PicoBlog

“Eat 30 different plants a week for your gut microbiome” is regularly trotted out as the gut health advice of the hour, so much so that chef Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall is even writing a cookbook around it. Health articles and online comments note religiously documenting each and every plant consumed across the week down to the very last smidge of flaxseed in a multi-grain loaf. Yet what is the evidence behind it?

There is one question that has defined my life: Why is Africa poor? The first time I asked this question, I was seven years old.  Growing up in Africa in the 1980s, most of us were poor. A few people maybe had a car or a truck. But if they did, it was almost certainly rickety and unreliable. Most of us still used horse carts. The only person I ever heard of driving a Mercedes was the president of the country (and NGO staff).

Getting better at chess should be easy. Before you throw your shoe at the computer screen, let me explain. According to psychologist Robin Hogarth, there are two kinds of learning environments, which he calls kind and wicked. Kind learning environments are constrained, consistent, and predictable. Lessons learned from experience are reliable. In contrast, feedback in wicked learning environments is delayed, inconsistent, or unreliable. Lessons learned from experience in wicked environments are often misleading.

Chubby is as chubby does. Thanks a lump, plump philosophic Forrest Gump. Let’s face fat facts my deliciously decadent Trekkers. We’re going to discuss a telling tale of the crushing scale. It’s simply a weighty matter for us to consider when it comes to a certain Deep Space Nine bloke’s physicality - one Chief Miles O’Brien. OK. Here goes nothing, or maybe everything… Chief O’Brien is chubby. There I said it.

Is Saltburn a good movie? Not since Edward vs Jacob, Britney vs Christina, or is genocide okay has a cultural event divided the world as much as that question. In actuality, it doesn’t matter, because people can’t stop talking about it, and for good reason! ncG1vNJzZmillZqwqa3MppyroaearrW0xKtlrK2SqMGir8pnmqilX6V8psLEq7CoppViwLW1y6VkrZmcoLavs4yamaitpGLAorjTm6yrpg%3D%3D

Did your soda bread come out a bit flat and you are not entirely happy with it’s look and would want it to rise more? Maybe we can help you with this issue The main issues could be the heat, not enough liquid or it could also be that you added too much water. Make sure that your bread is fully heated by the time the bread is ready to bake because the acid from the buttermilk starts reacting with the baking soda as soon as they mix, creating little air bubbles that need the heat of the oven to expand and make the bread rise.

Welcome to the Friday Q&A, a recurring feature where we answer your questions about Arizona government and politics.  If you have a question, we’re all ears! There’s no question too basic or silly; in fact, the weirder, the more niche, the better. Send us an email at hank@arizonaagenda.com and we’ll get cracking. Today’s question: Why is Phoenix the big metro and capital when it’s so hot here compared to other parts of the state?

This story fascinates me. We cannot and will never know, obviously, all of what occurred on October 7th. But it is becoming ever clearer that 'friendly fire' is a large part of the equation. More fascinating to me, though, is how quickly the mainstream Western narratives surrounding this day - the history leading up to it, the events of the day itself and the days since - have been challenged and begun to crumble, almost in real time.

I’ve been on the faculty at CU Boulder since 2001. Soon after arriving I started wondering about a troubling pattern in my classes. I had almost no Black students in them. Despite various initiatives, lofty goals and frequent statements of the importance of diversity from administrators, that remains the case today. CU Boulder is one of the least diverse and most inaccessible campuses among universities in the nation. That’s a problem.