Another Saturday in South Mississippi….

Locally–typical winter weather is on the back burner….highs near 80 and lows in low 70s and fog as thick as pea soup….wonderful time to be out and about.

Mississippi has a bill in the legislature that will basically make it illegal to be homeless.

Personal–more tests and more stuff medically….I got the bill for the radiation treatments I had last month and without insurance the price tag is $75,000….ain’t this health care system great?

Let’s begin….

Egg prices are on the rise again but why if chickens are being destroyed why are wings not rising as well?

With Super Bowl Sunday approaching, NPR looks at a different kind of chicken versus egg question: Why has the price of chicken wings remained stable while egg prices have soared? The answer, it turns out, is simple. The broiler chickens used for meat production have much shorter lives than egg-laying chickens, meaning there is less time for them to get infected with the bird flu that has devastated egg-laying flocks. Broiler chickens are typically slaughtered at around seven weeks, which is around 11 weeks younger than the youngest hens start laying eggs. Older birds “are more susceptible to the virus,” Tom Super of the National Chicken Council tells NPR.

Broiler chickens live on different farms than egg-laying chickens—and while they’re not immune to the virus, broiler flocks can be replaced a lot faster than egg-laying flocks. The current price of chicken wings is slightly below the five-year average, according to NPR, though Texas A&M Today reports that prices are expected to rise slightly as fans gear up for the Super Bowl. “The Super Bowl has always driven demand for wings, and that is not going to change,” says David Anderson, a livestock expert at the Texas A&M Department of Agricultural Economics.

“But wings have also become an everyday menu item, which means we are seeing other spikes throughout the year likely based on supply and demand,” Anderson says. “Wings were a poultry cut that used to be practically worthless,” he notes. “Then someone tossed them in some buffalo sauce and dipped them in blue cheese or ranch dressing.” According to the National Chicken Council’s Chicken Wing Report, wing sales during the NFL playoffs were up 12% year-on-year. The NCC says Americans will consume 1.47 billion wings during Sunday’s game, enough to circle the world three times.

Personally not a big fan of wings….I do not like paying for something I cannot eat….the bone and boneless wings are just chicken nuggets with some sauce.

More food stuff….could Italian food be good fighting depression?

A hot slice of pizza and a glass of red wine? Heaven. A big, hearty lasagna after a long day of work? Pure bliss. If you’re like me and salivate at just the thought of Italian food, you’ll want to listen up. New research shows that a natural plant extract found in tomatoes could actually help fight depression—and not just at dinner time.

A study published this week in the journal Food Science & Nutrition looked at how lycopene treatment affected mice with depressive-like behaviors. Lycopene is an organic compound that gives tomatoes and other red and pink fruits their pigment.

According to a press release, the depressed mice had impairments in the hippocampus, the part of the brain that helps with learning and memory. When they received the lycopene treatment, these impairments decreased, and their depressive states improved.

https://bestlifeonline.com/lycopene-depression/

I remember back many years ago there was a prediction that humans would be living underwater…..and there is a test going on now….

Some rich folks think the future of human habitation is on Mars. But at least one deep-pocketed investor suggests an alternative is right here on Earth—under the sea. The Guardian explores an ambitious project known as Deep underway in Wales. It’s being funded by a single anonymous investor, with the goal to establish a “permanent human presence” beneath the sea by 2027, writes Lisa Bachelor. The testing is taking place at an abandoned quarry near Chepstow, now flooded. Engineers are building a human habitat in the 260-foot-deep artificial lake, made up of interlocking individual units called sentinels. Submersibles would ferry people up and down—and engineers insist theirs are safe, rejecting comparisons to the fatal breakup of the Titan submersible in 2023.

“The goal is to live in the ocean, forever,” says Mike Shackleford, the project’s chief operating officer. “To have permanent human settlements in all oceans across the world.” While similar experiments have taken place over the years, Deep is the largest-scale one to date. The story explains that scientists still have much to learn about surviving at depths where no human was meant to survive, and an above-ground simulator will help with that. The challenges aren’t all life-and-death: Chef Joe Costa, for example, discusses the difficulty of preparing meals for underwater occupants. “The first hurdle was the challenge of actually being able to taste anything at depth because your tastebuds are suppressed by the pressure change,” he says. The food he prepares would therefore be too strong for landlubbers.

Read the full story.

Decade ago the US set an ambitious goal of eliminating food waste…..and how is that going for us?  Hint:  Not do good.

The United States is nowhere near its goal of cutting food waste in half by 2030, according to new analysis from the University of California, Davis. 

In September 2015, the U.S. set an ambitious target of reducing its food loss and waste by 50 percent. The idea was to reduce the amount of food that ends up in landfills, where it emits greenhouse gases as it decomposes, a major factor contributing to climate change.

Researchers at UC Davis looked at state policies across the country and estimated how much food waste each state was likely reducing in 2022. They found that, without more work being done at the federal level, no state is on track to achieve the national waste reduction goal. 

Researchers calculated that, even when taking reduction measures into account, the U.S. still generates about 328 pounds of food waste per person annually — which is also how much waste was being generated per person in 2016, shortly after the EPA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced the waste-cutting goal. 

These figures indicate that even our best strategies for eliminating waste aren’t enough to meet our goals, said Sarah Kakadellis, lead author of the study published in Nature this month.

In order to assess how the U.S. is doing to meet its food waste reduction goals, Kakadellis and her team used both publicly available data (from ReFED, a nonprofit that monitors food waste in the U.S.) and estimates based on the current policy landscape. 

https://www.popsci.com/science/food-waste/

This is for all those comic book fans.

There is a wealth of subject matter in these forms of literature about he multiverse…..a flight of fancy, right?

Cosmologist Laura Mersini-Houghton from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has proposed that our universe came from a quantum wave function, generating multiple universes alongside our own – in other words, the multiverse. This theory suggests that the universe’s earliest moments can be explained by quantum mechanics, offering a new perspective on cosmic origins.

This theory is mainly supported by the fact that our existence is so unlikely that it must exists in a multiversal setting. According to the second law of thermodynamics, our universe’s first experienced extremely low entropy made the concept of a ‘big bang’ nearly impossible. Oxford mathematician Roger Penrose calculated the probability as a 1 in 10^10^123^1 possibility (that’s 123 zeroes). This ridiculously low probability has led Mersini-Houghton to consider a quantum multiverse as the theory instead.

Mersini-Houghton’s theory came to her when she realized the early universe’s quantum nature could be viewed as a wave function rather than just an object. “QM on the landscape” – quantum mechanics applied to the concept of string theory – became her foundation for understanding universal origins. This approach brought together both quantum mechanics and string theory in regards to multiple possible energy states.

Physicist Claims They Have Uncovered The First Evidence of the Multiverse

That is about all the time I have today so hopefully you enjoyed this week’s ‘Dump’…..

As always…..Be Well and Be Safe….

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”