Calling all crocodile experts — South African police say you’re needed to help capture thousands of crocs out on the lam.

Thousands of crocodiles escaped a breeding farm along a river on the South Africa-Botswana border when the farms’ gates were opened earlier this week to alleviate pressure caused by rising flood waters.

Efforts are now being made to wrangle the reptiles and get them back to the Rakwena Crocodile Farm, from where the vast majority escaped. Hangwani Mulaudzi, a spokesman for the police in Limpopo Province, said Friday that experts are needed right away to help sort out the crocodile crisis.

“Due to the number of crocodiles that have been washed away there is a need for expertise, people who have expertise to come and assist,” Mulaudzi said. “So we are just making appeals to anyone … who has knowledge of catching crocodiles to come and assist.”

Look for the glow: News reports from the scene show people hunting down smaller crocodiles at night, tying them up and taking them back to the Rakwena Crocodile Farm in northern South Africa. The crocodiles are easier to hunt at night because their eyes glow when hit with a beam of light. The farm’s website shows crocs up to 16 feet long, though crocs of all sizes escaped, Mulaudzi said.

It isn’t clear exactly how many crocodiles are on the loose. Mulaudzi said he believes around 10,000 from multiple farms remain on the loose. Officials from the Rakwena Crocodile Farm have been quoted in conflicting South African media accounts as saying either 7,000 escaped or up to 15,000 escaped. The farm originally held about 15,000 crocs. About 2,000 crocodiles have been returned to the farm, Mulaudzi said.The farm did not respond to an email or calls seeking comment.

Caution: Regardless of the exact number of farm-raised crocs now touring the wild, government officials and experts are calling on people who live near the remote region, which sits on the Limpopo River, to be careful around bodies of water. Many of the crocodiles are assumed to now be residing in the river.

“So far we are lucky. There has not been any emergencies,” said Mulaudzi. “And we are hopeful that nothing will happen. But with crocodiles all over in the river we are saying, please, we need assistance.”

Donald Strydom, a wildlife expert at South Africa’s Khamai Reptile Centre, said he doesn’t think the croc release will lead to a loss of human life. People are aware of the situation, he said, and crocodiles don’t naturally hunt humans.

“People must not go into a monster hunt and think these crocodiles are out to eat them,” Styrdom told South Africa’s eNews Channel Africa.

Mulaudzi said he did not think the Rakwena Crocodile Farm would face any charges from police for releasing the crocs, given the emergency nature of the flood. Flood waters are inundating northern South Africa and neighboring Mozambique. But Mulaudzi said the farm may face scrutiny from the Department of Environmental Affairs, which is helping with the reptile emergency.

The Rakwena Crocodile Farm website shows goods like crocodile-skin purses, belts and hats for sale. Crocodile meat is also available for purchase.

Reported by JASON STRAZIUSO of the Associated Press from JOHANNESBURG,South Africa.

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Today’s edition of Kid Scoop takes a look at hibernation, the energy-conserving deep sleep that many animals do through the winter. Of course the most famous hibernator out there is the groundhog, thanks to the world famous holiday — Groundhogs Day — coming up on Saturday, Feb. 2.

But really, how many of us really know much about groundhogs? In National Geographic’s profile on the critter, we learn that groundhogs are a 13-pound plant eater and the largest member of the squirrel family. Aside from being excellent diggers, they can also swim and have even been known to climb trees.

The scientific name of the groundhog is marmota monax and they are sometimes called woodchucks. They can be found throughout the eastern U.S., most of Canada and into Alaska.

Learn the basics of Groundhog Day. http://youtu.be/5HynP_QFf5o

Check out this groundhog video. http://youtu.be/DwEfhYv6O94

And have you ever wondered how many weather-predicting groundhogs there are? CGP Grey has the answers! http://youtu.be/7-Nl4JFDLOU

Also check out this report from 2012 about how Groundhog Day organizers often face trouble from their furry little mascots.

Primary photo by FurryScalyMan via Flicr.com

What is Kid Scoop? It’s a special page that appears every Monday in The York Dispatch and other local newspapers. Aside from its main feature and the Writing Corner, it includes games, puzzles and jokes.

Get your copy of Kid Scoop in today’s edition of The York Dispatch, and be sure to assemble your own Write On! entry and submit it to NIE@ync.com. We’ll run every entry here!

Of course, you can submit those entries, and anything else you want, for publication here on the Junior Dispatch. Send your JD items to juniordispatch@yorkdispatch.com. Learn about what you can submit here.

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In Zimbabwe, mopane worms are a staple part of the diet in rural areas and are considered a delicacy in the cities. They can be eaten dry, as crunchy as potato chips, or cooked and drenched in sauce. When harvest season for the worms began recently, I decided to document the process, and I found it somewhat stomach-turning. But the worms can be mighty tasty and they’re very nutritious. Here’s the scoop on mopane worms.

THE MOPANE WORM

The worm is the large caterpillar of the Gonimbrasia belina species, commonly called the emperor moth. It’s called a mopane worm because it feeds on the leaves of mopane trees after it hatches in summer. It has also burrowed into literature, finding its way, for example, into the pages of Alexander McCall Smith’s series about The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, set in neighboring Botswana. At least one of the characters munches on dried mopane worms.

THE HARVEST

After six weeks of rain, the mopane worms cling to mopane trees in rural Gwanda, an arid cattle-ranching area in southern Zimbabwe. Amanda Ncube normally fetches firewood to sell and looks after the family cattle, but when it’s worm-harvesting season she joins other women and a few men in collecting the worms and piling them into buckets. The worms are as long as a hand and as thick as a cigar. Ncube carefully plucks them from the lower branches before climbing partway up the tree to shake off the higher worms. The more stubborn ones are pried loose with a long stick. The worms excrete a brown liquid once they make contact with skin, leaving the pickers’ hands wet and slippery. As they harvest the worms, the women and men move from one tree to another until their buckets are full. A thick slimy green fluid comes out as Ncube carefully squeezes out the entrails from a mopane worm she has just plucked from a tree. During harvest season, the porches of mud-walled homes are covered with thousands of worms, laid out to dry in the hot sun.

THE MARKET

At the local market, mopane worms are popular with residents who buy a cup or two of them and eat them immediately. The market is abuzz with activity, with most stalls strategically displaying the delicacy so people cannot miss them. Vendors offer free samples. The mopane worms are graded according to size and the area where they were harvested. Picky buyers ask about their provenance before buying, favoring worms from one district over another because of barely discernible — at least to all but the connoisseurs — differences in taste.

HIGH PROTEIN

The mopane worm is a healthful and cheap source of nutrition.

A Zimbabwean nutritionist, Marlon Chidemo, says the worms are high in healthy nutrients and contain three times the amount of protein as beef. He says eating worms is less taxing on the environment than consuming beef because it takes far fewer leaves to produce worms than it does feed to produce the same amount of beef.

WORMY BUSINESS

Dried mopane worms have become a multimillion-dollar industry, even exported to countries like South Africa and Botswana. They can be found in African restaurants in Paris.

PREPARATION

Once they’ve been dried out, they can be eaten straight away. They can also be cooked in a spicy or peanut butter sauce and served with pap, a maize porridge.

Having grown up eating the mopane worms, I have never had the opportunity to see how they harvest and prepare them until now. While the process is rather disgusting, the worm can be a pleasure to eat as a starter or a side dish. The taste is reminiscent of salty potato chips. Malawi’s first President Hastings Kamuzu Banda preferred his just like that, simply dried and then eaten as a snack like chips. Banda was known for carrying around pocketsful of worms that he would also offer to children.

A RECIPE

Here is a Congolese recipe that AP’s special Africa correspondent Michelle Faul describes as “one of the tastiest” for mopane worms.

Mopani Worms for four people.

Ingredients:

• 500 grams dried mopane worms
• three tomatoes diced or 1 can of tomatoes
• two onions, diced
• 1/2 teaspoon turmeric
• three fresh green chilies, finely chopped
• three cloves of garlic, finely chopped
• tablespoon of fresh ginger, finely chopped

Soak dried worms in water for 3-4 hours to reconstitute. Fry onions in groundnut oil on medium heat until translucent. Add turmeric, chilies, garlic and ginger.
Fry for about five minutes. Add tomatoes and cook on low for about 20 minutes until spices are well blended. Add drained worms and cook until they have softened a bit but still are a little crunchy.
Salt and pepper to taste.
Serve with pap, called sadza in Zimbabwe. Enjoy.

 

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A few months ago I happened upon an enormous cucumbertree magnolia. “Must be the biggest cucumbertree magnolia anywhere,” I thought.

Such speculation doesn’t have to be idle. In a Washington, D.C., office, the American Forests organization keeps the National Register of Big Trees.

The Big Tree program was begun in 1940 as America faced impending war and its attendant need for resources, including wood. The first giant to be earmarked and saved from the threat of a saw was Maryland’s Wye Oak, an estimated 450 years old and, up to its death, the champion white oak.

Since 1940, more than 800 Big Trees have been named. Almost every state has at least one, with the most in Florida and then California. Those states are home to some species found only there.

HOW BIG IS BIGGEST?

Not all Big Trees are necessarily big. Each is merely the biggest of its species. The smallest Big Tree is in Texas, a Reverchon hawthorn in Dallas which “soars” to 9 feet tall and around whose trunk you could wrap your hands.

You can probably guess which is the biggest Big Tree: the General Sherman sequoia in California, its upper leaves, at 275 feet, tickling clouds, and its girth, at 998 inches, wide enough to accommodate a two lane road.

Somewhat unsettling, given its weedy nature, is the image of the largest staghorn sumac, which is 61 feet high. Or one of the two poison-sumac co-champs, 23 feet tall with a branch spread of 21 feet!

TREES WITH HISTORY

It’s fun to imagine what was going on when the sequoia or western juniper champions were still in their relative youth a thousand or so years ago.

A few Big Trees have been more than mere witnesses; they have been part of history. The champion osage orange tree, still standing at the Patrick Henry homestead, was grown from a seed sent by Lewis and Clark to Thomas Jefferson, then presented to Henry’s daughter.

I will now surely pause for thought before planting out my 5-year-old osage orange seedlings this spring.

RULES OF THE COMPETITION

The Big Tree program is friendly competition, but like any competition, there are rules. Most obvious is that a Big Tree must be a tree, that is, a plant with a definite crown of foliage topping a trunk at least 3 inches in diameter. It also must be native or naturalized in the continental United States.

Big Trees are measured three ways to give an overall score, which becomes the basis for championship. First, and most straightforward, is to measure trunk girth in inches. Rules specify taking this measurement at 4 1-2 feet from the ground. If the ground slopes, measure from the high point; if the tree forks at 4 1-2 feet, measure the smallest circumference below that height; if the fork starts lower, measure the largest stem.

Height is a straightforward measure only if you’re a very good tree climber. For an indirect measure, hold a yardstick vertically in your outstretched hand, adjusting its height above your hand to equal the distance from your hand to your eyes. Now walk backwards until the top of the tree lines up with the top of the yardstick and you can just see the base of the tree over your hand — all without moving your head or your hand. The height of the tree, if you stayed on level ground, is equal to your distance away from the tree.

The third measurement is the average spread of the branches. Add the widest spread and the smallest spread, then divide by two.

Get your overall score by adding up the girth in inches, the height in feet, plus one-quarter times the average branch spread in feet.

I’m going to go measure that cucumbertree magnolia, and if it scores higher than 389 points — the score for the current champ, reigning in Waukon, Iowa — then this local tree is a champion. And even if it’s not, it is majestic to behold.

___

Online:

www.americanforests.org

http://leereich.blogspot.com/

http://leereich.com/

—
Reported by LEE REICH of the Associated Press

Image by jodastephen via Flickr.com

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Butterfly lollipops are a hot item at the Pennsylvania Farm Show this year. They are not something new on the menu at the food court, but an essential part of the Folk’s Butterfly Farm exhibit in the Main Hall.

Everyone who enters the greenhouse that contains thousands of butterflies is given a butterfly lollipop — a cotton Q-tip swab dipped in grape Gatorade.

David Folk, who runs the butterfly farm with his family, instructs each person to hold out the lollipop to a butterfly until it latches on and rests there.

Hands-on: Inside the 75-degree greenhouse, cameras click away, capturing awe on the faces of children and parents alike as butterflies land on the “lollipops” and on their clothing. The butterfly house has live butterflies, caterpillars and chrysalises, and the stand owners encourage close interaction between people and the butterflies.

This is the second year that Folk’s Butterfly Farm, which is in Columbia County, has set up at the farm show, and they estimate that around 2,000 people stopped in each day over opening weekend. That figure is slightly higher than last year, said Kristie Good, David Folk’s daughter.

“Now people come back and say they’re glad to see us again,” Kristie Good said.

Good originally raised and sold butterflies for an FFA project when she was in high school. Her first attempt was a flop because the temperatures were too cool, but her second attempt was a success, and she began selling butterflies she raised for weddings, birthdays and other celebrations.

It grew into a family endeavor with her parents and her husband, Eugene Good. They travel to events throughout the state, give educational presentations and welcome field trips to their farm. The butterfly lollipops work well as long as they use “high test” Gatorade and not a low-calorie version, said Kristie Good. In the beginning she tried sugar water, but someone recommended Gatorade and that seems to work even better, she said.

It’s OK: Some visitors worry that touching the butterflies will cause them to become injured and unable to fly, but butterflies are resilient. Their wings are made of scales like fish, so the worst thing that could happen is for their coloring to rub off, said Eugene Good. Moths, however, have wings made of powder, and touching their wings does cause permanent damage.

The four species of butterflies native to Pennsylvania in the butterfly house are the Painted Lady, Buckeye, Monarch and Eastern Black Swallowtail. Other types inside are the Zebra Longwing, Julia, Great Southern White and Giant Swallowtails.

Butterflies generally do not fly in weather below 55 degrees, and they do not fly when it’s raining, said Eugene Good.

Admission to the butterfly house is $2. For more information, visit www.folksbutterflyfarm.com.

Reported by Chelsea Shank of the York Dispatch from HARRISBURG, Pennsylvania. Reach her at cshank@yorkdispatch.com.

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An excited crowd followed a trail of bubbles that popped to the surface of a seaside pond — and it isn’t just any pond, it is one on the ruins of a 19th century landmark in San Francisco.

The city’s newest star — the first river otter seen in there in decades — surfaced its whiskery head furtively, a mouth full of sea grass. The crowd oohed as large waves pounded rocks just offshore, as a briny smell and chill lingered in the air.

The otter ducked back under water and took the sea grass underneath a concrete remnant of one of San Franciso’s most famous tourist destination where the animal was building a nest. The site? The Sutro Baths, a historic and now ruined swimming facility that sits alongside the ocean.

“We came here to see the baths and this was just a bonus,” said Eliza Durkin, who brought her son Jonathan to the site for a school project on historic places.

Beyond tourists, the otter has mystified and delighted conservationists, who are piecing together clues to figure out how he got there. The furry creature was first spotted by birdwatchers in September and has since settled into the City by the Bay.

River otters once thrived in the San Francisco Bay area, but the growth of the city, hunting and environmental pollution in the 19th and 20th centuries has taken its toll on the once thriving local population.

Good signs: The critters are a living barometer of water quality — if it’s bad they cannot thrive. But new populations being seen north and east of San Francisco are giving hope to conservationists that years of environmental regulations and new technologies are making a difference.

“The fact that this otter is in San Francisco and doing so well in other regions of the Bay Area, it’s a good message that there’s hope for the watershed,” said Megan Isadore, of the River Otter Ecology Project, a group that studies otter populations further north and in the bay.

The group said until now it had no evidence the creatures had returned to San Francisco, and the last sighting was nearly a half-century ago as best they can tell.

The otter is nicknamed “Sutro Sam” after the old baths, which were named after former San Francisco Mayor Adolph Sutro. The former mayor built the swimming attraction, which at the time was an engineering marvel.

The place: The facility opened in 1896 on a cliff facing the Pacific Ocean, its baths fed by the salty ocean tides and a freshwater seep from the hillside. They were torn down and burned in a fire in 1966, and the building’s remains have long been a tourist draw on the city’s rugged, western shoreline.

The aquatic mammal seems to have found the mix of the environment he needs to make a home, to the delight of tourists and local nature lovers.

“They do need freshwater to drink and keep their fur clean,” Isadore said. “They are also happy in salt and brackish water — wherever there is food — and he is getting freshwater from seeps behind the baths.”

“Habitat destruction had an impact on the river otters,” said Dorren Gurrola, a science teacher at the Marine Mammal Center, which studies Sam’s relatives, the sea otter. “So it’s always exciting to see these animals return to their habitat.”

Growth: Young males like Sam often are the ones that travel away from groups, looking for food. If they find a new, hospitable habitat, others including females may join and create the basis of a new colony, Gurrola said.

While there is no certain reason for Sam’s appearance in San Francisco, Isadore and biologists working to unlock more clues have some leads to go on.

He could have swam across the bay’s mouth from Marin County, and scat collected from Sam will be analyzed to see if there’s a genetic link to that population. But now, Sam seems to be happy swimming around and munching on small fish, including goldfish discarded in the area.

“We’re just trying to piece things together in a logical way,” Isadore said. “River otters sometimes even stow away on boats, we just don’t know.”

Reported by JASON DEAREN of the Associated Press from SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.

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Call her the girl with no name.

A 15-year-old is suing the Icelandic state for the right to legally use the name given to her by her mother. The problem? Blaer, which means “light breeze” in Icelandic, is not on a list approved by the government.

Like a handful of other countries, including Germany and Denmark, Iceland has official rules about what a baby’s first name can be. In a country comfortable with a firm state role, most people don’t question the Personal Names Register, a list of 1,712 male names and 1,853 female names that fit Icelandic grammar and pronunciation rules and that officials maintain will protect children from embarrassment. Parents can take from the list or apply to a special committee that has the power to say yea or nay.

In Blaer’s case, her mother said she learned the name wasn’t on the register only after the priest who baptized the child later informed her he had mistakenly allowed it.

“I had no idea that the name wasn’t on the list, the famous list of names that you can choose from,” said Bjork Eidsdottir, adding she knew a Blaer whose name was accepted in 1973. This time, the panel turned it down on the grounds that the word Blaer takes a masculine article, despite the fact that it was used for a female character in a novel by Iceland’s revered Nobel Prize-winning author Halldor Laxness.

Given names are even more significant in tiny Iceland that in many other countries: Everyone is listed in the phone book by their first names. Last names are based on a parent’s first name. Even the president, Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, is addressed simply as Olafur.

Blaer is identified as a “Stulka” — or “girl” — on all her official documents. Despite that, her boy-sounding nameh has led to years of frustration as she has had to explain the whole story at the bank, renewing her passport and dealing with the country’s bureaucracy.

Her mother is hoping that will change with her suit, the first time someone has challenged a names committee decision in court.

Though the law has become more relaxed in recent years — with the name Elvis permitted, inspired by the charismatic rock and roll icon whose name fits Icelandic guidelines — choices like Cara, Carolina, Cesil, and Christa have been rejected outright because the letter “c” is not part of Iceland’s 32-letter alphabet.

“The law is pretty straightforward so in many cases it’s clearly going to be a yes or a no,” said Agusta Thorbergsdottir, the head of the committee, a panel of three people appointed by the government to a four-year term.

Other cases are more subjective.

“What one person finds beautiful, another person may find ugly,” she acknowledged.

The board also has veto power over people who want to change their names later in life, rejecting, for instance, middle names like Zeppelin and X.

Eidsdottir says she is prepared to take her case all the way to the country’s Supreme Court if a court doesn’t overturn the commission decision on Jan. 25.

“So many strange names have been allowed, which makes this even more frustrating because Blaer is a perfectly Icelandic name,” Eidsdottir said. “It seems like a basic human right to be able to name your child what you want, especially if it doesn’t harm your child in any way.”

“And my daughter loves her name,” she added.

Reported by ANNA ANDERSEN of the Associated Press from REYKJAVIK, Iceland

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The 1950 Pennsylvania Railroad calendar never made it to James W. Flanagan, general manager of the Scranton Times.

He would never need it: he died in December 1949. But on Friday, 63 years after his death, the U.S. Postal Service made a delivery.

A mail carrier, with no explanation of where the package had been the last 63 years, handed it to Chris O’Hora at The Times-Tribune’s front desk. The calendar, rolled in a long tube, soon made its way to the office of Bobby Lynett, a publisher of The Times-Tribune.

Flanagan was the Scranton Times general manager from 1936 to his death in 1949 at the age of 63. He had a 54-year career at the paper, starting as a salesboy in 1895. The calendar includes a holiday greeting from an executive at the railroad company, dated the same month Flanagan died.

On Friday, Lynett gently rolled the large calendar out on his conference table, curious about its origin and more curious about where it had been the last 63 years.

Ray Daiutolo, a spokesman with the postal service, said lost mail is sometimes found when a machine is dismantled or a post office space renovated. Other times, someone may find a stamped but unmailed letter or package at a yard sale and then drop it in the mail, he said. Daiutolo was unable to trace the package’s history on Friday.

A new sticker, dated last week from a distribution center in Pittsburgh, accompanied two 4-cent William Howard Taft stamps, which appear to have been canceled decades ago, on the tube.

The calendar, originally mailed from the Philadelphia publicity department of the Pennsylvania Railroad, features the painting “Crossroads of Commerce” by Grif Teller. The Pennsylvania Railroad merged with New York Central Railroad in 1968.

Lynett said he will contact officials at the Steamtown National Historic Site to see if they are interested in displaying the calendar.

If not, it will be displayed someplace inside The Times-Tribune building, he said.

“We’ll find a good home for it. That’s for sure,” he said.

———
Reported by SARAH HOFIUS HALL of the Citizens’ Voice of WILKES-BARRE, Pa. (MCT). Visit The Citizens’ Voice (Wilkes-Barre, Pa.) at citizensvoice.com.

©2012 The Citizens’ Voice (Wilkes-Barre, Pa.)

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Like his ancestors, Iraqi-born falcon trainer Abu Badr al-Anazi swings the carcass of a pigeon to attract a falcon released a few hundred yards away. The bird of prey arcs over the desert outskirts of Dubai before sinking its talons into the lure.

While the methods to develop top-quality hunting falcons date back to antiquity, its transition into a modern Middle Eastern passion has brought in microchip tagging and price tags that can run well over $10,000 for a prime bird.

The falconry season starts in November in the Persian Gulf states when the weather cools. In late afternoon and early mornings, the falconers—Emiratis, Syrians, Iraqis and others—drive into the desert outside Dubai in SUVs to train the birds for hunting and racing competitions organizing by the country’s sheiks.

Each bird has a microchip inserted beneath its skin and a numbered ring fitted on its leg for identification.

Falconry has been part of the traditional life of the Arabian Peninsula for centuries. Bedouin have practiced it to hunt hare and houbara, a quail-like bird that is among the falcon’s main prey in the wild. After the Gulf’s oil boom, falconry turned into a more casual sport and hobby.

During the training session, one falconer removes the hood from the bird’s eyes while another, in the distance, swings the lure—a dead pigeon or some meat—while calling the bird’s name. If the bird catches the lure, it’s rewarded with some meat. Later, the falconer uses a live pigeon to carry on the training.

This part is important for Islamic hunters as it teaches the falcon not to kill its prey immediately. In order for the hunters to be able to eat the prey in accordance with Muslim beliefs, it must still be alive when its throat is cut and blood is drained. Once properly trained, a falcon will hold a captured houbara without killing it.

Reported by KAMRAN JEBREILI of the Associated Press from DUBAI, United Arab Emirates.

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Toymaker Hasbro says it will soon reveal a gender-neutral Easy-Bake Oven after meeting with a New Jersey girl who started a campaign calling on the toy maker to make one that appeals to all kids.
McKenna Pope, 13, of Garfield, N.J., got more than 40,000 signatures on her online petition at Change.org and the support of celebrity chefs including Bobby Flay, who backed her call for Hasbro to make a gender-neutral oven and to include boys in the ads.
She was prompted to start the petition after shopping for an Easy-Bake as a Christmas present for her 4-year-old brother, Gavyn Boscio, and finding them only in purple and pink.
Hasbro invited McKenna and her family to its Pawtucket, R.I., headquarters to meet with its Easy-Bake team, and on Monday, they drove to Rhode Island from New Jersey. During the meeting, Hasbro executives showed off a prototype of their newest Easy-Bake: one that’s black, silver and blue.
Hasbro has been working on the new color scheme and design for about 18 months, and decided to invite McKenna to see it and offer her thoughts, said John Frascotti, Hasbro’s chief marketing officer.
McKenna said the company is doing everything she asked, including putting boys in the ads.

“I think that they really met most or even all of what I wanted them to do, and they really amazed me,” she said, adding that Gavyn thought the new design was “awesome.”
Frascotti pointed out that the classic toy has had about a dozen different color schemes, from yellow to green to teal to silver, since first being introduced in 1963. The most recent iteration, introduced in 2011, is mostly purple with pink accents.
He said it’s sold well since then, and that prompted the company to look for a way to update it and to broaden the consumer base by doing it in different colors.
“It’s actually a product that’s played with by both boys and girls,” he said. “We will continue to offer the existing product too because it’s so popular.”
Hasbro plans to introduce the new color scheme at the industry’s Toy Fair in New York in February. Frascotti said people are likely to see it on store shelves next summer.
As for McKenna’s Christmas present for her brother, she said the TV show “Inside Edition” gave the family an Easy-Bake Oven after learning of her campaign. For Christmas, she said, she’ll probably buy him some mixes to bake in it.
Reported by MICHELLE R. SMITH of the Associated Press from PROVIDENCE, R.I.

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Little Miss Muffet could have been separating her curds and whey 7,500 years ago, according to a new study that finds the earliest solid evidence of cheese-making.

Scientists performed a chemical analysis on fragments from 34 pottery sieves — you know, a pot with holes on the bottom — discovered in Poland to determine their purpose. Until now, experts weren’t sure whether such sieves were used to make cheese, beer or honey.

Though there is no definitive test for cheese, Richard Evershed at the University of Bristol and colleagues found large amounts of fatty milk residue on the pottery shards compared to cooking or storage pots from the same sites. That suggests the sieves were specifically used to separate fat-rich curds from liquid whey in soured milk in a crude cheese-making process.

“It’s a very compelling forensic argument that this was connected to cheese,” Evershed said. “There aren’t many other dairy processes where you would need to strain,” he said. He and colleagues weren’t sure what kind of milk was used, but said there were lots of cattle bones in the region. The study was published online Wednesday by the journal Nature.

“This is the smoking gun,” said Paul Kindstedt, a professor of nutrition and food sciences at the University of Vermont and author of “Cheese and Culture.” He was not involved in the study.

“It’s almost inconceivable that the milk fat residues in the sieves were from anything else but cheese,” Kindstedt said, adding that many experts suspected cheese was being made in Turkey up to 2,000 years earlier than this latest finding in Poland but that there was no definitive proof.

Nutrients: He said the discovery of cheese making marked a major development for Neolithic people and gave them a survival advantage by allowing them to turn milk into a form that provided essential calories, proteins and minerals. At that time, the adult population was largely lactose intolerant, so making a product with less lactose, like cheese, allowed everyone to digest the nutrients in milk.

Kindstedt said the earliest cheeses were likely similar to spreadable cheeses like ricotta and fromage frais. He guessed that people either ate them soon after they were made or buried them in pots for months afterwards, saving them for the winter when food was scarce.

Cheeses also served to spice up the Neolithic diet. “Food was incredibly dull and monotonous,” Kindstedt said, noting the prehistoric farmers’ dependence on grain porridge.

What did it taste like? After being buried in the ground for months, he said, the cheeses would have been non-perishable, “bomb-proof” and pretty pungent.

“They probably would not be the first choice for a lot of people today,” Kindstedt he said. “But I would still love to try it.”

————

Online:

http://www.nature.com/nature

Reported by MARIA CHENG of the Associated Press from LONDON.

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Residents of a sleepy French village in Bordeaux have been left dumbfounded after discovering their local 18th-century chateau — the French word for a fancy mansion — was completely bulldozed “by mistake.”

The mayor’s office in Yvrac, France, said Wednesday that workers who were hired to renovate the grand 140,000-square-foot manor and raze a small building on the same estate in southwest France mixed them up.

“The Chateau de Bellevue was Yvrac’s pride and joy,” said former owner Juliette Marmie. “The whole village is in shock. How can this construction firm make such a mistake?”

Local media reported that the construction company misunderstood the renovation plans of the current owner, Russian businessman Dmitry Stroskin, to clean up the manor and restore it to its former baroque glory.

Stroskin was away when the calamity occurred and returned home to discover his chateau, a local treasure boasting a grand hall that could host some 200 people, as well as a sweeping stone staircase—was nothing but rubble.

“I’m in shock …I understand the turmoil of the community,” local media quoted Stroskin as saying.

He told them he plans to build an exact replica of lost manor on the site.
Reported by THOMAS ADAMSON of the Associated Press from PARIS, France. Follow him at http://Twitter.com/ThomasAdamsonAP

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Shakespeare’s Globe, the open-air London playhouse that helped win modern audiences over to all-weather outdoor theatergoing, is embracing the great indoors.

The Globe on Tuesday unveiled details of a new indoor venue that will sit alongside the O-shaped Elizabethan-style theater on the banks of the River Thames.

Built from 17th-century plans, it will allow audiences to remain warm and dry as they watch candlelit performances of plays by the Bard and his successors — and, its creators hope, cast those classic plays in a new light.

“We’re hoping it will prove as great a revelation as this building has,” said Globe artistic director Dominic Dromgoole, referring to the open-air theater that opened in 1997. “In the simplest terms, it’s called going back to the future.” ¶

The Sam Wanamaker Theatre — named for the late American actor-director who spent decades realizing his dream of rebuilding Shakespeare’s playhouse near its original site — is due to open in January 2014, and will allow the Globe to hold performances year-round for the first time.

Modeled loosely on the long-vanished Blackfriars playhouse where Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men, performed in winter, the timber-framed space will hold 350 people, in seated galleries and a standing-room pit.

Dromgoole said that in true 17th-century style, it would feature “a lot of people packed tight into a very small space — bulging with humanity.”

In another nod to authenticity, the oak-framed, wood-paneled theater will be lit by candles, no small achievement in our safety-conscious times.

Martin White, a leading expert on theater lighting and a consultant to the project, said that with modern safety techniques open flames in a wooden theater can be perfectly safe — and convincing the London Fire Brigade proved remarkably easy.

“I was quite surprised,” he said. “They became really interested in the project. I think they wanted to see live flames lighting a performance in the theater. They became enthusiastic about it, and that is always the best start for everything.”

Dromgoole pointed out that the Globe has a history of getting permission to bend building rules. In the 1990s it became the first thatch-roofed building constructed in London since the Great Fire of 1666. Thatched roofs were banned in London after the fire, which razed much of the medieval city.

The new venue is being built based on drawings found at Oxford University’s Worcester College in the 1960s — the earliest surviving plans for an indoor theater.

No theater buildings from that era survive, and many questions remain about how they were constructed.

Farah Karim-Cooper, head of the Globe’s architecture research group, said the goal was “to build a theater Shakespeare might recognize,” rather than a reconstruction of any particular venue.

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Online: http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/

Reported by JILL LAWLESS of the Associated Press from LONDON. Reach her at http://Twitter.com/JillLawless

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A hatch on a Swedish church tower inadvertently left open for some three decades resulted in 2 tons of pigeon poop sitting in the tower.

The church’s property manager says the layer of droppings was 12 inches deep when it was discovered during a May inspection of the Heliga Trefaldighets Kyrka in Gavle, 105 miles north of Stockholm.

Lennart Helzenius said that church staff was shocked by the sheer number of bags of excrement cleaners were hauling out of the tower. He says the droppings filled 80 bags in the first round of cleaning, and then just as many in the second round.

Helzenius says the hatch had probably been left open since the 1980s.

Reported by The Associated Press from STOCKHOLM, Sweden.
Pigeon image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/siriwan/

 

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