My Science School

The Sahara in North Africa is the largest hot desert and the third largest desert in the world. Spread over an area of 9.4 million sq km, the desert covers large sections of as many as 11 countries such as Egypt Libya. Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Sudan. Did you know only one quarter of the desert is sandy? The rest is made up of rocky plateaus, gravel, salt flats, dry valleys and oases.

The Sahara is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the west, the Red Sea to the east, the Mediterranean Sea to the north and the Sahel savanna to the south. The enormous desert spans 10 countries (Algeria, Chad, Egypt, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Sudan and Tunisia) as well as the territory of Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony that was annexed by Morocco in 1975, though control of the region is disputed by the Indigenous Saharawi people.

The Sahara desert has a variety of land features, but it is most famous for the sand dune fields that are often depicted in movies. The dunes can reach almost 600 feet (183 meters) high, and they cover about 25% of the entire desert, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica. Other topographical features include mountains, plateaus, sand- and gravel-covered plains, salt flats, basins and depressions. Emi Koussi, an extinct volcano in Chad, is the highest point in the Sahara, reaching 11,204 feet (3,415 m) above sea level,  and the Qattara Depression in northwestern Egypt is the Sahara's deepest point, at 436 feet (133 m) below sea level.

Despite the harsh, arid conditions of the Sahara, many plant and animal species call the region home. Approximately 500 plant species, 70 mammalian species, 90 avian species, 100 reptilian species and numerous species of spiders, scorpions and other small arthropods live in the Sahara. The camel is one of the most iconic animals of the Sahara, though its ancestors originated in North America. Other mammal residents of the Sahara include gazelles, addaxes (a type of antelope), cheetahs, caracals, desert foxes and wild dogs. Many reptiles also thrive in the desert environment, including several species of snakes, lizards and even crocodiles in places where there is enough water. Several arthropod species also call the Sahara home, such as dung beetles, scarab beetles, "deathstalker" scorpions and many types of ants.

Today, the Sahara has a dry, inhospitable desert climate. The past 2,000 years or so, the climate of the Sahara has been fairly stable — and dry. The northeastern winds strip moisture from the air over the desert and drive hot winds toward the equator.

Credit : Live science

Picture Credit : Google 

The tradition of decorated gingerbread houses began in Germany in the early 1800s, supposedly popularised after the not-so-Christmassy fairytale of Hansel and Gretel was published in 1812. The Grimms’ original fairy tale includes the line: “When they came nearer they saw that the house was built of bread, and roofed with cakes, and the window was of transparent sugar.” (In later versions it became gingerbread, rather than just bread.) Inspired by the story, German bakers began to craft small decorated houses from lebkuchen, spiced honey biscuits.

The origins of gingerbread are not precise. Ginger root was first cultivated in China around 5,000 years ago, and was thought to have medicinal and magical properties. When its usefulness as a preservative was discovered is unclear, but some food historians say that the first known recipe for gingerbread dates from around 2400 BC in Greece. Others trace its history to 992 AD, when Armenian monk Gregory of Nicopolis is thought to have taught Christian bakers in France how to make it. Later references include a gingerbread guild in Germany, probably formed in the 15th century to protect the rights of certain bakers. At around the same time, nuns in Sweden were baking gingerbread to ease indigestion.

In 2017, Jon Lovitch, sous-chef at the New York Marriott Marquis Hotel, broke the record for the fourth time for the “largest gingerbread village”. It was displayed at the New York Hall of Science. Another contender was the Pepperkakebyen (Gingerbread Town) in Bergen, Norway (on display until 31 December, £9). In 2015 it had more than 2,000 individual buildings that lit up, as well as ships, cars and a train. But only 1,020 of the structures were made of gingerbread, and it was denied the record for including non-edible components.

The walled medieval town of Dinkelsbühl, southern Germany, is often thought of as a real-life town of gingerbread houses. Its picturesque and well-preserved historic centre has gabled half-timbered buildings in yellow and peach, a church, a little town square and cobbled streets.

Credit : The Guardian 

Picture Credit : Google

Today it’s the most popular cookie in America, but the original Toll House Cookie, the first chocolate chip cookie, was invented right here in New England by Ruth Wakefield at the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts, during the 1930s. Made with flour, brown sugar, semi-sweet chocolate chips, and walnuts (the nuts are optional, of course — it may be that only the great “hot or cold” lobster roll debate is more passionately argued than “nuts or no nuts”), Toll House cookies are a simple drop cookie that children, adults, and even Santa Claus can agree on.

They were invented, it turns out, as a happy accident. Ruth and her husband had purchased the 1709 toll house in 1930 with plans to turn it into an inn (appropriately named the Toll House Inn) since the location was perfectly situated between Boston and New Bedford. A former dietician and food lecturer with a passion for quality cookery, Ruth was experimenting in the kitchen one day when she decided to take a bar of Nestle semi-sweet chocolate and break it up into bits, which she added to a butter drop cookie batter. When she took them out of the oven, she was surprised to see that the chocolate hadn’t melted, and the firm bits gave the cookies a unique (and addictive) crunch.

She liked the texture so much she called them Chocolate Crunch Cookies, and added the recipe to her collection.

The recipe made its way to a Boston newspaper, and as its popularity grew, so did the sale of Nestle chocolate bars. With Ruth’s permission, Nestle began printing the recipe on the bar’s wrapper, and in 1939, they started selling the chocolate bits on their own in bags, calling them “morsels.” The recipe, nearly identical to the original Toll House Cookie recipe, is still printed on each bag today.

Credit : New England

Picture Credit : Google

If a poster could describe Homer Simpson, it’d be him with all things junk. From burgers to pizzas, Homer loves it all. But if there’s one thing he can’t live without, it’s doughnuts.

Homer Jay Simpson is a fictional character and one of the main characters of the American animated sitcom The Simpsons. He is voiced by Dan Castellaneta and first appeared on television, along with the rest of his family, in The Tracey Ullman Show short "Good Night" on April 19, 1987. Homer was created and designed by cartoonist Matt Groening while he was waiting in the lobby of James L. Brooks' office. Groening had been called to pitch a series of shorts based on his comic strip Life in Hell but instead decided to create a new set of characters. He named the character after his father, Homer Groening. After appearing for three seasons on The Tracey Ullman Show, the Simpson family got their own series on Fox, which debuted December 17, 1989. The show was later acquired by Disney in 2019.

Homer is one of the most influential characters in the history of television, and is widely considered to be an American cultural icon. The British newspaper The Sunday Times described him as "The greatest comic creation of [modern] time". He was named the greatest character "of the last 20 years" in 2010 by Entertainment Weekly, was ranked the second-greatest cartoon character by TV Guide, behind Bugs Bunny, and was voted the greatest television character of all time by Channel 4 viewers. For voicing Homer, Castellaneta has won four Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Voice-Over Performance and a special-achievement Annie Award. In 2000, Homer and his family were awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Picture Credit : Google

Baked Alaska, also known as Bombe Alaska, omelette norvégienne, omelette surprise, or omelette sibérienne depending on the country, is a dessert consisting of ice cream and cake topped with browned meringue. The dish is made of ice cream placed in a pie dish, lined with slices of sponge cake or Christmas pudding, and topped with meringue. The entire dessert is then placed in an extremely hot oven for a brief time, long enough to firm and caramelize the meringue but not long enough to begin melting the ice cream.

The meringue insulates the ice cream while the dessert is browning and you end up with a delicious mixture of flavors and textures, the most surprising of which is the ice cream center that doesn’t melt while it is in the oven! Many chefs are credited with the invention of the dessert, and there were many hot-and-cold dessert pairings served as ice cream became widely available, but the name “Baked Alaska” was coined at Delmonico’s Restaurant in New York City in 1876 to honor the recently acquired American territory of Alaska.

Baked Alaska is not a difficult dessert to make at home, since it has only three components: cake, ice cream and meringue. You can easily put your own spin on the original recipe by using brownies or pound cake, instead of a plain sponge cake, and you can even use store-bought cake instead of homemade. The ice cream flavors can be mixed and matched to suit your tastes, too. The only element of this dessert that you can’t change is the meringue. You need to make a classic meringue with eggs and sugar to finish the dessert off properly, since the air pockets created by whipping the egg whites are what insulate the ice cream while the dessert is browning. It’s a fantastic dessert to impress a crowd with, and since the base can be prepared well in advance and frozen, it is a great make-ahead dessert when you want to serve something special without being pressed for time.

Credit : Baking Bites 

Picture Credit : Google

A s'more is a traditional camping snack that has been popular with kids—and their parents!— for years and years. Although many different varieties of s'mores have developed over time, the s'more is basically a sandwich of roasted marshmallows and chocolate between graham crackers.

S'mores are usually made by the campfire. Marshmallows are roasted over the fire until they're gooey. Then graham crackers with pieces of a chocolate candy bar are used to sandwich the gooey roasted marshmallow. Many kids mash the combination together so that the heat from the marshmallow will melt the chocolate.

This sweet, warm, gooey, delicious treat always leaves kids wanting more. In fact, that's probably how they got their name. S'more is thought to be a contraction of the phrase, “some more," as in “I want some more of those s'mores!"

No one knows for sure who invented the s'more. However, the first published recipe for “some mores" was in a 1927 publication called Tramping and Trailing with the Girl Scouts. Loretta Scott Crew, who made them for Girl Scouts by the campfire, is given credit for the recipe.

So even though we don't know for sure whether the Girl Scouts were the first to make “some mores," no one else has claimed to have invented them. We also don't know when the name got shortened to “s'more" as recipes for “some mores" appeared in Girl Scout publications until at least 1971.

Credit :  Wonderopolis 

Picture Credit : Google

The history of the waffle cone dates back over a century beginning with Abe Doumar. Doumar, a traveling salesman who spent his days selling paperweights to visitors at the World’s Fair in St. Louis, had an epiphany one day while strolling the fairgrounds. One evening, Abe saw the owner of an ice cream stand packing up his things to close because they’d run out of the paper bowls used to serve ice cream. At another stand nearby, a man was making waffles on a single-iron waffle maker. Abe bought a waffle, rolled it into a cone and topped it with ice cream, resulting them in the world’s first waffle ice cream cone! In the following days, the ice cream vendor and waffle salesman continued operating under one stand, selling ice cream cones.

After the fair ended, Abe – an immigrant from Damascus, Syria – began a business with the help of family. He built a four-iron waffle machine from scratch (that is still used today.) What made this particular machine different is that the four-iron machine allowed Abe to roll a waffle while three others cooked. In 1905, Abe opened the first of what would become a chain of Doumar’s ice cream stands stretching from Coney Island to Jacksonville, Florida. Two years later, in 1907, Abe and his brother George opened a stand in Norfolk at the Ocean View Amusement Park. The park, now gone, was once the most popular oceanfront destination and the stand was launched during the 1907 Jamestown Exhibition and became the most successful of all of the Doumar family’s stands. Because of this, Abe relocated to Norfolk permanently.

Credit : Culture Trip

Picture Credit : Google

These days, Thanksgiving is all about the food—from the classic turkey to delicious pumpkin pie, Americans look forward to overindulging on favorite foods that we associate with the harvest bounty of 17th-century Massachusetts. But did they have these beloved Thanksgiving foods at the first Thanksgiving in 1621? A deeper look reveals that our "traditional" Thanksgiving feast may not be as traditional as we think.

The Pilgrims’ autumn harvest of 1621 was plentiful. Of course, they owed a lot of that success to their Wampanoag neighbors, who had helped them grow crops and taught them how to survive in the brutal climate of coastal Massachusetts. The harvest festival took three days, during which the Pilgrims and Indians feasted and celebrated. Approximately half of the original settlers died during the first year, and only four women remained alive by the fall of 1621, so the meal was likely prepared largely by men. 

There would not have been cranberry sauce, though they might have had raw cranberries. There were no mashed potatoes, since the potato didn't make its way to North America until the 18th century. There was no pumpkin pie—they didn’t have a baking oven in Plimoth Plantation—but there might have been pumpkin served other ways, since both the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag ate pumpkin and other indigenous squashes.

On the table would have been local root vegetables like carrots and onions, dried fruits and nuts, venison (provided by the Wampanoag), fish such as bass, and shellfish like mussels and lobster. They might have had corn, though it would have been more of a cornmeal mush, known as "samp." There is also an account that mentions a "great store of Wild turkies," so it is likely that turkey was on the menu at the first Thanksgiving, in addition to other wild fowl such as duck and goose.

Credit : Gilder Lehrman 

Picture Credit : Google

For more than 80 years, Girl Scouts have sold cookies to raise funds to support their scouting activities. Today, the sale of Girl Scout Cookies raises more than $700 million each year, making the Girl Scout Cookie Program the largest girl-led business in the country!

Girl Scout Cookies got their start in the kitchens of Girl Scouts and their mothers. Girl Scouts began to sell cookies as a way to finance their scouting activities as early as 1917, just five years after Juliette “Daisy" Gordon Low started the first Girl Scout group in Savannah, Georgia.

In July 1922, Girl Scout national headquarters published an edition of The American Girl magazine for all Girl Scouts. The issue contained a recipe for a sugar cookie that could be baked and sold to raise funds for local councils. Thus, the simple sugar cookie was arguably the first true Girl Scout Cookie.

In 1934, Greater Philadelphia became the first Girl Scout council to sell commercially baked cookies. In 1935, the Girl Scout Federation of Greater New York used the words "Girl Scout Cookies" on their boxes of commercially baked cookies for the first time.

Girl Scout leaders believe selling cookies helps Girl Scouts realize their full potential and become strong, confident and resourceful citizens. In fact, Girl Scout leaders have identified five essential skills that Girl Scouts develop by selling Girl Scout Cookies: goal setting, decision making, money management, people skills and business ethics.

Girl Scouts set sales goals to support their chosen activities for the year, which might include funding community service projects, attending summer camp, traveling on field trips and providing events for girls in their community. Many successful businesswomen today say they got their start selling Girl Scout Cookies.

Credit : Wonderopolis 

Picture Credit : Google

The World's Largest Cupcake record now belongs to Georgetown Cupcake at Georgetown Cupcake's national headquarters in Sterling, Virginia, though the picture here is from the previous world record holder.. On November 2, 2011, the bakery created a cupcake weighing 2,594 lbs, according to Guinness World Records.

Everything is certainly bigger in Texas. The World's Largest Gingerbread House was created in 2013 in Bryan, Texas. It covered 2,520 square feet, and was 21 ft in height. This 35.8 million-calorie treat has been named the biggest gingerbread house ever by the Guinness World Records.

The Food Network's Duff Goldman lives up to his Ace of Cakes title by baking the largest cupcake in history — now entered in the Guinness Book of World Records. The 61.4-pound creation is more than a foot tall and entirely edible. Reportedly 150 times the size of a regular cupcake, this record-breaker called for 16 pounds of butter, 10 pounds of sugar, and three ounces of food coloring. The mammoth confection supported the Great American Bake Sale, which raised $10,000 and awareness for Share Our Strength, a charity working to fight hunger across America.

Picture Credit : Google

Cacao has carried deep cultural meaning since it was first domesticated. For the Olmec, an early Mexican Gulf Coast culture (1500 to 400 BC), this plant had geological, nutritional, spiritual, and economic significance. As the first society known to have domesticated the cacao tree, the Olmec found the crop to be spiritually and culturally significant in addition to being a healthful and delicious foodstuff. Theobromine (a chemical compound present in cacao) found in excavated Olmec pottery and at ancient burial sites revealed that cacao beverages were a staple in a variety of spiritual ceremonies (Powis 2011).

The question becomes, why cacao? According to the Popol Vuh, the Mayan creation text, the gods created humans from a combination of sweet things, maize, and cacao (Driess and Greenhill 2008, 18-22). In addition, many ancient artifacts depicted cacao offerings between gods such as the Mayan moon goddess IxChel and the rain god Chac who are seen trading cacao in an ancient Mayan depiction. This iconography rooted the tree’s capacity as a conduit of communication with the gods. Known as the “World Tree” or the “First Tree,” this crop became the tree of life and a cosmic metaphor linking the natural world to the spirit world. Thus, the offering of cacao functioned to symbolically connect diviners with the gods through ritual. The bounty of the cacao tree in Mesoamerica also created a metaphorical link to abundance, which was a request to the gods in agrarian and funerary rites. As Driess and Greenhill state, “Obsession with time and calendrical events fueled rituals during which cacao offerings helped to ensure the continuation of cosmic and agricultural cycles” (2008, 52). Cacao drinks were left in tombs and beans were used to adorn the bodies of the dead as it was believed that cacao had the power to energize the soul and aid in the transition to the supernatural world. The deep spiritual meaning of cacao catalyzed its importance in Olmec society.

Generally sought out for religious purposes by the Olmec, cacao didn’t become a food of conspicuous consumption until the Aztec and Mayan eras when cacao was served at feasts, weddings, birth ceremonies and other social occasions (Henderson 2015, 84).  As the crop gained exposure, demand was created and soon cacao was present at nearly every commensal dining event, becoming a staple in the Mesoamerican diet.  Popularly consumed as a beverage, the Olmec fermented the cacao with pulp intact.  In the early days, cacao beverages were produced solely from the pulp of the fruit.  The discovery of the more familiar chocolate drink might have been a happy accident as a by-product of the pulp brewing process (Edgar 2010).

After fermentation, cacao beans were mixed with water, vanilla, cinnamon, and sometimes a red chili.  The beverage is generally made by women who dutifully raised the foam on the drink before consumption.  The foam was thought to contain the essence of the wind god P’ee and still today, the amount of foam raised is a measure of a woman’s worth.  After the drink was prepared and the foam was raised, the cacao beverage was ready for use in ceremony or prescribed as a remedy for ailments.  Cacao was used to cure skin conditions, fever, seizures and in the most severe matters used to coax illness out of the body by appealing to the spirits with an offering of beans or a blended concoction containing the fruit (Dreiss and Greenhill 2008, 136).

Over time, chocolate has become a beverage enjoyed by cultures all over the world, but cacao was an incredibly significant crop to the Olmec during the Formative Period in Mesoamerica. The abundance, healing, and nutritional properties of the crop made it seem a true gift from the Gods, and created a foundation for its integration into the cultural identity and landscape of Mesoamerica.

Credit : Boston University 

Picture Credit : Google