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February 14, 2010 Food Recipe Redux: Chocolate Caramels, 1881 By AMANDA HESSER A few weeks ago, I gave Stuart Brioza and Nicole Krasinski, a husband-and-wife team of San Francisco chefs, a 19th-century recipe for simple chocolate caramels made with molasses and vanilla and asked them to use it as inspiration for an entirely new dish. The beauty of this free-form recipe assignment, which I give to a chef each month, is that I never know what he or she will come up with. My rule is that the chefs can improvise with flavors and techniques as much as they want, as long as they can later explain how they got from A to B. Brioza and Krasinski were the chef and pastry chef, respectively, at Rubicon until it closed in 2008. While they work on their next restaurant venture, they have more time than usual on their hands — or, at least, more access to daylight and creative thinking. Two days after sending them the candy recipe, I received one back for Black-Sugar-Glazed Medjool Dates W...

Venice, Italy Burano, Italy from LA times

First Early Human Genome Sequenced Say hello to Inuk By Susannah F. Locke Posted 02.10.2010 at 1:04 pm Artists Impression of "Inuk" Nuka Godfredsen Scientists have sequenced the genome of an ancient human for the first time. An international team extracted DNA from 4,000-year-old hair found in Greenland's permafrost. They were able to sequence an impressive 79 percent of the genetic material and shared a thing or two about this ancient Homo sapiens in this week's issue of the journal Nature. For starters, it's a dude, and they nicknamed him "Inuk." His DNA indicates that his ancestors left Siberia to travel to the new world before the ancestors of current natives of North America did. He also had brown eyes, thick hair, and darker skin. And, of course, other key traits we were just dying to know: he had dry earwax (common in Asians and Native Americans), a propensity to baldness, and type A+ blood. He was also inbred. Inbred to the sa...

News Dots: The Day's Events as a Social Network An interactive map of how every story in the news is related, updated daily. By Chris Wilson Like Kevin Bacon's co-stars, topics in the news are all connected by degrees of separation. To examine how every story fits together, News Dots visualizes the most recent topics in the news as a giant social network. Subjects—represented by the circles below—are connected to one another if they appear together in at least two stories, and the size of the dot is proportional to the total number of times the subject is mentioned. To use this interactive tool, just click on a circle to see which stories mention that topic and which other topics it connects to in the network. Double click a dot to zoom in on it. From there, you can click on any connected dot to see which stories mention both subjects. To zoom out, just double click in white space or use the zoom out button in the upper left corner. The buttons in the upper right can to...

Short Version: Yes, this is that scale that Tweets your weight. And yes, it’s actually pretty cool. Review So the Internet made me fat. That and all the beer. Anyway, now I’m going to depend on the Internet to make me skinny again and I think the Withings WiFi scale is just the thing to get me back in Abraham Lincoln mode. This glass scale features a body mass sensor complete with invisible electrodes as well as a backlit OLED readout. To start, you connect the scale to your computer via USB and assign your wireless hotspot. Then each time you hop on the scale you wait for the electrodes to sense your body fat (or if they can’t it just transmits your weight) and then you check your progress online. New users are “added” when they weigh themselves and show up as unknown users until you assign their measurements to an account. Because folks usually float among a few data points, your wife’s numbers won’t get mixed up with yours and the dog’s numbers will definitely not get mixed up wi...

Costa Rica election win for Chinchilla shows women's rise in Latin America Laura Chinchilla won the Costa Rica election Sunday. She'll be the country's first woman president, echoing a trend across Latin America where women are being voted into high-level political office in record numbers. By Sara Miller Llana Staff writer posted February 8, 2010 at 1:41 pm EST Rio de Janeiro — Jacqueline Campos, a lifelong resident of Rio de Janeiro, says she is not inspired by the ideas being floated ahead of presidential elections here later this year. But she still views the 2010 race as a landmark one: a woman has more than an outside chance of becoming president of Brazil. "We women were always expected to take care of the house, and that alone," she says. "Now we have much more to offer. We might lead the country." The election, slated for October, could see at least two women on the ballot. Dilma Rousseff, of the governing Workers' Party (PT), ...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/the_daily_politics/8506334.stm