On sweltering summer days in meadows where the grass hasn’t been cut, you can spot the delicate pinkish-red flowers of the field carnation, marked with dark stripes and white speckles. Each blossom sits alone on a slender, upright stem. Try to pick one and others seem to follow — each plant sends up several branches, each topped with a flower. All the branches grow from a stem so thin that, weighed down by blooms, it sprawls across the ground like grass. That’s why it’s called the field carnati…

Don’t add other ingredients to beaten egg whites; instead, gently fold the whites into the batter while stirring.
The average amount of yeast needed is 20 to 40 grams per kilogram of flour.
Preheat a gas oven for 10 minutes before baking, and an electric oven for 25 minutes.
Bake smaller items at 200-270°F. Larger items should be baked at 130-180°F, but for a longer time.
Brush the dough with egg yolk 5-10 minutes before baking.
Store flour in cloth bags.
Avoid using liquid jams or preserves as…

Humans have turned the wild aurochs into “milk tanks on hooves” — just look at Yaroslavl and Kostroma cows. Some of these animals consume up to 220 pounds of feed a day and produce 15 gallons or more of milk.
Take, for instance, a relatively small Yaroslavl cow named “Vena,” who once produced an astonishing 82 liters of milk in a single day — that’s over six buckets. Then there’s the Simmental cow “Zozulya,” who yielded 59 kilograms of milk in one milking; that added up to as much as 28,200 pou…

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics assembled the largest dataset ever of facial-attractiveness ratings: 52 studies from 76 countries. The final dataset contains more than 1.5 million ratings for about 17,000 faces, submitted by nearly 30,000 raters.
Main findings

On average, female faces were rated as more attractive than about 60% of male faces.
The pattern held across cultures and sexual orientations — heterosexual, gay, bisexual, and lesbian respondents also te…

The hoard consists of three tightly coiled gold spirals that at first glance could look like bracelets, but inspection shows they are neck rings or collar rings, wound to fit into a compact space. Next to the gold lay several small iron wheel-shaped objects, two small axes, and a bronze bracelet.
The objects were moved to the Prahova Museum of History and Archaeology, where specialists are now examining them.
Expert analysis
Archaeologist Alin Frinkuleasa, a specialist in ancient prehistory wor…

Tobacco has been used for millennia, and chemists first isolated nicotine from the plant in the late 1820s. Now, 200 years later, biologists report that they have uncovered exactly how the tobacco plant synthesizes the nicotine molecule.
The discovery could change how scientists approach plant-based “molecular farming”—engineering tobacco to produce medicines and vaccines. Nicotine has long been a problem: it contaminates bioproducts and forces extra processing, so understanding the pathway wil…