Another Saturday and another news dump for your reading pleasure.

Local–Next week they say will be the coldest weather we have had this winter….but it will not be as bad as others will suffer.

Personal–Biopsy went well….went in at 0700 and was finally released at 1345….will know the results next week I am told.

Let’s begin today with what we eat…..

Maggots may not be winning any popularity contests, but they’re quietly becoming a contender to become the world’s next big protein source—first for pets and livestock, and eventually, perhaps, for humans. In Kenya, InsectiPro is raising black soldier fly larvae by the tens of millions on piles of rotting mangoes and other crop waste, per Smithsonian. The larvae gorge for about two weeks in their transformation into grubs, then are processed into a high-protein, high-fat meal that’s used in animal feed. Each day, they turn 16.5 tons of waste into biomass, growing with startling speed and requiring much less land, water, and energy than it takes to produce corn or soy.

Their leftover waste, known as frass, can also be used as fertilizer. Globally, money is following the maggots: More than half of the roughly $2 billion invested in insect farming has gone to black soldier fly operations. France-based Innovafeed—which the Washington Post notes houses hundreds of millions of flies—runs a massive, highly automated larvae factory and has partnered with agribusiness giants ADM and Cargill. In Illinois, a pipe carries wet corn-processing by-product directly from an ADM plant into Innovafeed’s facility, where the larvae devour it. In turn, ADM buys the resulting insect meal for use in pet food, a neat loop that avoids the costs of drying or transporting the waste elsewhere.

Studies suggest that when larvae meal replaces part of conventional feed, hens shed fewer harmful bacteria, piglets have fewer digestive problems, and dogs get solid marks on everything from stool quality to breath. For now, however, the main hurdle isn’t biology but psychology. Americans are wary of eating insects or even feeding them to their pets, so companies are experimenting with friendlier branding—Innovafeed markets its ingredient under the innocuous-sounding name “Hilucia”—and focusing first on pet food. Human products, like protein bars and shakes made with insect meal, are on the drawing board but not yet on shelves at scale. In Democratic Republic of Congo, meanwhile, maggots and hairy caterpillars are already in demand.

I hope it does not come to this until I am gone.

Do you store bread in the freezer?

Bread may be a simple kitchen staple, but did you know that how you store it can actually impact its health benefits?

Maybe you store yours at room temperature in the pantry or toss it into the refrigerator (we beg you to stop doing that, because it only dries it out).

But if you store your bread in the freezer, you may be getting some additional benefits besides long-lasting storage — because freezing bread can also give a meaningful boost to your gut health, blood sugar and digestion, thanks to a natural change in the starches through a process called retrogradation, which forms resistant starch.

Starch is a type of carbohydrate found in foods like bread, potatoes and grains, and it absorbs moisture and gelatinizes when cooked with water. At a molecular level, starch is made up of two glucose polymers: amylose and amylopectin. In bread, for instance, registered dietitian Avery Zenker explains that the heat of baking disrupts the hydrogen bonds that normally keep starch molecules tightly packed in a crystalline structure, allowing amylose and amylopectin to become easier for digestive enzymes to access.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/health-benefits-storing-bread-freezer_l_694962f4e4b099a75cbd9114

No time for lunch….then this may be your answer….

Soup fans who like their broth in unconventional formats have another chance to suck on it instead of sip it. Progresso is bringing back its oddball Soup Drops hard candies and adding two new varieties, the company said in a press release. Joining the returning Chicken Noodle flavor are Tomato Basil and Beef Pot Roast, with packaging that promises the candy “warms in your mouth,” per USA Today. The original line, described in marketing as “soup you can suck on,” debuted in January of last year and sold out in less than an hour, according to earlier reporting.

The latest Soup Drops will be sold as part of a bundle available exclusively on Walmart’s website. Each bundle includes a can of Progresso Chicken Noodle Soup, plus a Soup Drops variety pack containing all three flavors, for $2.97—roughly the cost of a single can of soup. The soups will be restocked weekly, while supplies last. More details, including information on the variety cans, are posted at ProgressoSoupDrops.com.

I do not partake in social media….no Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc….none at all and some times people look at me funny when I tell them that….but ….

I still remember when my neighbor Bob got his first smartphone a few years back. Within weeks, he was showing me dozens of photos on Instagram, asking if I thought each one was good enough to post. The man was a chess champion, for crying out loud, but suddenly he needed strangers on the internet to validate his morning coffee.

I’ve never been much for posting my own life online. Sure, I scroll through Facebook now and then to see what my grandchildren are up to, but sharing my own updates? That’s never felt necessary to me. And according to psychology research, there might be something to that instinct.

Turns out, people who choose not to broadcast their lives on social media often display some pretty remarkable qualities. Not because they’re trying to be different, but because they’ve developed a particular kind of confidence that doesn’t rely on external feedback.

Let me walk you through what the research says.

Psychology says if you never post photos or updates about yourself on social media you display these 9 confident qualities

Blogging is as close as I get to sharing….

Then there is your mobile phone……some worry about brain cancer and other such things but the one thing they should be worried about is who is looking at your data….

Immigration officials now have access to a tool that can map the movements of phones across whole neighborhoods, raising new alarms among privacy advocates. Documents obtained by 404 Media show that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has purchased access to two products from Penlink called Webloc and Tangles. Webloc lets users draw shapes on a digital map—ie, workplaces, protest sites—and pull up all the phones there during a chosen time window, then trace those devices to other sites, like homes and workplaces. An internal ICE memo says agents can query this commercial data sans warrant. “This is probably unconstitutional,” says Don Bell of the Constitution Project at the Project on Government Oversight, per the Independent. The data comes from the murky location-data market, with info harvested from ordinary apps, then sold by brokers, per 404.

Once a device is flagged by Webloc, the system can reconstruct its travel history locally and nationwide, cross-matching phones that show up at multiple sites. Tangles, meanwhile, lets users monitor social media, detect faces in images, run “sentiment analysis” on posts, and maintain watch lists. Civil liberties groups say ICE is exploiting a legal gray zone to sidestep the Supreme Court’s Carpenter vs. US decision, which requires warrants for historical location data from telecoms. The agency argues people have “voluntarily” shared data with third parties by using apps, undermining any expectation of privacy under the Fourth Amendment. The ACLU says that reasoning is “self-serving,” warning the system enables pervasive tracking “at an agent’s mere whim,” with immigrant and minority communities likely to bear the brunt; anti-ICE protesters will also be targets, per the Brennan Center.

Sen. Ron Wyden, a critic of the location-data sector, says the program gives “Trump’s shock troops” a powerful tool against people “who have done nothing wrong” and contends it violates federal law unless users clearly consent to government sales—something he says isn’t happening, per 404. ICE has spent more than $2.3 million on Penlink licenses since September, even after a 2023 inspector general report found ICE, Customs and Border Protection, and the Secret Service broke rules using similar commercial-location datasets and lacked adequate safeguards. In a statement, Penlink said its tools use only public or commercially available data, are meant to “advance criminal investigations and save lives,” and are governed by “strict compliance” and “responsible-use standards.”

I know some cannot live without constant use of their phone…..so be aware and be careful.

Finally have you ever noticed that the older we get the faster time seems to pass?  There may be a reason.

Have you ever looked back and felt like the years just vanished overnight? You’re not the only one. Many of us notice that as we age, our perception of time changes.

Days and years seem to speed by, leaving us wondering how this happened. Is it just our busy lives, or is there something deeper happening in our brains?

Scientists are diving into this age-old mystery to uncover why time feels like it’s racing against us.

From changes in how our minds process information to the routines that shape our daily lives, there’s a lot going on behind the scenes.

Adrian Bejan, a researcher at Duke University with decades of experience, offers a fascinating perspective on this phenomenon.

He suggests that our perception of time changes due to physical alterations in our brains and bodies as we age.

But let’s unpack this idea step by step. Why do some days feel longer or shorter than others? And why does time seem to fly by as we get older?

https://www.earth.com/news/human-perception-time-flies-by-much-faster-as-we-get-older/

That is all I have for this Saturday…..I hope everyone has a good weekend and as always…..Be Well and Be Safe….

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”