article, but still very cool.

B

The idea of bringing back an iconic name in the automotive industry always conjures images of grandeur. Renderings run rampant with modern twists, updated drivetrains, and state-of-the-art suspension. When discussing the titans of the muscle-car era, I think most would agree that the 1970 Chevrolet Chevelle SS is right in the thick of it, in terms of iconic cars that changed the way we looked at motorized transportation. Sadly, the Chevelle name has been gone for 45 years now. But, thanks to Trans Am Worldwide, the Chevelle is making a big return in 2024 as the 70/SS.

The 2024 70/SS is offered in a number of colors with numerous upgrades and options.

Knowing A Thing Or Two About Retro

Trans Am Worldwide currently builds, you guessed it, Trans Ams. However, they build their interpretation of what the Trans Am would be today had Pontiac not been shuttered by The General. To broaden their horizons, they have designed and built from the ground up, a car that they believe will live up to the Chevelle name. Badged as the 70/SS, Trans Am Worldwide took styling cues from the original 1970 model while at the same time putting their modern interpretations on it.

Starting with a new sixth-gen Camaro as the foundation, the designers completely changed every part of the exterior. The only untouched area was the windshield. As you can see, every body panel has been reshaped to pay homage to the classic ’70 Chevelle Super Sport. They even stretched the car’s rear with new quarter panels, deck lid, and bumper. The interior remains mostly Camaro. However, the 70/SS does receive retro-styled seats and carpet. The 70/SS badging and Hurst cue ball shift knob are also nice touches.

Almost nothing remains of the Camaro that serves as the foundation and starting point for the 70/SS. The windshield is the only exterior part that isn’t changed.

No Skimping On Power

If you are going to build a car to bring back the Chevelle, it had better not be short on horsepower. The 70/SS does an excellent job in this department. You can order the car with one of three powerplant options. The base engine is the 450-horsepower LT1 that comes in the Camaro. If you want more power and excitement, a 396 cubic-inch LT engine producing 900 horsepower can be installed. If you are anything like us and want to go all in, the 70/SS can be had with a 454 cubic-inch LS6/X packing twin turbochargers. The top-tier offering makes a tire-frying 1,500 horsepower.

The 70/SS can be ordered with a supercharged LT engine making 900 horsepower or even a twin-turbo 454 cubic-inch LS6/X that produces 1500 horsepower. Manual transmissions are also an option.

The 70/SS is offered in both manual and automatic transmission versions, and there are suspension upgrades as well. Just check the box for the optional removable hard top for those wanting the look of a coupe. Eight heritage colors are available, as well as ten modern metallic and pearl hues to choose from. You can even pick your own custom color if that’s your thing. Additional options include wheel and tire packages, custom graphics, exposed carbon fiber, and brake upgrades.

Wheel and tire packages and brake upgrades are just a couple of the myriad of options to choose from when ordering your own 70/SS.

We can’t wait to see the 70/SS in the real world pounding the streets. If you’re interested in ordering one, you might want to hurry, as there will only be 25 examples of the 70/SS with the LS6/X engine package produced.

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Full-Time Thrifter Encourages Secondhand Shopping by Posting Local Treasures on Social Media.

Visits: 23

Full-Time Thrifter Encourages Secondhand Shopping by Posting Local Treasures on Social Media. This article is about a person who thrifts full time. For my wife and I , it’s a chance to give back and find items we use in our decorations. So please read and enjoy another persons take on thrifting.

Thrifting is an increasingly popular way to shop (and a great way to spend an afternoon), but what if we told you it could be a full-time job?

At least it is for Ambie Hay, who goes by “Palm Beach Thrifters” on social media. When she’s out and about in Palm Beach County, Florida, scouting for her clients, Hay follows their wishlists to find what they’re seeking. And when she comes across incredible antiques and vintage pieces that aren’t on the list, she posts them to her Instagram page, where she shares thrift items and their locations with her 196,000 followers from all over the world.

AMBIE HAY/FACEBOOK

Her goal is simple: to promote secondhand shopping by encouraging people to check out local thrift stores.

“Thrifting is such a blast, but it really takes a lot of time, and a lot of people are working or they have children at home,” Hay, 61, told Nice News. “That’s where I got the idea that well, at least I could post because I’m out there anyway.”

Hay, who worked in retail for 25 years, closed her own design boutiques to pursue her passion for thrifting and become a full-time reseller. Around five years ago, she started an Instagram account “to show others and to help the thrift shops because they’ve helped me so much.”

“I found so many beautiful things in these stores, and I know how hard the volunteers work, and the thrift shops are always affiliated with charities,” she added. “And I thought, how can I give back to my followers? How can I give back to the thrift shops?”

AMBIE HAY/FACEBOOK

She’s been able to give back to her local shops by featuring vintage treasures on her account, offering the publicity and exposure they might not have otherwise had. “One of the [thrift stores] the other day said, ‘Oh my gosh, we had a group of women down from Tennessee, and they came in because you mentioned our thrift shop,’” she recalled.

For Hay, who’s originally from Kentucky, thrifting runs in the family. Her interest in it began when her mom would take her to Goodwill as a child, and she now thrifts with her nieces and nephews.

“I really love seeing that the younger generation now is embracing vintage pieces and secondhand shopping. I think it’s just fantastic,” said Hay. “I can see that it’s getting bigger and bigger.”

While the resale industry in the United States is slowly increasing — the number of businesses has grown by an average of 3.5% per year on average since 2018 — Americans still throw away more than 34 billion pounds of used textiles each year.

AMBIE HAY/FACEBOOK

But people like Hay are helping to reduce waste by turning consumers away from fast fashion and its detrimental impact on the environment.

And she’s starting ’em young: Hay wants to teach children about the importance of thrifting with her children’s book, published in 2021, focused on “the importance of recycling.”
As per her website: “Thrifting is proof positive you can earn money, save money, give back, and have fun all at the same time! … Thrifting is not a trend, it’s the future!”

 

Here’s my sweet boy Sailor, who inspired our Children’s book “Nifty the Thrifter.” He’s 17 and still loves to go thrift shopping!! My talented niece Madeleine @madeleine.hay.art brought this book to life with her colorful and whimsical illustrations! I’m so excited to share our book with you! 💕
I hope it book brings joy to both children and adults and inspires everyone to go thrifting!! 🌴☀️🐶💜🌸🎉🌟💕🌿🌟💫💫💫

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Cheers to being crooked again. Quirky English pub bulldozed after a fire to be rebuilt as it was.

Visits: 10

Cheers to being crooked again. Quirky English pub bulldozed after a fire to be rebuilt as it was.

The owners of a quirky 18th century British pub unlawfully bulldozed after a mysterious fire last year were ordered on Tuesday by a local council to rebuild it — and to stick to its original, lopsided dimensions.

The watering hole — known as the Crooked House for its leaning walls and tilting foundation — favored by many locals in the village of Himley, central England, was gutted by a fire and subsequently demolished last August.

Its demise saddened many in the village, about 210 kilometers (130 miles) northwest of London, and became the subject of a criminal investigation. Three people were arrested and later released on bail in connection with the blaze but no one was charged.

In a statement, the South Staffordshire Council said it had “engaged with the owners” and now ordered the pub rebuilt “back to what it was prior to the fire” by February 2027 or face prosecution for failing to comply. The notice was served on owners, Adam and Carly Taylor and the company secretary of ATE Farms, which bought the inn. They have 30 days to appeal the notice.

The fire took place two weeks after the pub was sold by operator Marston’s. Two days later — and before a cause could be determined — the pub was bulldozed without authorization, which raised questions among local residents.

Roger Lees, the leader of the council, praised campaigners whose “aim is to see the Crooked House back to its former glory.” More than 35,000 people joined the ‘Save The Crooked House (Let’s Get It Re-Built)’ Facebook page.

“We have not taken this action lightly, but we believe that it is right to bring the owners, who demolished the building without consent, to account and we are committed to do what we can to get the Crooked House rebuilt,” Lees said.

Andy Street, the mayor of the wider West Midlands region who has supported the pub’s reconstruction, welcomed the decision in a post on X, formerly Twitter. “Fantastic work from South Staffordshire Council,” Street said.

The pub, originally built as a farmhouse in 1765, started sinking on one side as a result of extensive coal mining in the area, which is part of England’s region widely known as the Black Country, a reference to its industrial and mining heyday in the mid-19th century.

Around 1830, it became a pub and was called The Siden House — siden meaning crooked in the local dialect.

In the 1940s, it was renamed the Glynne Arms but was condemned as unsafe and scheduled for demolition until a forebear of Marston’s bought it and made it safe.

Renamed as The Crooked House, it became a tourist attraction, drawing visitors to admire its odd structure, one side standing about 1.2 meters (4 feet) lower than the other.

Now, there is only three years to go until the pub rises again and thirsty regulars can sip a beer — or two.

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Food Links from other sources. Recipe Reprints from other.

Almond Cookie Bars with Coconut.

Visits: 12

Almond Cookie Bars with Coconut.

HOW TO MAKE COOKIE BARS WITH ALMOND FLOUR

This buttery cookie is made much like shortbread. Except we are using almond flour instead of all-purpose flour. Bob’s Red Mill Super-Fine Almond Flour is my favorite {not sponsored, just a big fan}.

Baking with almond flour is very common in gluten free baking. You use it much like regular flour, but the two can’t usually be swapped for one another without making additional recipe changes. Almond flour is made of finely ground almonds so it reacts differently from regular flour made of wheat.

a look at the chewy inside texture of almond cookie bars

Remember to pin this recipe to Pinterest! Use the button on the recipe card or the share buttons on the side or bottom of this page.

INGREDIENTS FOR THIS GLUTEN FREE RECIPE

ingredients for almond cookie bars with coconut
  • Almond flour ~ I used Bob’s Red Mill Super-Fine Almond Flour
  • Confectioners’ sugar ~ adds softness and some sweetness
  • Kosher salt ~ if using table salt, use a little less
  • Coconut ~ use flaked or shredded, the kind that looks like shredded cheese. If you don’t want long strands in the cookie bars, give it a little chop before adding to the recipe.
  • Unsalted butter ~ because this is a shortbread like base, I recommend a good quality European butter such as Plugra or Kerrygold.
  • Chocolate ~ I used a chopped milk chocolate bar {I always have Trader Joe’s Pound Plus bars in my baking cabinet}, but you could use chocolate chips and dark chocolate, if preferred.
  • Almonds ~ dry roasted almonds were chopped for the topping, but you could also use sliced or slivered almonds.
HOW TO MAKE ALMOND COOKIE BARS WITH COCONUT AND CHOCOLATE

Start by preparing an 8×8 baking pan with parchment paper. This is the USA Pan that I use and love.

Then add the almond flour, confectioners’ sugar, coconut and kosher salt in a bowl and mix to combine. I use my pastry cutter for this {less dishes to wash!}. Next add the unsalted butter and use a pastry cutter or fork to cut the butter into the dry ingredients until a soft dough forms.

Now press the cookie dough evenly into the prepared baking pan. Bake for 12 minutes, until the edges are set and lightly browned. Remember your oven is different than mine and our baking times might be slightly different.

unbaked buttery almond flour base in baking pan

When the cookie is baked, remove it from the oven and immediately sprinkle the chocolate over the hot bars. Allow it to sit for three minutes, then use an off-set spatula to smooth the melted chocolate over the almond cookie.

Sprinkle coconut and chopped almonds over the top of the melted chocolate. Then use clean hands to lightly press the coconut and almonds in to the melted chocolate.

Now comes the hard part, waiting for them to cool! It takes about an hour for the cookies to be cool enough to slice them into bars without them falling apart. You can speed this process up by placing the pan in the refrigerator once it is cool enough to handle with bare hands.

overhead look at cut cookie bars on a parchment lined cutting board

WHY YOU WILL LOVE THIS COOKIE BAR RECIPE

  • It’s EASY! Active time is 10-15 minutes.
  • No chill time.
  • Uses cold butter.
  • Creates soft and chewy almond cookie bars, with almond joy like flavors.
  • A great cookie bar for those needing a dessert without flour.
cookie bars with a bite out of it and bowl of coconut in the background
Just look at that soft and chewy texture!

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Labradoodle Who Loves Ambushing His Owners Wins Pet of the Week

Visits: 32

Labradoodle Who Loves Ambushing His Owners Wins Pet of the Week.

From a dog who responds to Harry Potter spells to a cat’s adorable greeting for its owner every morning, we’ve seen a series of fun viral pet stories this week. But alongside Internet-famous pets, we’ve been enjoying seeing our readers’ cats, dogs, and other pets submitted for our weekly Pet of the Week.

If you want your pet to be part of next week’s Pet of the Week line-up, be sure to follow the instructions at the end of this story to get involved.

Squirrel the dog
Pictures of 4-year-old Squirrel the dog who loves to jump out on his owners and canine friends. Archi Lamont

This week’s Pet of the Week is Squirrel, a Labradoodle who loves to ambush her owners and fellow canine friends.

From Perth, Scotland, Squirrel was named so because of her resemblance to a squirrel when she was just 8 weeks old.

Now almost five years old, she has a gentle nature and a serious love of playtime.

“[She] loves to hide from us and surprise us by leaping out,” owner Archi Lamont told Newsweek. “I assumed we were the target on the beach but she had targeted other victims, who were, fortunately, very tolerant of her behavior.”

When she isn’t causing mischief at the beach, she loves toys, especially her comfort teddy bear that she has had since she was a puppy.

“Her best feature is her gentle nature, but the lack of cast hair and minimal doggy smell is a bonus,” said Lamont.

Finalists

Max the dog
Pictures of Max and his loving owner Michael. Michael Garcia

Our first finalist this week is Max, a shelter dog who came from an abusive home with anxiety and PTSD.

Now living in Colorado with owner Michael Garcia, he is living his best life with an owner who truly understands him.

Almost four years old, he and his owner have an extra special bond and are barely ever apart.

London and Sunny
Best friends London and Sunny pose for the camera. Misty Donaldson

Next up this week are London and Sunny, rescue dogs aged four and three.

“They are the sweetest babies ever,” said owner Misty Donaldson.

“I’ve been around a lot of dogs,” she said. “But I’ve never seen two dogs that have to be constantly touching like these two.”

Despite not being siblings by blood, Donaldson says that their touching love for each other is a huge source of joy.

Ollie the cat
Ollie the cat relaxing on the grass in the sunshine. Emily Robinson

Last but not least is Ollie the cat. Just 18 months ago, Ollie and his friend showed up on Emily Robinson’s porch in Michigan.

“His friend Billy was not very friendly, but Ollie was very clingy. He wanted so much love. My husband and I would feed both boys,” Robinson told Newsweek. “We noticed that Ollie’s eye was very swollen and milky. We brought him in to take him to the vet.”

Ollie was diagnosed with glaucoma and the specialist vet told them he would need his eye removed.

“Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to afford it so we put eye drops in and are doing our best to save up,” she said.

Since the trip to the vet, Ollie hasn’t left their side, staying in the house ever since.

And Billy is always nearby too, with his own insulated and heated home on the deck outside.

“They chose us, and we couldn’t be happier,” said the loving owner.

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A teacher brought a kid’s ripped coat home to fix. His daughter slipped a note in the pocket.

Visits: 48

A teacher brought a kid’s ripped coat home to fix. His daughter slipped a note in the pocket. “My student was grinning when he showed me the note. He kept looking at it in class and smiling…”

 

An eighth grade science teacher in Illinois is warming hearts with a story about a winter jacket.

“I asked one of my students who is very poor to give me his torn coat so I could bring it home for my daughter to sew,” the teacher, who wishes to remain anonymous, shared on Reddit. “He came to class and showed me that he found this in the pocket.”

A teacher asked his daughter to mend a student's coat. This is the note she slipped into one of the pockets.
A teacher asked his daughter to mend a student’s coat. This is the note she slipped into one of the pockets. Courtesy Jay

It was a note from the teacher’s 17-year-old daughter, Brianna.

“Hey child, it is me, the magical coat fixer. Hope it holds up and please send it back if it doesn’t. Sorry I couldn’t make it as invisible as I hoped, but I did my best,” Brianna wrote. “Also since you’re in 8th grade (I think — I’m not 100% sure what grade my dad teaches) I thought you could use some 11th grade advice.

“MIDDLE SCHOOL SUCKS. YOU’RE ALMOST FREE. YOU CAN MAKE IT,” she continued in all capital letters. “GOOD LUCK.”

“Brianna is an incredible kid. She does stuff like this all the time,” the teacher tells TODAY.com. “My student was grinning when he showed me the note. He kept looking at it in class and smiling, and I actually had to ask him to put it away so we could learn about digestion.”

The student was grateful for his mended coat and the note he found in a pocket.
The student was grateful for his mended coat and the note he found in a pocket.Courtesy Jay

Later that day, the boy handed the teacher a handmade greeting card to give to Brianna.

“Thank you for fixing my coat,” he wrote with a gold marker. “I really appreciate the letter you gave me. It means a lot because 8th do sucks.

“But all my of my teachers are great,” he added.

Much to the teacher’s surprise, his post about the coat went viral on Reddit. In the comments, one person summed up perfectly what made the interaction so meaningful:

“There are so many wonderful things about this. You thought to help out a kid in your class who didn’t have the resources to help themselves / they weren’t afraid or too proud to accept help when they need it / you know your child’s skills well enough to know they could help / not only did your kid go out of their way to help, they thought it might be nice to include a note, a word of wisdom, and a promise to keep helping in the future if needed / the kiddo who needed help recognized how special this note was and thought to share it with you / and now you share it with your internet friends!

“As others have said, you’re raising a good one! This was a wonderful internet moment to come across today, thank you.”

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Smokin’ Hot Smokies Recipe | Bacon-Wrapped Cocktail Sausages.

Visits: 24

Smokin’ Hot Smokies Recipe | Bacon-Wrapped Cocktail Sausages.

The year is full of occasions for gatherings; weddings, birthdays, anniversaries, sporting events, or even as just an excuse to have fun and socialize! And whether you’re a host or a guest, with these Smokin’ Hot Smokies, you’ll be the hit of the party!

Smokin’ Hot Smokies

Ingredients you will need:

  • 1 (14 oz) pkg. cocktail sausages
  • 14 to 15 bacon strips
  • 1½ cups brown sugar, divided
  • ½ tsp. five-spice powder
  • ¾ cup cola
  • Toothpicks

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Cut the bacon strips crosswise into three pieces. The Rada Stubby Butcher Knife is ideal for this.

Smokn_Hot_Smokies_010814.Still002

Wrap cut pieces of bacon around individual cocktail sausages.

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Insert a toothpick through the bacon-wrapped cocktail sausages, securing the ingredients together.

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Place the bacon-wrapped smokies in a greased 9 x 13 pan. Sprinkle with 3/4 cup brown sugar. Bake about 40 minutes or until sugar is bubbly.

Smokn_Hot_Smokies_010814.Still005

Remove pan from oven. Transfer smokies into a Crock-Pot or slow cooker, which need to be sprayed with nonstick coating.

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Add ¾ cup of brown sugar, ¾ cup of cola, and ½ tsp. of five-spice powder to the smokies. Add hot sauce as desired to control the level of heat. Cover the Crock-Pot or slow cooker and set to high, allowing the smokies to cook for four hours.

Smokn_Hot_Smokies_010814.Still007

After cook time, remove from heat source and serve!

Smokin’ Hot Smokies

Whether you’re a host or a guest, with these Smokin’ Hot Smokies, you’ll be the hit of the party!
Prep Time10minutes 
Cook Time40minutes 
Total Time50minutes 
Course: Appetizer
Servings: 40

Ingredients

  • 1 (14 oz.) pkg. cocktail sausages
  • 14 to 15 strips bacon
  •  cups brown sugar, divided
  • ½ tsp. five-spice powder
  • ¾ cup cola
  • wooden toothpicks

Instructions

  • Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Spray a 9 x 13″ baking pan with nonstick cooking spray; set aside.
  • Cut each bcon strip crosswise into 3 even pieces.
  • Wrap cut pieces of bacon around individual cocktail sausages.
  • Insert a wooden toothpick through the bacon-wrapped cocktail sausage, securing the ingredients together.
  • Place the bacon-wrapped smokies in the baking pan and sprinkle with 3/4 cup brown sugar. Bake about 40 minutes or until sugar is bubbly.
  • Spray a 3-quart slow cooker with nonstick cooking spray.
  • Transfer sausages to prepared cooker. Sprinkle with remaining 3/4 cup brown sugar and five-spice powder. Drizzle with cola and hot sauce.
  • Cover and cook on high for 4 hours.

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Coca-Cola Chicken Wings Recipe.

Visits: 21

Coca-Cola Chicken Wings Recipe.

From game day to movie night, there’s no beating delicious fried chicken wings as an appetizer or snack. This garlicky chicken wings recipe brings restaurant-quality wings to your kitchen, living room, or backyard barbecue! Eat them during the Super Bowl, share them with friends, or bring them to a party to be the MVP!

Garlicky Chicken Wings Recipe

Ingredients you will need:

  • 1 tablespoon olive oil
  • 2 1/2 tablespoons soy sauce
  • 1 1/2 lbs. chicken wings
  • 1/2 cup brown sugar
  • 3/4 cup Coca-Cola
  • Garlic powder to taste

Add 1 tablespoon olive oil to skillet.

Kristy puts oil in cooking pan.

In a mixing bowl, combine 2 1/2 tablespoons soy sauce, 1/2 cup brown sugar, 3/4 cup Coca-Cola, and garlic powder to taste (we used 1 tablespoon).

Kristy combines ingredients, including Coca Cola.

Stir thoroughly.

Kristy stirring sauce mixture.

Heat the olive oil in the pan on medium heat. Place the chicken wings inside the pan and cook, turning to ensure both sides receive heat.

Kristy cooking chicken wings.

Once wings are browned on both sides, reduce heat to low and add Coca Cola mixture.

Adding sauce to chicken wings in frying pan.

Cover wings and simmer for 30 minutes, occasionally turning as they cook.

Placing lid on chicken wings so they can simmer.

Remove from heat.

Kristy places wings on a plate.

Serve and enjoy!

Kristy with completed garlicky chicken wings.

Garlicky Chicken Wings

From game day to movie night, there’s no beating delicious fried chicken wings as an appetizer or snack. This garlicky chicken wings recipe brings restaurant-quality wings to your kitchen, living room, or backyard barbecue! Eat them during the Super Bowl, share them with friends, or bring them to a party to be the MVP!

Ingredients

  • 1 tablespoon olive oil
  • 2 1/2 tablespoons soy sauce
  • 1 1/2 lbs. chicken wings
  • 1/2 cup brown sugar
  • 3/4 cup Coca-Cola
  • Garlic powder to taste

Instructions

  • Add 1 tablespoon olive oil to skillet.
  • In a mixing bowl, combine soy sauce, brown sugar, Coca-Cola, and garlic powder to taste (we used 1 tablespoon).
  • Stir thoroughly.
  • Heat the olive oil in the pan on medium heat. Place the chicken wings inside the pan and cook, turning to ensure both sides receive heat.
  • Once wings are browned on both sides, reduce heat to low and add Coca Cola mixture.
  • Cover wings and simmer for 30 minutes, occasionally turning as they cook.
  • Remove from heat.
  • Serve hot!

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Gene Therapy Allows an 11-Year-Old Boy to Hear for the First Time.

Visits: 24

Gene Therapy Allows an 11-Year-Old Boy to Hear for the First Time.

Gina Kolata visited the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and met with Aissam Dam, his father and the researchers they worked with.

Aissam Dam, an 11-year-old boy, grew up in a world of profound silence. He was born deaf and had never heard anything. While living in a poor community in Morocco, he expressed himself with a sign language he invented and had no schooling.

Last year, after moving to Spain, his family took him to a hearing specialist, who made a surprising suggestion: Aissam might be eligible for a clinical trial using gene therapy.

On Oct. 4, Aissam was treated at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, becoming the first person to get gene therapy in the United States for congenital deafness. The goal was to provide him with hearing, but the researchers had no idea if the treatment would work or, if it did, how much he would hear.

The treatment was a success, introducing a child who had known nothing of sound to a new world.

“There’s no sound I don’t like,” Aissam said, with the help of interpreters during an interview last week. “They’re all good.”

While hundreds of millions of people in the world live with hearing loss that is defined as disabling, Aissam is among those whose deafness is congenital. His is an extremely rare form, caused by a mutation in a single gene, otoferlin. Otoferlin deafness affects about 200,000 people worldwide.

The goal of the gene therapy is to replace the mutated otoferlin gene in patients’ ears with a functional gene.

Although it will take years for doctors to sign up many more patients — and younger ones — to further test the therapy, researchers said that success for patients like Aissam could lead to gene therapies that target other forms of congenital deafness.

It is a “groundbreaking” study, said Dr. Dylan K. Chan, a pediatric otolaryngologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and director of its Children’s Communication Center; he was not involved in the trial.

The one in which Aissam participated is supported by Eli Lilly and a small biotechnology firm it owns, Akouos. Investigators hope to eventually expand the study to six centers across the United States.

A close-up view of a device pinned to Aissam’s hood has a wire that loops directly into his ear canal.
Special earphones being used for Aissam’s hearing test. His form of deafness is rare, caused by a mutation in a single gene, otoferlin. Credit…Hannah Beier for The New York Times

 

Aissam’s trial is one of five that are either underway (the others are in China and Europe) or about to start.

Investigators from all five of the studies will be presenting their data on Feb. 3 at a meeting of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology.

The studies, researchers said, mark a new frontier for gene therapy which, until now, had steered clear of hearing loss.

“There has never been a biological or medical or surgical way to correct the underlying biological changes that cause the inner ear to not function,” Dr. Chan said.

Although otoferlin mutations are not the most common cause of congenital deafness, there is a reason so many researchers started with it. That form of congenital deafness, said Dr. John A. Germiller, an otolaryngologist who is leading the CHOP study, is “low hanging fruit.”

The mutated otoferlin gene destroys a protein in the inner ear’s hair cells necessary to transmit sound to the brain. With many of the other mutations that cause deafness, hair cells die during infancy or even at the fetal stage. But with otoferlin deafness, hair cells can survive for years, allowing time for the defective gene to be replaced with gene therapy.

Aissam’s trial at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia is among five that are either underway (the others are in China and Europe) or about to start.Credit…Hannah Beier for The New York Times
An exterior view of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, with its name at the top of the building.

 

There’s an advantage in using gene therapy to allow children to hear. Most of the mutations that affect hearing — there are approximately 150 — do not affect any other part of the body. Some genes are actually unique to the ear.

The inner ear is a small closed compartment, so gene therapy delivered there would not affect cells in other parts of the body, said Manny Simons, chief executive and co-founder of Akouos and senior vice president of gene therapy at Lilly.

But getting the genes to the cochlea, a spiral-shaped cavity close to the center of the skull, is challenging. The cochlea is filled with fluid, is lined with 3,500 hair cells and is encased in a dense dome of bone with a tiny, round membrane. Sound sets off a wave of fluid in the cochlea and stimulates the hair cells to transmit signals to the brain. Each hair responds to a different frequency, enabling a person to hear the richness of sound.

The gene therapy consists of a harmless virus carrying new otoferlin genes in two drops of liquid that are delicately injected down the length of the cochlea, delivering the genes to each hair cell.

Yet despite the promise of otoferlin gene therapy, finding the right patients for the trial was difficult.

One issue is the very idea of treating deafness.

“There is an internal Deaf community that doesn’t see itself as needing to be cured,” said Dr. Robert C. Nutt, a developmental and behavioral pediatrician in Wilmington, N.C., who is deaf.

Some Deaf parents, he added, celebrate when their newborn baby’s hearing test indicates that the baby is deaf too and so can be part of their community.

Making the issue of gene therapy even more complicated is the standard intervention for otoferlin hearing loss: a cochlear implant. The device, which uses electrodes to stimulate auditory nerves in the inner ear, allows patients to hear sounds, especially those needed to understand speech. But the implant does not provide the full richness of sound — and is said to assist in hearing but without restoring it completely.

Dr. John Germiller wears a white lab coat and stands against a blue wall.
Dr. John Germiller, an otolaryngologist who is leading the CHOP study.Credit…Hannah Beier for The New York Times

 

Most babies born with otoferlin deafness get cochlear implants in infancy and are therefore ineligible for the trial. The implants somewhat alter the cochlea, which could hamper the interpretation of gene therapy results.

The Food and Drug Administration, which allowed the CHOP study to go forward, asked that, for safety reasons, the researchers start with older children, not infants, and treat only one ear.

The challenge for the U.S. study was to find older children whose parents would agree to the study, who had otoferlin deafness and who did not have cochlear implants.

Aissam never had cochlear implants. He never had schooling in Morocco to help him develop communication skills. But three years ago, when he was 8, his father, Youssef Dam, a construction worker, got a job in Barcelona, Spain. For the first time, Aissam went to school, enrolling in a school for the deaf, where he learned Spanish Sign Language. Soon after, his family learned of the gene therapy trial.

When Aissam was deemed eligible to be patient No. 1, Lilly and Akouos paid for him and his father to live in Philadelphia for four months, while Aissam received gene therapy and follow-up hearing tests.

No one knew whether the nerve cells that communicate with the hair cells of the cochlea would still be intact and functional in someone who had been deaf for 11 years, Dr. Simons of Lilly said.

It was not even clear what dose of the new genes to give. All that the researchers had to go on were studies with mice. “We were flying blind,” Dr. Germiller said.

Aissam’s results, his doctors said, were remarkable. In an interview at CHOP, his father said through an interpreter — he speaks a North African language from the Amazigh family, commonly known as Berber — that Aissam was hearing traffic noises just days after the treatment. When Aissam had a hearing test two months later, his hearing in the treated ear was close to normal.

But no matter how well the gene therapy works, the researchers recognize that Aissam may never be able to understand or speak a language, Dr. Germiller said. The brain has a narrow window for learning to speak beginning around ages 2 to 3, he explained. After age 5, the window for learning spoken language is permanently shut.

Hearing can still help patients even if they never learn to speak, he noted. They can hear traffic or know when someone is trying to communicate. The ability to hear also can help with lip reading.

Aissam wears a face mask and sits in a conference room at the hospital, signing with both hands to an interpreter.
Aissam signing to an interpreter during an interview at the children’s hospital.Credit…Hannah Beier for The New York Times

 

Now that gene therapy has proved safe for Aissam and for another child in Taiwan treated two months after him, researchers at the hospital in Philadelphia are able to move on to younger children. They have two lined up, a 3-year-old boy from Miami and a 3-year-old girl from San Francisco, both of whom got cochlear implants in only one ear, so that the other could be treated with gene therapy.

If the Lilly trial of otoferlin gene therapy is proved to be effective and safe, “there will be a lot of interest in other genes” that cause deafness, said Dr. Margaret A. Kenna, an otolaryngologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and professor of otolaryngology at Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Kenna, an investigator in the Lilly trial, added, “It’s been a long time coming.”

“For decades people have been saying, ‘When is this going to work?’” Dr. Kenna said. “I didn’t think gene therapy would begin in my practice lifetime. But here it is.”

 The other is supported by Otovia Therapeutics and various programs in China.

A third study is sponsored by Regeneron and Decibel Therapeutics. Researchers in Europe so far have treated one child, who is younger than 2, and in one ear. Another study by Sensorion is expected to start this month.

On a recent frigid morning, Aissam sat in a conference room at CHOP and, with the help of three translators, patiently answered questions about his remarkable experience. He’s a solemn child with a round face and big brown eyes. There was an interpreter for his father, and the sign language team had a Certified Deaf Interpreter — a person who is deaf translated his signs into American Sign Language — and an interpreter who knew American Sign Language and spoke his words.

Their system worked to a certain extent but robbed the conversation of spontaneity and forced Aissam to answer in short sentences or phrases, minimizing the expression of his personality.

But Aissam managed to convey the wonder of hearing.

Noises and voices frightened him initially, he said. But then, as the world of sound opened up, he began to enjoy every sound he heard — elevators, voices, the sound of scissors snipping his hair at a barbershop.

And there was music, which he heard for the first time one day while getting his hair cut.

Asked if there was a sound he particularly liked, Aissam did not hesitate.

“People,” he signed.

Gina Kolata reports on diseases and treatments, how treatments are discovered and tested, and how they affect people. 

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Can you give up your smartphone for a month?

Visits: 45

Can you give up your smartphone for a month? I normally wouldn’t advertise something like this, but I just thought it might be fun.

We’re introducing a NEW kind of “Dry January” this year. Instead of abstaining from alcohol for a month, we challenge you to ditch your smartphone!

We believe in the power of living a simpler life with fewer distractions. One of the biggest distractions in our lives today is our phone. In fact, the average person spends 5.4 hours on their phones each day!

That’s why we’re challenging YOU to give up your smartphone for a month as part of the siggi’s digital detox program. siggi’s is doing its part by launching the siggi’s Digital Detox Program where selected contest participants will win:

  • $10,000.00
  • Smartphone lockbox
  • Good ol’ fashioned flip phone
  • 1 Month pre-paid sim card
  • 3 Months’ worth of siggi’s yogurt

Think you have what it takes to give up your smartphone for a month? Nostalgic for a time when all you needed was a flip phone? Enter the siggi’s Digital Detox Program for a shot to win by filling out the submission form linked below.

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. Contest starts at 12:00 a.m. (ET) on 1/17/24 and ends at 11:59pm (ET) on 01/31/24. Must be 18 or older. Other restrictions apply. 10 winners will be contacted via email. For Official Rules, visit this link. Sponsor: The Icelandic Milk and Skyr Corporation, 80 Pine Street, 39th Floor, New York, NY 10005. Void where prohibited.

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Food Life Links from other sources. Recipe Reprints from other.

Beef and Noodles.

Visits: 31

Beef and Noodles.

Looking for a quick and hearty weeknight meal? Megan’s got just the recipe for you in the Sparkle Eats Kitchen! There’s really nothing more filling and comforting than beef, noodles and gravy… especially on a cold winter night. This Beef and Noodles recipe is done in under 30 minutes and the whole family will love it! Just pair it with a salad or vegetable for a full meal.

Ingredients

  • 1 lb. ground beef
  • 1 small onion diced
  • 1 8 oz. package sliced mushrooms
  • 3 cloves garlic minced
  • ¼ tsp. salt
  • ¼ tsp. freshly ground black pepper
  • 1/2 lb. egg noodles cooked according to package directions
  • 3 Tbsp. butter
  • 3 Tbsp. flour
  • 2 ½ cups beef broth
  • 1 beef bouillon cube
  • 1 Tbsp. Worcestershire sauce
  • 1 tsp. onion powder
  • ½ tsp. garlic powder
  • ½ tsp. mustard powder
  • ½ tsp. dried thyme
  • ½ cup milk
  • 1 10.5 oz. can cream of mushroom soup

Instructions

  • In a large pot, cook ground beef, onion and mushrooms over medium-high heat until browned and cooked through. Drain grease. Add minced garlic and season lightly with salt and pepper. Remove meat from pot and set aside. In the same pot, melt butter; add flour and whisk for one minute. Whisk in broth, bouillon, onion powder, garlic powder and mustard. Bring to a boil and let the sauce thicken. Add milk and cream of mushroom soup; stir well. Add beef back to pot and stir well. Add noodles and stir to combine.

Course Main Course
Cuisine American
Keyword beef and noodles, egg noodles, gravy, ground beef

 

Prep Time 10 
Cook Time 30 

 

Servings 4 people
Author Sparkle Markets

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Peanut Butter Pie.

Visits: 24

Peanut Butter Pie.

The true sign of an unfancy recipe: when it gets shared via an article like this. This recipe isn’t original,but for me it comes via Mary Yoders Restaurant.

So try it and let us know how it turned out. You can use a store bought shell, or make your own Grham Cracker shell.

Ingredients

2/3 cup sugar

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 cup dark corn syrup

1/3 cup creamy peanut butter

3 eggs

1 cup salted peanuts

1 unbaked pie shell

Directions.

Beat sugar, corn syrup, peanut butter and eggs.  Stir in peanuts.  Pour into unbaked pie shell.  Bake in 375o oven for about 45 minutes until crust is golden brown.  Cool slightly until center is firm.  Chill in refrigerator and serve with whipped cream.

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A Minnesota boy learned his bus driver had cancer. Then he raised $1,000 to help her.

Visits: 16

A Minnesota boy learned his bus driver had cancer. Then he raised $1,000 to help her.

Noah Webber made banana bread and muffins, then sold the treats and raised $1,000 for his bus driver, who had recently been diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. He says ‘I didn’t just want to stand there.’

Saleen Martin

USA TODAY
Heidi Carston, a Minnesota bus driver a student raised $1,000 for after finding out she has stage 4 cancer.

Heidi Carston has spent the past decade bussing children safely to and from school in Minnesota.

That all changed in December when she was diagnosed with stage 4 metastatic gastric cancer. Carston had to tell her students that she wouldn’t see them for a while because of health issues.

One boy just knew he had to help.

“When she announced it on the bus, I was sad,” 11-year-old Noah Webber told USA TODAY on Wednesday. “I was shocked … I didn’t just want to stand there and watch it happen and not do anything.”

After chatting with his family, Noah decided to organize a bake sale in Carston’s honor and ended up raising $1,000 for her.

Noah’s small act of kindness turned out to be a big deal for Carston.

Putting the bake sale together
Noah Webber puts his next batch of goodies into the oven. The treats are part of a fundraiser he organized for his bus driver who was diagnosed with cancer.

Noah, a sixth-grader at Black Hawk Middle School in the Twin Cities suburb of Eagen, first met Carston at the beginning of the school year.

Months later when Carston realized she would need to undergo chemotherapy and wouldn’t be able to work, she said she just knew she had to tell her students why she wouldn’t be on the bus for a while.

“They’re accustomed to the same driver every day,” she said. “They become accustomed to your habits, your style, and I just didn’t want them wondering ‘What happened to Ms. Heidi?'”

After Noah told his family about what his bus driver was going through, the Webbers baked up a storm, making muffins and banana bread, and then posting about the baked goods on a neighborhood app. Noah’s mom also told her co-workers about it, and another bus driver posted about the sale on an app for bus drivers.

They presented the money and gifts to Carston shortly after Christmas. The gifts included flowers, candy and a blanket.

“I was just blown away,” Carston told USA TODAY on Wednesday. “I just couldn’t even believe it, that he had such a kind heart to be able to even come up with this idea.”

She said she was “overwhelmed by his love and all of the students on all of my routes for giving me gifts … (It was) very, very touching.”

Treats Minnesota sixth grader Noah Webber made to raise money for his former bus driver who was diagnosed with cancer.

Boy’s community is proud of him for helping bus driver in need

Noah said he was excited and happy to help his bus driver, who he described as kind and “super friendly.”

His father, Mike Webber, said he “couldn’t be more proud” of his son.

The boy’s act of kindness is just further proof that bus drivers are needed and valued, said Allyson Garin, a spokesperson for Rosemount-Apple Valley-Eagan Public Schools.

“They’re these unsung heroes … the first face our kids see in the morning and the last face they see,” she said. “It was just exciting to see the district come together as a whole, including Noah and his fundraiser, with all these amazing things.”

His school principal, Anne Kusch, said his actions embody the school’s philosophy: Calm. Kind. Safe.

“We’re super proud of Noah here and excited to see what else he’s going to do in the next two and a half years that he’s with us,” Kusch said.

Noah Webber and Heidi Carston, his bus driver who was diagnosed with cancer.

Bus driver is undergoing chemo, hoping for the best

Carston said that her diagnosis came too late for stomach removal surgery, an extensive procedure that involves a long recovery, she told USA TODAY.

Doctors are hoping that her body will respond well to chemotherapy but they won’t know for several more weeks.

Her family has started a GoFundMe where people can donate to help her. It had raised just over $5,000 by Wednesday evening.

 

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A Knife Forged in Fire.

Visits: 15

A Knife Forged in Fire.

The author wanted a Japanese-style kitchen blade made for him by hand. What he witnessed was a combination of artistry and atomic magic.

JANUARY 9, 2024, 6:00 AM

Sam brought out what looked like a deck of tarot cards with nothing on them. No Hermit. No Hanged Man. No Fool. They were gray, thicker than ordinary cards, and clearly heavy in his hands. Inside of them a message waited. He had a long ritual to perform to release it.

As he shuffled the cards, they clattered together, revealing the first hint of their message: They were made of steel. He stacked them and squared up the edges so that all of the cards were nice and straight, nothing sticking out or crooked. Everything neat. The alchemical precision favored by Newton in his dim laboratories.

He clamped them in an industrial vise. Now the cards made a block about the size of a thick paperback book. They would never be individual cards again, these 12 pounds of two different kinds of steel, arranged in alternating layers.

The vise was mounted on a large metal table in the shop that Sam shares with his two brothers, who are fine woodworkers. The shop is in Skokie, which means “marsh” in the Potawatomi language, for these environs were once rich and populous wetlands before they were drained and turned into rows of low industrial buildings like this one and sturdy, modest residential homes. But the brothers have transformed this space into a marvelous cabinet of wonders in which to create whatever they might dream. Much of what is inside could have come from the 19th or early 20th century, great cast-iron machines of fabulous design, embossed with symbols no longer thought necessary to display on slick modern devices. In addition, some of the things in this sprawling realm of clutter might have come from another galaxy, like the ballistic cartridge for the table saw. If you accidentally touch the blade, it senses electrical conductivity and retracts. It’s gone so fast that it can’t cut you. It’s all part of the magic of this place of transformations.

Sam lowered his black face shield and picked up the MIG welder and pulled the trigger. The room lit up to an intensity such that Sam was cast as a silhouetted troupe of antic spiders dancing on the walls and floor and ceiling, sparks flying around him like a cracked nest of hornets and in his hands a burning blue hole at the center of things. All this to the roar of the forge’s fire across the room, heating up toward 2,400 degrees, and the insect chattering of the welder chewing away at liquid metal.

Sam bent over the light, his body curved around it like some sorcerer who’d caught a star and had it pinned there on the bench and was leaning over to examine it and chip away the edges. The bits were falling all around him and bouncing up in little arcs off the diamond floor of heaven. It was positively spooky the way that light stole the glory of the crisp and sunny autumn day outside the open roll-up door.

When he was done and I could look more closely without safety glasses, I saw that he had tacked the cards together with a misshapen bead of melted metal at each end of the stack. As a 12-pound solid oblong block of steel with runes inside, the stack would now be called a billet. To finish it off, he welded a two-foot length of steel rebar to one end to make a handle so that he could hold it.

Sam is afraid of some of his machines in the way that the lion tamer is afraid of his cats. You are confident. You know your skills. You have been doing this a long time. But you know that wild animals are always wild animals, and a false gesture, perhaps an unexpected noise, could set in motion events that could not be stopped. This pact requires utter honesty, complete truth. Sam is harnessing powers that few of us ever encounter in our lives. He’s directing them in order to reach down inside of this deck of tarot cards and transform the very atomic nature of its being. He’s doing what sorcerers do: magic.

John Maynard Keynes, a British economist, owned some of Isaac Newton’s papers. They were about alchemy, which was Newton’s lifelong obsession. Keynes gradually came to the conclusion that Newton “was not the first of the age of reason.” No, Keynes said, “he was the last of the magicians.”

Not the last. We have some right here in Chicago.

Sam Goldbroch is a knife maker. He was getting ready to make me a traditional Japanese-style kitchen knife.

Bladesmith Sam Goldbroch puts the metal he forged into a vise
Bladesmith Sam Goldbroch puts the metal he forged into a vise so he can cut off what isn’t needed for the author’s knife. Forging Damascus steel is such an arduous process that he made as much as possible in the batch.

I first met Sam when he was just a kid. I’d see him and his family — his parents, Claire and Bernie; his twin brother, Phil; and their older brother, Simon — at events in the neighborhood near Dewey Elementary School in Evanston where we all lived. My elder daughter, Elena, and Simon began dating in high school and are now married. The boys, as we came to call them, all went into the crafts — Phil and Simon into wood, Sam into food initially. He worked as a chef in various capacities at some of Chicago’s best restaurants, such as Blackbird, Elizabeth, and North Pond. But when he and his wife, Julie Zare, decided to start a family, they realized that a chef’s grueling schedule would not encourage the best home life. So in 2016 Sam began teaching at the Chopping Block, the Lincoln Square school for home cooks. As he taught his students how to use knives in the kitchen, he saw that he really didn’t know anything about them, though he had used them in professional kitchens for 12 years. And with a simple question from one of his students — “What makes a good knife?” — his life was swallowed up into the mysteries of metal and fire and force.

Both the Northeast of the United States and the Northwest have robust communities of knife makers. The American South has even more. Chicago and the surrounding area are just beginning to coalesce into a serious community of bladesmiths. You can see a sample of their wares at Northside Cutlery in North Center, a small and tidy shop of beautiful, handcrafted pieces displayed in a wall-size cabinet Phil Goldbroch made for that purpose. The knives sell for a few hundred to a few thousand dollars each. They are all one of a kind, made by a variety of local bladesmiths.

Sam recently hosted a group of Chicago knife makers for a potluck lunch at the shop. After the meal, Sam cranked up the forge, and one of them, Dylan Ambrosini, crafted a blade while we all watched. Dylan, at 24, is one of the youngest and most talented knife makers in the Midwest. He and Sam collaborated on a nine-inch chef’s knife, which sold for $950 before they could get it on display at Northside Cutlery. Top-end chef’s knives can cost even more. Anthony Bourdain bought one of his favorites for $5,000 from Bob Kramer, a popular bladesmith in Washington State. It brought $231,250 at auction after Bourdain’s death.

In Sam’s kitchen and in the shop, I had seen a kind of knife called a Nakiri. I wanted one. If you’re a knife nut, as I am, that’s all you have to say. Jacques Pépin, the popular French chef, once said that you need only three knives to cook well. “That being said,” he quipped, “I probably have three hundred knives at my house.” People who love cooking can’t always say what makes them fall for a particular style of knife. Most chef’s knives are at least eight inches long, which feels too big for me. Sam had already made me a chopping knife called a tall petty, whose blade was five inches long. “Tall” means that my fingers clear the cutting board, and “petty” means that the blade is short. I use it all the time for chopping, but sometimes it’s too short, as when I have a big onion. I wanted one that was a little longer. The nakiri is ideal for preparing vegetables, which is most of what I do. I have always loved the shape. And I knew that Sam would make his own Damascus steel for this knife. The blade and handle would mate to make a work of art that was an exceptional tool. When I had my first dream about this knife, I woke up and knew that I had to have it.

I decided that I wanted to follow Sam as he made my knife, to understand the process from start to finish. I did not expect that I would stumble upon a mystical and transcendent experience in the making of such a seemingly simple tool.

As my father used to say, there’s a mile of wire in a screen door.

Goldbroch twists the steel to begin shaping it.
After heating the steel to more than 2,000 degrees, Goldbroch twists it to begin shaping it. He would repeat this process five times until the twists tightened.

Sam took the billet of steel, holding it by the rebar handle in a heavy blacksmith’s glove, and he carried it to the forge, with its interior of tangerine flame. The forge is a black cylindrical furnace, 16 inches long, as big around as a gallon of paint, and open at both ends. Two propane torch nozzles entered the top to provide the fire. The floor of the forge was populated by glowing white rocks of fractured firebrick. And it roared like a lion. The heat rising from it was so intense that the waves appeared to be dissolving the brick building I could see across the alley through the open roll-up door. I sat at Sam’s workbench. Although I was 20 feet away, the heat on my face was like summer sun.

Sam placed the billet among the white-hot rocks and we waited. He talked of the metal’s need to heat all the way through and “relax.” As we watched, the dull deck of gray cards began to wake up and take on the qualities of a living thing. Among the glowing rocks, it seemed to stir and issued a low, dark color. He had put two kinds of steel in the stack that became the billet, 1095 and 15N20, because he was making Damascus steel, a special kind of steel for swords and knives that combines metals to form beautiful patterns by way of forging and pounding, crushing (called “upsetting”) and twisting. Damascus is not particularly superior to other steels. It’s just prettier. But it has acquired a special mystique because hundreds of years ago, as early as the fourth century B.C., it came into Europe from the East by way of Syria. That steel had a wavy pattern in it. So by analogy, people today call steel that has a wavy pattern “Damascus.” The Crusaders were armed with Damascus blades. It was said that theirs were quenched in the blood of dragons. And it was also said that those blades could do battle with the Saracens and afterward still sever a feather floating in midair.

If you want to know what rock is like deep in the earth, you can see it here in the shapeshifting of the metal. These are the energies that we are not used to in the quiet simmer of our daily lives.

I watched the forge. It took a long time, but it had our attention the way a green shoot would where only some damp sand had been seen before. Something was changing. Transformations were coming. If you want to know what rock is like deep in the earth, you can see it here in the shape-shifting of the metal. These are the energies that we are not used to in the quiet simmer of our daily lives. The energies of the deep earth and the high sun, the two sources that power our planet.

Half an hour passed, and now the billet was no longer gray. It had taken on the look of a bright confection of orange marzipan. Sam put on his blacksmith’s gloves. The billet was so hot that he wore glasses tinted against infrared radiation. He lifted the billet out of the forge for the first time to check the color of the metal. The rebar sagged like a fishing rod with a swordfish on the line. He wasn’t pleased with that, but he liked what he saw on the billet, and so he swung it over to the 12-ton hydraulic press just a few feet away. The billet landed on the compression platform. Holding the rebar in his left hand, he brought down the handle on the press with his right, moving the square metal die down to gently tap the mushy billet with a few tons of pressure so that he could see if it had been heated through and through. He had to make sure that his welds were holding the cards together. The smith calls this process of initial compression “forge welding,” because if everything is right with the stack, the cards will meld into one solid piece.

As the cards of metal were deformed and compressed, the surface of the billet rippled and changed color as if in emotional response to the extremes of heat and force, turning gray and deeper orange and shedding dark flakes of oxidized metal. Sam tapped the handle and added more pressure. Waves of dull gray cascaded across the surfaces and calved off and fell to the floor. But the billet held together. First success. It had cooled enough now that Sam had to return it to the forge to reheat it to a working temperature of about 2,300 degrees.

While it was heating, Sam unbolted the flat dies from the press using a socket wrench. Dies are the parts of the press that actually make contact with the hot metal. He exchanged the flat ones for more rounded ones that are called drawing dies. They would draw the billet into an elongated shape and help start to flatten it.

When the billet was hot enough once more, Sam began compressing it more aggressively to transform it into what he called a bar. In the middle of this, the rebar handle melted, menacingly clattering to the floor, ringing and dancing, and Sam stepped gingerly back to let it settle, then continued his work by lifting the billet with heavy tongs. There was no stopping now. He would succeed or fail by the skill of his hands and his knowledge as a bladesmith.

A natural, lifelong student of anything interesting, Sam got his start by trying to answer that question of what makes a good knife. He began to buy knives of good quality, but old and beat up, to restore them. He talked to knife makers and chefs who knew about knives. He took blacksmithing classes in which he began to acquire a feel for metal, not as the solid that most of us are used to but as a substance every bit as malleable as potter’s clay. He began to get a feel for taming the fire.

Heating and crushing now with more and more force, Sam gradually transformed the billet into a crude bar of steel so long, about a foot and a half, that it hung out either end of the forge. He then took the bar back to the metal table and clamped it into the vise. He put on his ear protection and picked up an angle grinder. At 1,000 degrees, the steel had gone dark.

Sam turned his grinder to cut from the other side, and an orange volcano shot up to the ceiling. He explained that you can tell the kind and quality of steel you’re working with by the color and shape of the sparks.

To make my little six-and-a-half-inch nakiri knife, Sam didn’t need all 12 pounds of steel that he’d started with. But the process of forging Damascus steel is so difficult and time consuming that he wanted to make as much as possible in a single batch. As he began cutting the bar in half, orange sparks cascaded down, elves of fire skipping across the concrete and dancing away into the sunlight in the alley. He turned his grinder to cut from the other side, and an orange volcano shot up to the ceiling. He explained that you can tell the kind and quality of steel you’re working with by the color and shape of the sparks.

Cutting through the bar took the better part of an hour, as he heated it to soften it and attacked it again and again with different tools. After destroying several angle grinder blades, he brought out a chisel he’d forged in a blacksmithing class and began hammering it into the cut he’d made in the bar. The making of Damascus steel takes a heavy dose of artistry and craftsmanship, and if one approach doesn’t work, you try another and another until the thing in your head becomes a thing in the world. At last he had the metal bar hot and nearly severed and clamped in the vise, and with his blacksmith’s hammer, he swung for the fences and knocked half the billet across the room. Fortunately, no one was in the path of the projectile, which landed, smoking, on the floor by the forge.

When the two black hunks of metal had cooled to a few hundred degrees, they took on an almost melancholy gloom of blue-gray, dashed with a distemper of rust, and their random-seeming warts and scars gave them the aspect of objects that had made a long and lonely journey through space, ending with a fiery entry into our world. Only the squared-off shape of these meteorites betrayed the hand of man.

Sam picked up one of the chunks with his tongs, saying, as unlikely as it seemed at that moment, “There’s a knife in there. That’s all that matters.” He also mentioned that the worst accidental burns in a forging shop occur when the metal has cooled off to black and is still at several hundred degrees. The visitor learns to touch nothing.

Now that he was working with a billet that weighed six pounds instead of 12, he could proceed much faster. Moving from forge to hydraulic press, heating and upsetting and turning, occasionally changing dies to different shapes, Sam gradually formed the bar into a piece about 16 inches long and an inch and a quarter square. Some time before, Sam had acquired a rusty old-fashioned monkey wrench. He had welded a piece of steel round bar to the head to make a long and heavy wrench for one specific purpose: twisting a bar of hot Damascus steel. Now he heated the bar and clamped it with the hydraulic press just enough to immobilize it, not enough to deform it. Then he fitted the adjustable wrench to it. Because the bar was now square in cross section, he could maintain a grip on it, as with a wrench on a nut. But when he went to twist it, he managed to turn it only halfway around. It wasn’t hot enough.

He put it back in the forge and this time heated it until it was in a yellow rage of photons. Again, he fitted the wrench to the glowing end. And then, using his entire body and the leverage of the long-handled wrench, he began twisting and twisting. The metal shed great gray flakes, and the yellow bar gradually turned orange, looking like a twist of taffy as Sam put all of his effort into the now-helical bar until it would turn no more. It was as if he were doing battle not so much with steel but with fire itself, placing the bright yellow bar in the press and then wringing the light right out of it, for that’s what it was, a blade of bright light that he strangled until it went black.

Then he put the bar back in the forge and did it all again. He repeated the process five times, and as the twists grew into a tighter and tighter pattern, the steel began to bend upon itself and undulate like an incandescent banded snake.

When Sam thought that the metals had thoroughly mixed, he placed the bar in the vise and picked up the angle grinder.

“I’m going to give you a nice center cut,” he said, meaning the place in the bar where he’d find the best pattern of steel.

He took a wooden nakiri template from a board on the wall where he kept the blanks of all the knives he made. He placed it on his anvil and traced its shape with chalk on the bar to get the length right for blade and tang. The tang is the slim projection from the blade that he’d fit into the handle. Using the heat, the press, and a hammer on the anvil, he flattened the metal into a vague, cartoonish semblance of a rude asteroid-black knife that my four-year-old granddaughter, Annelise, might have drawn in charcoal. He clamped it in the vise to let it cool. He occasionally pointed an infrared meter at it to check the temperature. When it was cool enough to handle, he took it to the bench and again traced the nakiri shape onto the rough alligator surface. Then he went to the band saw and cut away as much metal as he could around the silhouette. Even though I had earplugs, the noise drove me out to the alley.

Sam was doing all this after taking a weekend forging class outside of Philadelphia. He’d driven 12 hours home, getting only five hours of sleep. Then he wrestled this demon all day, almost eight hours of back-wrenching work, until he got what he had envisioned in his head. It was roughly the right shape. But it was still scabbed black and ugly. Day one was done.

As if in rebellion against the taming of the fire, all night long the lightning lit up the low gray udders of the clouds, the wind milking them here and there for their pitiful rain. What epic history lay beyond the thunder’s crack and groan?

Goldbroch chalks a template for the nakiri knife onto the rough-shaped steel.
Goldbroch chalks a template for the nakiri knife onto the rough-shaped steel. “I’m going to give you a nice center cut,” he says.

On the second day, Sam retired to the grinding booth, an enclosure he had built for his power sanding. The belt grinder is a machine of admirable complexity that can turn every which way while keeping a six-foot loop of sandpaper revolving on drums, allowing Sam to make shapes such as Western knife handles. He has to wear a respirator, a heavy apron riveted in brass, gloves, and noise-canceling headphones.

I saw Sam at his best in there. He stood in his armor, confronting a clearly dangerous and indifferent machine of stupendous mechanical capacities for removing any material that came near it, including human flesh in large bloody quantities if he slipped up. It’s a bit like a whirling wall of razor blades. Sam put both hands into this, holding something fairly small — it might have been a knife or a handle.

He is a big man, solid and steady on his feet, with wide shoulders and strong arms. He is soft-spoken, modest, and understated, a kind of gentle giant. I’d see him Saturdays at the summer farmers’ market with one or the other of his two children on his shoulder. If you met Sam, your first impression might be of calm and strength, control and competence. He’d happily show you what he can do with hammer and tongs, and you’d understand the deep dichotomy and even mystery that powers his mastery of energy and matter. What he does is simply so self-evident in the end that it cannot be questioned. When he’s done, what he puts in your hand is self-explanatory. He does not apologize. He does not explain or boast. He does not have to. It’s in your hand. And if you met him, you’d wonder: What gives him such a solid platform?

I think Sam’s mastery grew out of a catastrophic incident in his childhood. He had struggled with fire when he was young, and not in any artistic way.

I think Sam’s mastery grew out of a catastrophic incident in his childhood. He had struggled with fire when he was young, and not in any artistic way. The story of that struggle belongs to him and Simon and Phil, who went through it together, so it is not mine to tell. But I can say this much: They were trapped in an out-of-control fire when they were kids. They survived. Their parents did not.

When he came out of the grinding booth, Sam had the metal in the right shape and even close to the right size. This was called the rough grinding of the knife. Now he had to set the bevel, the angled portion of the blade that would terminate in the cutting edge. He did this with hammer and anvil, man against steel, as in images of 19th-century industrial infernos. The hammer rose toward the ceiling and then Sam put his whole back into it as it came ringing down on the steel. When he first brought the blade out of the forge, it was a tiger burning bright, and when he straightened up with the shape he was after, the black stubbly silhouette looked as if all it needed was a little stamp on the edge that said “Made in Hell.”

All morning long, a small heat-treating oven, actually a kiln that could have been used for ceramics, had been warming up. Now it had reached 1,650 degrees, the temperature at which to begin the process called “normalizing.” All of the forging and pressing and hammering and twisting of the metal had confused the internal crystal structure of the steel and introduced weird stresses among the grains.

But since the knife now had the exact shape that Sam wanted, he wouldn’t need to do anything violent to the blade again, except one final explosive act. To prepare for that, he first had to heat it back up to the point that the steel could, as he explained, relax again and release the tensions within, so that rather than being, at a microscopic level, like broken and jagged sea ice, the metal would be like a quiet millpond.

He placed the blade in the oven and closed the door. He set the timer for 10 minutes and went back to his bench to begin work on the handle. The artistry of this knife was all Sam’s doing. I had given him absolute control. But I’d spied a particular piece of wood among the materials he keeps for making handles. It was a rare Australian eucalyptus called vasticola burl, and when I’d first pointed to it, Sam smiled and said, “Oh, I love that wood.” He picked it up. It was just a block, perhaps six inches long and two inches square. He wiped some oil on it with a paper towel, and it seemed to glow.

“It looks like fire,” he said.

The fire again. He’d had his taste of fire when he was a child. And now it was in his blood.

The block was too wide for the Japanese wa handle that he was going to make, so we went into a giant room with an array of limb-snatching machines, and he cut it to size on a 1912 band saw that was taller than we were. Back at his bench, he searched in the drawers full of materials for handles and came up with a nicely patterned piece of buffalo horn for the ferrule, the protective ring between handle and blade.

“This is good,” Sam said. “It’s usually just black.”

The timer went off, and he took the blade out and put it in a rack to cool. He turned the heat down to 1,550 degrees, and when the blade had cooled, he returned it to the oven. After another 10 minutes, he put the blade aside again to cool and turned the oven down to 1,450. He repeated the 10-minute heat treating and set the blade aside once again.

“It’s still not a knife,” Sam insisted.

It was not yet good steel. It couldn’t be sharpened to take a cutting edge, and whatever edge you might put on it wouldn’t hold. It was useless for the kitchen, which was where I wanted to take it. To eat, let’s not forget. For what is a human but a transport channel for energy? And our energy comes from food. Lovely, gourmet food prepared with a fine knife. The qualities we need in a knife to create that food come from the atomic structure of the steel. But for the moment, what we had here was like a pig wallowing in mud and claiming to be cassoulet.

Sam stepped up to the oven, beside which the blade had been cooling. The oven had reached 1,475. He put the blade in and closed the door.

A slender, rectangular metal vessel sat upright on the floor by the oven. It looked somehow military, as if meant to shoot a rocket. It was filled with Parks 50, what’s known as a high-speed oil and designed for this purpose. After 10 minutes of heating to 1,475, Sam took the blade from the oven with heavy tongs and gloves and plunged it into the oil. A cloud of smoke rose to the ceiling, and a searing sound filled the room like a basket of snakes.

“This is the moment of truth,” Sam said, holding the tongs and looking away from the smoke. “This is when it becomes a knife.”

“This is the moment of truth,” Sam said, holding the tongs and looking away from the smoke. “This is when it becomes a knife.”

The quenching is a pressurized moment on which everything else turns. He cannot flinch. He cannot fake it. Like the free solo climber, he cannot make mistakes. The mere hint of a ping with the knife in the oil, and he’d have to go back to the other half of the blackened billet and start over. Because the knife would have fractured. Hard to believe, but at this point, if Sam dropped the knife, it could shatter. Some American knife makers have even taken to having a quenching ceremony to mark the birth of a knife. Some of them also think that you can quench properly only while facing north. Sam doesn’t hold to those ideas. You do your best and try to have more skill than luck.

The small heat-treating oven sat atop another oven that looked as if it wouldn’t be out of place in a 1960s kitchen. It was a tempering oven. Sam had set it to 400 degrees, and now he put the knife inside for many hours of tempering, which would finish settling the structure of the metal and would reduce its hardness to the sweet spot where it could be easily sharpened and would also hold an edge. Sam could do nothing more with this blade until the tempering was finished. So he would turn to other projects.

Before I went home that second day, Sam said, “I’ll finish the belt sanding tonight and leave about 10 percent of the hand sanding for the morning so you can watch. Assuming you like to sit there and watch people sand stuff.”

Steel is not steel. It is a chameleon, completely dependent on its environment. At temperatures such as Sam was using, it is a glowing portal to the world of the atom. Steel is iron mixed with carbon and some other elements, depending on what kind of steel you want. I had asked Sam to make me a high-carbon knife, which means that, by technical definition, at least 0.6 percent of its atoms are carbon. In practical terms, it means that it’s not stainless steel and will rust if you don’t take care of it. Sam and I like to take care of our knives the way some people like to take care of their motorcycles.

Taking care of a knife is pretty simple. You strop it before each use. You don’t throw it in the sink. You wipe it off and put it in a safe place when you’re done — a knife block, for example. And we would chop down telephone poles with it before we’d put it in a dishwasher. Then again, to qualify as a master bladesmith with the American Bladesmith Society, you have to chop a wooden two-by-four in half two times with a knife you made and then still be able to shave with it. The rules for that qualification test clearly state: “The test knife will ultimately be destroyed during the testing process.”

The knives that Sam and his fellow Midwestern smiths make, passed from hand to hand with care, from mother to son to uncle to granddaughter, could last a thousand years, by which time every speck of high technology we know today will be dust. But the reality is that if a knife maker has become too famous, you simply can’t get his or her knives any longer.

Iron atoms form crystals of various kinds, atoms connected electrically to one another. Iron atoms are like little magnets, having a north and south (positive and negative) end. So they can arrange themselves like those toys for children, magnetic shapes to create pleasing patterns.

When carbon mixes with iron, the smaller carbon atoms occupy the spaces between iron atoms. The crystal arrangement of the iron atoms changes to accommodate the carbon. Different crystal arrangements give the metal different properties. Think of it as bread. It’s like deciding what kind of bread to make. White bread. Sourdough. Hard Lithuanian black bread. Fluffy Mexican bolillos. So goes the saga of steel. The tarot cards Sam dealt at the start of this process were 1095 steel, which is iron with between 0.95 percent and 1.05 percent carbon, and 15N20, which is iron with nickel. Mixing the two is popular for making Damascus and produces an attractive pattern and a very nice edge.

As a lover of good food and good kitchen tools, I don’t need to know much about metallurgy. A bladesmith like Sam can take care of that. But I find this stuff fascinating, these amazing transformations. I like to know what’s going down in the atomic world that will blossom into these beautiful patterns of his blade.

As I watched Sam work, I kept having the impression that he was trying hard to erase something — the traces of the fire, the encroaching flames, the blackened body of the meteorite after its travels. But the erasing was also an act of creating. Michelangelo said that the block of marble contains a man, and all you have to do is remove the rock that isn’t part of the man, and then you will have your sculpture. So Sam said, “There’s a knife in there. …” And in this attitude of seeking, there is a humility that does away with the myth of the conquering hero or the towering artistic genius.

Sam does not see himself as the creator of the knife. He sees himself as having found it inside of this other, most unlikely object.

Sam does not see himself as the creator of the knife. He sees himself as having found it inside of this other, most unlikely object. As he worked, he let the steel tell him things. He followed what the material suggested rather than sticking to a predetermined plan. He was facilitating the process. He was the sorcerer. He did not invent magic, did not really make magic, but he employed magic. And with the rackety dance of hammer and tong, he was urging the knife into stelliferous being. In the process, he was also taming the fire.

Hundreds of thousands of years ago, an ape not all that different from us created an edge by fracturing one rock with a blow from another. Make no mistake. Such a knife is sharp enough to shave with. And at a stroke, the woolly mammoth could fall apart into bite-size pieces. It didn’t change everything, but it laid a dense, high-calorie, protein-packed feast on our table that allowed the relatively small inner workings of our gut to extract the tremendous amount of energy needed to grow these giant billowing brains we have. In a sense, the knife marked the birth of civilization.

After being ground and cleaned of oils, the blade is bathed in etching solutions to reveal its Damascus pattern.
After being ground and cleaned of oils, the blade is bathed in etching solutions to reveal its Damascus pattern.

When I came in the next morning, while I did not feel that I had missed anything crucial (Sam sitting and sanding), the knife was now a revelation. It was the right size and shape, and it was all silver. It looked like a real knife awaiting a handle.

“Wow,” I said.

Sam smiled. Then, with a sly look: “Let me show you something.”

He carried the blade to the room of giant machines. Against one wall a sink was set up with gallon-size square beakers of colored liquid, one black or dark blue, one gold. “We’ll do a two-stage etch and see what we’ve got.” He washed the blade and cleaned it with Windex. He then put the blade into the dark solution. He set the timer on his watch, and when two minutes were up, he again cleaned and rinsed the blade and put it in the golden liquid. I knew that the dark fluid was ferric chloride. I asked what the golden liquid was. Sam reached to a shelf behind the sink and brought down a half-gallon bottle. It featured a cartoon alligator and was labeled “Gator Piss.”

“What’s in it?” I asked.

Sam shrugged. “Proprietary, I guess.” He left the blade to etch and went back to his bench to tidy up. “But it works,” he said.

The trade name might seem odd to those who don’t know the history of Damascus steel. Ancient Afghan makers, for example, quenched their blades in donkey urine. Some makers during medieval times believed that only the urine of redheaded boys should be used. Other Asian smiths prescribed heating the blade until it looked “like the sun rising in the desert” and then shoving it “into the body of a muscular slave.” About quenching by murder, Sam said simply, “I don’t make weapons.”

Half an hour later, he took the blade out of the Gator Piss and washed it. He held it under the lamp. We could clearly see the Damascus pattern, with its contour map of dark hills and bright craters, its sinewy valleys and far landscapes. And we could spot his signature, or maker’s mark, which he’d electrically etched on the blade. And as with looking through a microscope, the longer you looked, the more you saw.

Sam took the blade back to the bench for finer and finer sanding. “You don’t want to make it too fine,” he said. “Or the pores will close up and you’ll start to lose the sharpness of your pattern.” He would take this Damascus to 800 grit.

He had more polishing to do, more etching. The handle was a simple shape and Sam knew it well. He’d sand and polish it, and then the eucalyptus would really look like fire. He’d glue the tang into the handle. And of course, he would sharpen the knife and shave the hair on his arm to test its razor edge.

Outside the open door, I could see that the day was high and clear with light-year blue and upward-tumbling cumulus clouds that mirrored the Damascus pattern churning in the blade.

The knife, nearly finished
The knife, nearly finished: The blade had been etched, the handle shaped. Now the epoxy holding the handle in place was left to cure.

The quenching of anxiety and stress through ordered, repetitive, directed, and meaningful physical motions is an effect well known among neuroscientists and others who work with human brains and nervous systems. The rhythmic movement is soothing. Sam had tamed the fire inside and coaxed it outside to create a work both useful and beautiful. A palliative process that would give rise to a tool that would feed us and satisfy our sensibilities with its physical beauty while doing so. All of human history would thereby be embodied in a single work of art.

On the third day, when Sam presented me with the finished knife, it was so beautiful that it took my breath away. I brought it home and cut some onion for my wife, who was making dinner. The knife slid through the flesh with no resistance. It felt like cutting air. I rinsed it and wiped it dry and during dinner we propped it up in its black velvet case and we stared at it like early humans in a cave somewhere, watching fire.

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What do you think the world will be like in 100 years?

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What do you think the world will be like in 100 years? Below are a few thoughts from 1924 and I’ll give you a link of more predictions from 1924. I want you to make a prediction of what the world will look like in 100 years from now2124.

What do you think the world will be like in 100 years? The people of 1924 certainly had some thoughts — many surprisingly prescient, and many hilariously wrong. USA Today recently rounded up a selection of 2024 predictions from a century ago, including several regarding the state of transportation.

Real estate mogul Joseph P. Day thought daily commutes to the office might be done via plane, while Swedish architect Ben Bjorkson rather accurately predicted how roadways might take over U.S. cities. “In the city of a hundred years from now, I see three-deck roads, speedways through the heart of town, skyscrapers with entrances for automobiles as high as 15 stories, monorail expresses to the suburbs replacing streetcars and motor-omnibuses, ever-moving sidewalks, and underground freight carriers which will go in all directions,” he said.

Others — like paleontologist E.L. Furlong, who thought horses would be extinct in the wild by 2024 — were thankfully wrong. But perhaps most eerily, British scientist Archibald M. Low seemed to anticipate both the internet and the rise of working from home in his book Wireless Possibilities. He wrote that future societies would be able to sign checks “by the rapid transmission of motion,” trace criminals, and conduct business remotely.

“What a help to the man who objects to a large city! Why could he not conduct his business from his house in comfort instead of having his spats washed every week in order to maintain his financial reputation?” Low said.

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Have you ever bought Girl Scout Cookies?

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Have you ever bought Girl Scout Cookies? For me it’s been a while. I can’t even remember the last time. I know my daughter bought them last year from a co-worker. I always enjoyed the mint ones.

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Skill #1: Goal Setting
Girl Scouts learn how to set goals and create a plan to reach them, enabling amazing experiences for themselves and their troops all year long, while helping others too.

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Skill #2: Decision Making
Girl Scouts learn to make decisions on their own and as a team, whether it’s how to run and promote their cookie sale, interact with customers, or spend their earnings.

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Skill #3: Money Management
Girl Scouts learn to expand their money smarts while running their own cookie business and create a budget to fund the experiences they want to share as a troop.

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Skill #4: People Skills
Girl Scouts find their voice and build confidence through customer interactions, developing valuable skills that will help them succeed in school, in business, and in life.

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Skill #5: Business Ethics
Girl Scouts learn to act ethically—lessons that will stay with them for a lifetime of leadership and success.

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Just putting this out there. From Science to Humanity’s Well-Being: 9 Extraordinary Examples of the Power of Music.

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Just putting this out there. From Science to Humanity’s Well-Being: 9 Extraordinary Examples of the Power of Music.

Anyone who listens to music — which is around 90% of the population — has likely experienced its power to soothe, stir up emotion, connect, and jog memories. Whatever the mood or moment, the soundtrack possibilities are endless. But the power of music stretches far beyond merely comforting or entertaining its listener — studies show that the art form is also full of possibilities when it comes to the world of science.

Research has proven that music can be harnessed to improve mental health, reduce pain, and otherwise profoundly affect our brains. From the fields of neurology to astronomy, music has contributed to unique advancements in the way we understand ourselves and the world. These findings support the idea that music can serve as a catalyst for healing, breaking barriers, and connecting — sometimes without us even being aware of its impact.

The relationship is a two-way street: Scientists have used music to enhance their field, and musicians have used science to enhance their art. To highlight this intersection, we compiled the below music-meets-science examples, ranging from music being used to help people with dementia to astrophysicists using planets’ orbits to create musical rhythms.

Feeling inspired to turn on a playlist? Here are a few of our favorites at Nice News: a relaxing playlistfeel-good playlist, and a powerful playlist that will “give you chills.” Happy listening!

Well-Being and Music: Using Music to Reduce Pain and Feelings of “Unpleasantness”

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Research has shown that music has the power to reduce physical pain and provide comfort. And an October 2023 paper published in Frontiers in Pain Research added to that body of research, finding that listening to your favorite songs is particularly effective.

“In our study, we show that favorite music chosen by study participants has a much larger effect on acute thermal pain reduction than unfamiliar relaxing music,” lead author Darius Valevicius said in a statement. “We also found that emotional responses play a very strong role in predicting whether music will have an effect on pain.”

The scientists also evaluated musical themes to see if they affected pain relief, and found that “moving or bittersweet emotional experiences” seemed to result in lower ratings of pain and unpleasantness.

Neurology and Music: Scientists Re-Create Pink Floyd Song by Analyzing Listeners’ Brain Waves

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In August 2023, Scientists re-created a portion of Pink Floyd’s 1979 hit “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1” by analyzing the brain waves of people listening to it.

Researchers played 90% of the song for epilepsy patients undergoing surgery to curb seizures, and trained a computer model on their neural activity collected via brain electrodes, per Science. The team then programmed the algorithm to come up with the remaining 10% — about 15 seconds of music — based on the patterns it had learned. The resulting audio is an eerie, echoey simulacrum.

“We’re on the threshold of lots of things — the fusion of neuroscience and computer engineering, and really, in many ways, the sky’s the limit,” study lead Ludovic Bellier told Fortune. The work provides insight into how the brain processes music, and may be used to help people who struggle to speak due to injuries or diseases.

Click here to listen to the result.

Mental Health and Music: Study Shows Music May Benefit Mental Health as Much as Exercise 

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Music lovers will tell you that bopping along to your favorite song is a surefire way to feel better, but a scientific review published in JAMA concluded that music’s benefit to mental health is actually comparable to that of exercise. In other words, singing your heart out in the shower could be as good for your mind as a jog around the block.

Researchers analyzed data from 26 studies involving a combined 779 adult participants. Each study measured the impact of making and listening to music on health-related quality of life (HRQOL). The review, published in March 2022, found “moderate-quality quantitative evidence of associations between music interventions and clinically significant changes in mental HRQOL.”

After comparing that evidence to data on other approaches, the authors noted that the results are within the range of the “average effects of established non–pharmaceutical and medical interventions (e.g., exercise, weight loss).” Read more.

Technology and Music: Machine Turns Heartbeats of Children With Heart Defects Into Rhythms

About 40,000 children in the U.S. are born with congenital heart defects, or CHD, each year. In an effort to hold space for this condition in an intentional way, a father of two sons who have heart issues reached out to Swedish audiovisual artist and woodworker Love Hultén.

From there, the CHD-4 was born: a unique drum-like machine that decoded electrocardiograms from four children with heart defects and transformed the patterns into sequences, which ultimately produced sounds based on their unique heartbeats (the individual shape, pace, and beats per minute).

Fast Company described Hultén’s invention as a “one-of-a-kind machine designed to produce rhythm and music where there is none,” with Hellqvist adding that “it takes dark and heavy experiences and transforms them into something beautiful. Into hope and change.”

Astrology and Music: Astrophysicists Bring a Sound to Saturn’s Moons and Rings 

Astrophysicists at the University of Toronto used music to bring a sense of Saturn to Earth — despite the planets being hundreds of millions of miles apart.

The team “converted Saturn’s moons and rings into two pieces of music,” said astrophysicist Matt Russo in a press release from the institution. They made the music based on the patterns of “orbital resonances” and “rhythmic gravitational tugs” that were then converted into musical harmony. This data was collected via the Cassini spacecraft, a mission that orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017.

Dan Tamayo, a postdoctoral researcher at CITA and the Centre for Planetary Sciences at U of T Scarborough, explained: “Saturn’s magnificent rings act like a sounding board that launches waves at locations that harmonize with the planet’s many moons, and some pairs of moons are themselves locked in resonances.”

This isn’t the only time music has been created from the cosmos. You can hear the moons of Jupiterheartbeat stars, and sonification from data of a black hole at the center of the Milky Way, along with an exciting universe of planetary playlists created through SYSTEM Sounds: a sci-art outreach project co-founded by Russo and Tamayo.

Cognitive Function and Music: The Role of Music on People With Cognitive Impairments

Many studies have explored music as a bridge to memory, identity, and expression for people with dementia. For example, music was shown to elicit pleasurable responses (like smiling and dancing) even in later stages of the disease when verbal communication wasn’t accessible. It was also shown to spark connection between patients and caregivers and facilitate episodic memory recall.

A March study published in Alzheimer’s Research and Therapy also found that while music helped improve cognitive functions of patients with Alzheimer’s, the influence was even greater when the patients were involved in the music making.

Attention and Music: Using Music to Stay Focused

Have trouble staying focused? Consider turning on some tunes. A Stanford study showed that “music moves [the] brain to pay attention” by engaging certain areas and, ultimately, increasing cognitive activity. Per a press release from the institution, “Music engages the brain over a period of time … and the process of listening to music could be a way that the brain sharpens its ability to anticipate events and sustain attention.”

That being said, music isn’t broadly beneficial to every task on your to-do list. Psychologists have found that music is more distracting than beneficial when it comes to studying.

“Multitasking is a fallacy; human beings are not capable of truly multitasking because attention is a limited resource, and you can only focus on so much without a cost,” cognitive psychologist Brian Anderson said in a Texas A&M University press release. “So when you’re doing two things at the same time, like studying and listening to music, and one of the things requires cognitive effort, there will be a cost to how much information you can retain doing both activities.”

Artificial Intelligence and Music: AI Completing the Beatles’ Final Song

Forty-five years after John Lennon first started working on the song, artificial intelligence put the finishing touches on what we know today as “Now and Then.” According to the official video’s description, the unexpected gift is thanks to a software system that allowed for the song to be completed with contributions from all four Beatles in the piece — and is a reflection of the band’s “endless creative curiosity and shared fascination with technology.”

There’s no question AI is changing the way music is being curated, played, and created, and this is one example of how it can be used to salvage something beautiful.

“It marks the completion of the last recording that John, Paul, George, and Ringo will get to make together,” the video’s description reads, “and celebrates the legacy of the foremost and most influential band in popular music history.”

Music and Togetherness: Singing With Others Is Good for Us 

Vladimir Vladimirov/ iStock

A growing body of research shows that singing together at any occasion boosts well-being. One of the reasons for that is endorphins, those happy hormones runners are always going on about.

“Singing is one of the mega-mechanisms we use for bonding,” Robin Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Oxford, told The Guardian. “Singing in the shower gives you a bit of an uplift, but when doing it communally, there’s something about the synchrony of singing that creates this massive endorphin uplift.”

Dunbar set out to prove singing’s bonding power in a 2015 study, in which strangers sang together for an hour and left as, well, not strangers. “It was as if they’d known each other since primary school,” he recalled.

He noted that the prolonged exhalation and breath work required while singing likely contributes to its health benefits. Going forward, this research could help inform therapies for dementia, Parkinson’s, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, long COVID, and more.

 

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The only bad taco salad is a taco salad you don’t eat! Spice up taco night with these this scrumptious recipe.

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The only bad taco is a taco you don’t eat! Spice up taco night with these this scrumptious recipe.

INGREDIENTS

 

INSTRUCTIONS

 

1.Heat oil in a skillet over high heat. Add ground beef. Stir fry, breaking up the pieces with a spatula, for about 7-10 minutes, until the beef is browned, and moisture has evaporated.

2. Stir taco seasoning into the ground beef until well combined. If you like, you can also add 1/4 cup of water when adding the seasoning and let it simmer a bit.

3. Meanwhile, combine all remaining ingredients in a large bowl. Add the ground beef. Toss everything together.

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