Word of The Day

Habitue: One who habitually frequents a place.

News; Food That Fools You

This food looks delicious, but don't be fooled!

If you chomped into this mouth-watering meal, your taste buds would never trust you again. Why? You’d get a mouthful of paper towels, cotton balls, dish soap, plus other yucky surprises.

Food stylists and photographers use many tricks to make food look delicious for advertisements and cookbooks. For instance, milk on cereal might be replaced with white glue. That way the cereal doesn’t get soggy. Or lemon juice might be added to a banana to keep it from turning brown. “Food is basically like cut flowers,” says food stylist Lisa Cherkasky. “It’s amazing how fast it dries up and shrinks.”

National Geographic Kids takes you on the set to check out the secrets of food styling. Just make sure that it’s only your eyes that do the feasting!

Soapy Milk
To make milk look freshly poured, food stylists add dish soap bubbles to the surface just before the shoot. This trick works for coffee and other drinks, too.

Nice Ice
Don’t crunch those ice cubes! They’re actually hand-carved plastic blocks that cost up to $50 each. The thirst-quenching cranberry juice is really red food coloring mixed with water.

Hot Potato?
This spud might look smoking hot. But the steam was created by heating a wet cotton ball in a microwave oven and hiding it behind the potato. Squeezable margarine instead of real melted butter adds to the ready-to-eat illusion.

Chicken with Paper Stuffing
This chicken is only partly cooked. Otherwise its skin would get wrinkly and burned. To give it that well-roasted look, the food stylist painted the bird with a special brown mixture. To keep it plump, the chicken is stuffed with paper towels.

Indoor Grill
Can’t you just smell the charcoal grill? In reality, the burn marks are seared into the veggies using a very hot electric coil. Some stylists apply eyeliner to make fake grill marks.

Waterproof Bread
The bread is coated with a special spray that people normally use to protect car interiors from water and sun. Stylists use the spray to keep bread from drying out.

Icing Cream and Lipstick Berries
This scoop of vanilla is actually store-bought cake icing mixed with powdered sugar. That means it won’t melt under bright lights while the camera clicks. White areas on the strawberries have been touched up with lipstick.

Styling Toolbox
Food stylists know all sorts of tricks to make food look yummy. But they also have tools that they never leave home without. Here are a few of them.

Jeweler's Torch: A jeweler uses this flaming tool to repair broken necklaces and secure gems in rings. A food stylist uses the torch to brown the edges of a steak or melt chocolate chips in a cookie.

Superglue: Great for patching skin on a chicken or holding together a pile of nuts.

Tweezers: The tiny prongs help rearrange sesame seeds on a bun or place rice on a plate.

Ice powder: Mixed with water and food coloring, this product creates tasty-looking but fake icy treats such as slushes.

Hans Christian Andersen, Danish Fairy Tale Author

1805: Considered the father of the modern fairy tale, Andersen was born to poor parents in the slums of Odense, Denmark. He received little formal education as a child but his father, who was literate, encouraged his interest in learning and in theater. An awkward child, Andersen often suffered humiliation at the hands of his peers, but he remained passionate about his love of forklore and the arts. When his father died in 1816, Andersen was forced to go to work. He apprenticed for short periods to a weaver and a tailor and also worked in a tobacco factory. At age 14, Andersen moved to Copenhagen to pursue a career as a singer, dancer, or actor, but soon realized that writing was his true passion. Through the help of a benefactor, Andersen gained admission to Copenhagen University, where he completed his education. By the late 1820s, Andersen had published poems, travel sketches, and even a musical drama produced by the Royal Theater. But his Fairy Tales and Stories were the source of his lasting success. Andersen's fairy tales were distinguished by their originality; most were not updates of existing folktales, a common practice of the time. His first small volume appeared in 1835 Fairy Tales Told to the Children and Andersen continued to turn out additional volumes of fairy tales over the next three decades. Among his most well-known tales are "The Little Mermaid" (1837), "The Emperor's New Clothes" (1837), "The Ugly Duckling" (1843), "The Princess and the Pea" (1835), and "The Snow Queen" (1845).

Andersen's fairy tales and other works have been translated into well over a hundred languages and many of the fairy tales have been popularized in film versions. A 1952 movie musical starring Danny Kaye was loosely based on Andersen's life.

Word of The Day

Skein: A long length of yarn wrapped in a loose twist.
Also, a flock of wild fowl.

Sentence:

I need to buy beads, skein, and fabric.

Today In History; Discovery of The Lost Incan Site Corihuayrachina Announced

2002: In 2002 Peruvian and British explorers seeking authentic remains of Incan civilization untouched by Spanish conquerers discovered a lost Inca stronghold on a peak in the Andes that was used as a place of resistance against the Spanish invasion. The ruins are about about 25 miles (40 kilometers) from the Inca citadel of Machu Picchu, a similar find discovered in 1911. According to the expedition leader, British explorer Peter Frost, the site was the biggest of its kind found since 1964, providing possible evidence of the Incan flight to the hills during the Spanish conquest. Located in a remote forest on Mount Victoria in the Vilcabamba region, the ruins so far discovered include more than a hundred structures, including homes, storehouses, burial grounds, roads, waterworks, farming terraces, and a dam. Corihuayrachina holds great interest for explorers but is not as complete as Machu Picchu, the legendary untouched Incan temple site that provided an unprecedented glimpse into Incan life and religion.

Word of The Day

Titanic: Having great magnitude, force, or power; colossal.

News; International Coastal Cleanup: Helping Ocean Animals Survive

About 150 volunteers came out in Washington, D.C. for the International Coastal Cleanup.
Courtesy Ocean Conservancy

Eleven-year-old Cammy Holmes tramped along the shores of Washington, D.C.'s Anacostia River with her big sister and a friend. Wearing gloves to protect their hands, they filled a garbage bag with everything from fishing line and dirty plastic bottles to old grocery bags.

The girls, and about 150 others volunteered in the International Coastal Cleanup, an annual event that raises awareness of the importance of keeping the world's waterways and oceans clean.

The cleanup was sponsored by an organization called the Ocean Conservancy that works to protect ocean animals and their homes. Unfortunately, a lot of trash never makes it into a trash can. It blows on the wind, and travels down streams and rivers to the sea.

Trash isn't just ugly—it can be dangerous for creatures that live in the water. Every year, plastic trash like old fishing gear, shopping bags, and food wrappers kills one million sea birds and 100,000 marine mammals and sea turtles.

Sometimes these animals get tangled up in garbage and die. Sometimes they eat trash that chokes or poisons them. Sea turtles, for example, mistake plastic bags for the jellyfish they love to eat.

At the Anacostia River, Cammy helped the volunteers pick up 2,380 pounds (1079.5 kilograms) of trash in just a few hours along three miles (4.83 kilometers) of shoreline.

"When you hear about a coastal cleanup you think, gross, you have to pick up trash," says Cammy. "But then you get there and find out it is actually fun! I liked meeting all the other people and helping out the environment."

This one-day event has an important message 365 days of the year: "We are all connected to the ocean. You can help keep the ocean clean by putting trash in the right place. Take the extra time to put your snack wrapper in the garbage can instead of throwing it on the ground, and recycle everything you can," says Sonia Besteiro of the Ocean Conservancy.

Fast Facts:

• In the past 21 years, volunteers with the International Coastal Cleanup have cleared millions of pounds of litter from 211,460 miles (340,312 kilometers) of coastline worldwide. That distance is the equivalent of going around the Earth eight times!
• In 2006, 358,617 volunteers cleaned 34,560 miles (55,619 kilometers) of shoreline, collecting 7 million tons of trash!
• In the 2007 cleanup, nearly half a million people in 70 countries pitched in.

Today In History; Alexander Graham Bell Granted Patent For Telephone

1876: Although Alexander Graham Bell did not actually invent the first telephone (that honor goes to Italian-American Antonio Meucci), his improvements on the invention made it practical. Bell patented his method of using electromagnetic signals to duplicate sound vibrations across wires. He also experimented with the phonograph, an early way to reproduce sound and music by machine, and the photophone, transmission of sound on a beam of light, the precursor of modern fiber optics.

Word of The Day

Get on The Stick: Start working, as in I have to get on the stick and start preparing dinner. This synonym for get busy or get busy alludes to getting a car going by manipulating the gearshift, or stick. [Slang; early 1900s.]

News; Green Sports Car Set For Launch

A "zero-emission" sports car with a top speed of nearly 100mph is set to be unveiled at the Geneva Motor Show.

The hydrogen-powered Lifecar, based on the design of the Morgan Aero-8 roadster, produces little noise and only water vapour from its exhaust.

The lightweight model packs advanced fuel cells and an energy storage system that gives the car a range of 250 miles (400km) per tank of hydrogen.

It has been developed by a consortium of UK companies and universities.

"Figures suggest the car should be capable of doing 0-60 [miles per hour] in about seven seconds," Matthew Parkin of classic sports car manufacturer Morgan told BBC News.

However, the exact acceleration will not be known until the complete car is taken for its first test drive.

"It's nearly there and the plan is to drive it when the show is over," said Mr Parkin.

Clever power

The £1.9m project to build the Lifecar, part funded by the UK government, has taken nearly three years.

"The basic concept was to build an entertaining and fun sports car that would act as a showcase for the technology and would deliver 150 miles to the gallon," said Mr Parkin.

"Everything else has tumbled out from that."

The car is powered by a bank of lightweight hydrogen fuel-cells developed by UK defence firm Qinetiq.

"If you took a typical internal combustion engine and replaced it with a fuel cell, the fuel cell would be very large," explained Ian Whiting of Qinetiq. "That's not an efficient way to do things."

The fuel cells in the Lifecar produce about 22 kilowatts - roughly one fifth of the amount of power of a typical combustion engine.

"With that we can provide all of the cruise capability we need to," he said.

When the car needs to accelerate or climb a hill it draws extra power from a bank of ultra-capacitors aligned down the centre of the car.

We may have to supply headphones with the sounds of a five litre V8 linked to the throttle pedal Matthew Parkin

"They are like a battery but they do not store quite as much energy and they allow the energy in and out much quicker," explained Mr Whiting.

These are primarily charged by a regenerative braking system which slows the car by converting the vehicle's kinetic energy into useful electrical energy using a motor.

"Hybrid cars already use regenerative braking - normally it restores about 10% of the energy," said Mr Parkin. "Lifecar is aiming for 50%."

Quiet runner

The car has a range of about 250 miles (400km) and has a top speed of around 90mph (145km/h).

"The whole thing has to be built around efficiency which comes down to weight at the end of the day," explained Mr Parkin.

The seats are made of wood to keep the weight down

As a result, the car has an aluminium chassis and a lightweight wooden interior, including seats.

It also doesn't have any of the "luxuries" such as a stereo, central locking or even airbags, found on many modern cars.

"The objective is to get the weight down to 700kg."

There are also other notable omissions such as a gearbox and - as the fuels cells produce little noise - the roar of an engine.

"We may have to supply headphones with the sounds of a five litre V8 linked to the throttle pedal," said Mr Parkin.

Other car manufacturers have shown off hydrogen-powered sports cars, although many have been conversions of existing models or hybrid cars that can also run on petrol.

For example, Japanese manufacturer Mazda has unveiled a modified version of its RX-8, known as the Hydrogen RE, which uses a dual-fuel system.

Honda has also announced that its petrol hybrid CR-Z sports car concept would launch in 2009.

Bumpy road

However, the road to a hydrogen-fuelled future has a number of obstacles.

Critics point out that to produce hydrogen by splitting water uses a large amount of electricity. At present, the majority of this electricity comes power stations burning fossil fuels and therefore brings no environmental benefit.

In addition, there is little infrastructure for refuelling the vehicles.

"There's a whole range of questions about how you [could roll out a hydrogen infrastructure] and when you could do that," said Mr Whiting.

"For vehicles which have a central base you can readily install a system to refuel those."

For example, hydrogen buses that return to a central depot already operate in many cities.

An infrastructure to refuel personal hydrogen vehicles would take longer, he said.

However, interim solutions do exist, such as so-called "reformer technology".

"It allows you to take the existing fuel infrastructure - diesel for instance - and convert it into hydrogen on the vehicle," said Mr Whiting.

The car is a concept at this stage but Morgan does not rule out going into production at some point in the future.

"We will gauge reaction when we show it," said Mr Parkin. "If there is an enormous response we will have to look at the project, the pricing and how it will function."

The car will be on display at the Geneva Motor Show in Switzerland between 6 and 16 March.

Other collaborators on the project were RiverSimple, Cranfield University, Oxford University and Linde AG.