Parrot

 

Taste of Home

This recipe for sweet Cinnamon Crunch Bagels will bring Panera to your kitchen. It's time to get your crunch on!

Few decisions in life are as stressful as bagel selection at Panera. OK, we might be exaggerating a bit, but when you’re faced with choices like chocolate chip, blueberry and Asiago before 8 a.m., it can get overwhelming.

When in doubt, we think a Panera Cinnamon Crunch Bagel is always a great choice. There’s something magical about that crunchy, cinnamon-sugar topping once it’s toasted and slathered with a smear of flavorful cream cheese. Delicious!

Re-create a bit of that bagel magic at home (and avoid bagel decision stress) with this copycat Panera Cinnamon Crunch Bagel recipe, complete with that addicting crunch topping. Keep reading to learn how to whip up a batch of homemade bagels that are better than the bakery.

Panera Cinnamon Crunch Bagel Recipe
This recipe makes 12 heavenly bagels.
Ingredients

• 2-1/4 cups (530ml) water, between 105-115°F
• 3-1/4 teaspoons (10g) instant or active dry yeast
• 6 cups (720g) bread flour, plus more for dusting
• 1-1/2 tablespoons (19g) light or dark brown sugar, packed
• 3 teaspoons (18g) salt
• 8 cups water
• 1/4 cup (60g) honey
• 1 egg white
• 1 tablespoon water

Cinnamon Crunch Topping:

• 1/4 cup (60g) unsalted butter, melted
• 2/3 cup (134g) packed light or dark brown sugar
• 1 tablespoon (8g) ground cinnamon
• 2-1/2 tablespoons (20g) all-purpose flour or bread flour

Editor’s tip: While all-purpose flour can be used in a pinch, we don’t recommend it. To achieve the right chewy bagel texture, stick with a high-protein flour, like bread flour, for the best results. 

FOR THE DIRECTIONS ON HOW TO PREPARE AND COOK THESE CINNAMON BAGELS, CLICK HERE...

Diving Pelicans

 

Fake Friends

Pond Sailing

 

SEX in SPACE

Houston, we have a problem! Love and sex need to happen in space if we hope to travel long distances and become an interplanetary species, but space organizations are not ready.

National agencies and private space companies — such as NASA and SpaceX — aim to colonize Mars and send humans into space for long-term missions, but they have yet to address the intimate and sexual needs of astronauts or future space inhabitants.

This situation is untenable and needs to change if we hope to settle new worlds and continue our expansion in the cosmos — we’ll need to learn how to safely reproduce and build pleasurable intimate lives in space. To succeed, however, we also need space organizations to adopt a new perspective on space exploration: one that considers humans as whole beings with needs and desires.

As researchers exploring the psychology of human sexuality and studying the psychosocial aspects of human factors in space, we propose that it is high time for space programs to embrace a new discipline: space sexology, the comprehensive scientific study of extraterrestrial intimacy and sexuality.

The final, intimate frontier
Love and sex are central to human life. Despite this, national and private space organizations are moving forward with long-term missions to the International Space Station (ISS), the moon and Mars without any concrete research and plans to address human eroticism in space. It’s one thing to land rovers on another planet or launch billionaires into orbit — it’s another to send humans to live in space for extended periods of time.

In practice, rocket science may take us to outer space, but it will be human relations that determine if we survive and thrive as a spacefaring civilization. In that regard, we argue that limiting intimacy in space could jeopardize the mental and sexual health of astronauts, along with crew performance and mission success. On the other hand, enabling space eroticism could help humans adapt to space life and enhance the well-being of future space inhabitants.  READ MORE...

NOTE:
This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Simon Dubé, PhD candidate, Psychology of Human Sexuality, Erobotics & Space Sexology, Concordia University

Dave Anctil, Chercheur affilié à l'Observatoire international sur les impacts sociétaux de l’intelligence artificielle et du numérique (OBVIA), Université Laval

Judith Lapierre, Professor, Faculty of Nursing Science, Université Laval

Hummingbirds

 

Strengthening the Brain

The MIND diet is a hybrid of the Mediterranean diet and the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension diet (its name is a combo of those two diets). And it just passed its latest test.

In a study published in September in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease scientists show the MIND diet can slow cognitive decline and reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s disease dementia.

This held true despite the fact that study participant’s brains still developed the abnormal clumps of proteins associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

First author Klodian Dhana is an assistant professor at Rush University. His focus is on identifying risk factors of dementia. In the absence of a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, scientists aim to identify which modifiable lifestyle factors can lower the risk of cognitive decline. Nutrition, he tells me, “has gained interest because it can be readily modified.”

“I hope the findings of this study motivate people to practice a healthier lifestyle through nutrition, exercise, and cognitive activities,” he says.

HOW THE DISCOVERY WAS MADE — Dhana and colleagues examined data pulled from Rush University’s ongoing Memory and Aging Project representing 569 participants. These individuals lived in the greater Chicago area and began sharing their vitals in 1997. In 2004, an annual food frequency questionnaire was thrown into the mix, which evaluated how often they ate specific foods. All participants agreed to undergo clinical evaluations while they were alive and a brain autopsy when they died.

Each participant was assigned a MIND diet score based on how closely they adhered to meals within it. Within the MIND diet are 10 brain-healthy food groups and five unhealthy groups: The unhealthy group includes butter and stick margarine, cheese, fried and fast food, pastries and sweets, and red meat.  READ MORE...

Scratcher

 

Rule of Reappraisals

"It's 6:00 p.m. already???"

I was in disbelief. The day was over and I still had a mountain of tasks on my desk. Where had the time gone?

The day was a failure.

Or was it?

As I sat back in my chair, overwhelmed by the sheer amount of work ahead of me, I remembered a lesson a friend taught me some years ago.

It's a lesson I now like to call:

The rule of reappraisal

What's the rule of reappraisal?

As a young man, many years ago, I embarked on a major undertaking: I began learning Tagalog (Filipino), my father's native language.

It was exciting and rewarding to learn a new language, especially one that taught me so much about my father's culture and my own roots. But it was also extremely frustrating -- because as hard as I worked, I couldn't always express myself the way I wanted. The word I needed often seemed to be just beyond my grasp, and my grammar was full of mistakes.

After one especially challenging day, I broke down in frustration to a close friend. He told me something I've never forgotten, and his advice is what I refer to today as the rule of reappraisal:

Don't focus on what you have ahead of you. Instead, look back on what you already accomplished.

This pearl of wisdom helped me to change my perspective. Learning a language is a never-ending journey -- even for native speakers -- so focusing on the path ahead is self-defeating. After all, there will always be more to learn.

But what happened when I took a look behind?

Just a few years before, I could barely say a few words in Tagalog. Now, I could hold a full conversation. I could enjoy Filipino movies and humor (although I didn't get every joke). I even took a trip to the Philippines, by myself, which turned out to be a life-changing experience.  READ MORE...

Nylons

 

A Few Laughs

 

Biden and the Dems

 

Relocating

 

Cleaning Coffee Mugs

Whose bright idea was it to make all insides of coffee mugs white? As a coffee expert, I’m all too familiar with coffee stains in general, but especially the ones that mar the insides of my favorite mugs, thus making them look embarrassingly dirty. “Thanks for coming over for dinner! Here’s coffee in a gross-looking mug!”

While these stains don’t come out with regular hand-washing or stints in the dishwasher, there are a few different things you can do lift them. Which one is best and easiest? I was determined to find out! So I tried five different methods and recorded my results. Here are my findings.

How I Tested the Methods for Cleaning Coffee Stains Inside Mugs
I rooted around in the cabinet and found my five favorite mugs, which, with near-constant use, also happened to be the most stained. I brewed a strong batch of coffee and poured about two ounces of liquid in the bottom of each one. Then, I let it all sit on the counter to soak in. Once the liquid had evaporated and the coffee oils had left a nice, tough layer on top of the already-lingering stains, it was time to get to work by cleaning each one using five popular and proven methods!

The ratings: I ranked each stain-removal approach from 1 to 5, with 5 being the easiest and/or most efficient and 1 being the hardest and/or least efficient. While each technique and tool managed to leave the mugs clean, some required more work either during or after the job was done. Along with the rating, you’ll find more detailed notes from my tests.  READ MORE...

Elephant Dance

 

Neanderthal Man

A recreation of a Neanderthal man’s face is turning heads all over the world – not only for its strong resemblance to our own physiognomy today but also because of the good humor it exudes, as much as 70,000 years after the man died.

What almost everybody instantly recognizes is that this man, nicknamed “Krijn,” who was not even a Homo sapiens, has a magnetic personality that still radiates over the millennia.

As Live Science reports, experts from Kennis & Kennis Reconstructions created the face of the young Neanderthal man from a piece of skull discovered from the North Sea off the coast of the Netherlands twenty years ago.

Face of Neanderthal charms the world
Using what they already knew from the Neanderthals’ sturdy bone structure, the researchers also gleaned information from other skulls that have been found and data regarding their eye, skin, and hair color to help in the recreation of the Neanderthal’s grinning face.

Believed to have lived in Doggerland, which was once dry land but now forms the seabed in the North Sea between the United Kingdom and continental Europe, he died between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago, according to the researchers.  READ MORE...

Sheep Dogs

 

Dark Energy On Earth

DARK ENERGY ISN’T just dark — it's nigh invisible.

Hypothesized by physicists to drive the accelerating expansion of the universe, dark energy has never been directly observed or measured. Instead, scientists can only make inferences about it from its effects on the space and matter we can see.


Finding measurable hints of dark energy’s effects on distance objects — and the shape of space itself — is a major goal of major NASA missions, such as the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

But in a new paper published September 15 in the journal Physical Review D a group of cosmologists suggests researchers might not need to peer deep into the cosmos to make second-hand observations of dark energy — it may have been detected right here on Earth.

WHAT’S NEW — In the paper, the researchers claim that hints of dark energy were detected at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy during an experiment designed to detect dark matter.

The team, comprised mostly of theorists, looked at data from the XENON1T, an experiment designed to detect rare interactions between hypothetical dark matter particles and components of the noble gas xenon held in a special detector.

The odds that dark energy has been detected directly are admittedly low, Jeremy Sakstein, assistant professor of theoretical physics at the University of Hawaii and one of the paper’s authors, tells Inverse.

“There are other explanations for this signal as well,” he says, and at the moment, “we don't know whether it's just a statistical anomaly.”

Statistically, there is a 5 percent chance the detection was an anomaly. The detection of the 2012 discovery Higgs Boson, by comparison, was much more certain — there was only a chance in about 3.5 million that detection was anomalous.  READ MORE...

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