Blog List

Friday 19 May 2017

New World’s Hottest Chili Is Deceptively Tiny, Could Send You Into Anaphylactic Shock

Author
By Spooky 

When Welsh fruit grower Mike Smith set out to create a novelty chili pepper for a national grower’s show, he had no idea he would accidentally end up with the world’s hottest pepper. Called Dragon’s Breath – a tribute to its Welsh heritage – the record-breaking pepper scores a whopping 2.48 million units on the Scoville scale of hotness.

Intended to be a tiny thing of beauty, the Dragon’s Breath pepper turned out to be a sensory beast that can’t really be consumed unless you’re willing to put your life at risk. Just to put into perspective how hot this thing is, the Scotch bonnet, a chili usually eaten as a challenge, scores between 100,000 and 350,000 Scovilles, military-grade pepper spray registers at 2 million units on the same scale, and the previous world’s hottest pepper was rated at a maximum 2.2 million units. Dragon’s Breath blows them all away with an impressive rating of 2.48 million Scovilles.

Photo: North Wales Daily Post

Experts believe that attempting to chew and swallow just one of these harmless-looking peppers would put a person at risk of death from anaphylactic shock. In laymen’s terms, it would burn and close up their airways.

Mike Smith, who created the Dragon’s Breath pepper with the help of researchers at Nottingham Trent University, says he hasn’t tried to eat one, because it “would not be a pleasant sensation.” He did put it on the tip of his tongue and found it unbearable.

Photo: North Wales Daily Post

“It’s not been tried orally,” the 53-year-old told the North Wales Daily Post. “I’ve tried it on the tip of my tongue and it just burned and burned. I spat it out in about 10 seconds. The heat intensity just grows.”

And because it’s so strong, Mr. Smith and scientists at Nottingham Trent University believe Dragon’s Breath could have an important medicinal use. Oil from the chili can numb the skin, so it could be used as an alternative to anesthetic in third world countries, or on people who are allergic to conventional anesthetic.



“It was a complete accident but I’m chuffed to bits – it’s a lovely looking tree,” said Mike Smith, who has been competitively show-gardening for eight years. He has applied to Guinness World Records for the title of world’s hottest chili, and his Dragon’s Breath is now also a contender for the Royal Horticultural Society’s Plant of the Year award.
For further information log on website :
http://www.odditycentral.com/news/new-worlds-hottest-chili-is-deceptively-tiny-could-send-you-into-anaphylactic-shock.html

Couple Spend 25 Years Turning Barren Patch of Land into Paradise of Biodiversity

Author
By Spooky 

In 1991, Anil and Pamela Malhotra bought a 55 acres of unused farmland in Karnataka, India, and started planting native trees on it. Over the last 25 years, their small forest has turned into a 300-acre wildlife sanctuary that hundreds of endangered plants, animals and birds call home.
Anil and Pamela met and married in New Jersey, USA, during the 1960s. They both shared a love for wildlife, and after visiting Hawaii on their honeymoon, they fell in love with the archipelago’s lush forests and fascinating fauna. They bought some land and decided to settle there. “That is where we learnt the value of forests and realized that despite threats of global warming no serious efforts were being made to save forests for the future,” Anil said.

Photo: SAI Sanctuary

In 1986, the couple traveled to India for the funeral of Anil’s father, and the level of pollution and deforestation horrified them. No one seem to care about the tainted rivers and disappearing forests, so they decided it was up to them to save what they could of the country’s wildlife. They sold their property in Hawaii, moved to India, and started looking for available land.

After failing to find any for sale in northern India, Anil and Pamela went further south, to the Kodagu district of Karnataka, where a farmer were willing to part with some abandoned farmland. “When I came here with a friend who suggested I buy this land, it was a wasteland of 55 acres. The owner wanted to sell because he couldn’t grow coffee or anything else here,” Anil recalls. “For me and Pamela, this was what we were looking for all our life.”

Photo: video screengrab

The heavy rainfalls of Kodagu made the land unusable as farmland, but it was perfect for the rainforest that the Malhotras had dreamed of. The farmer was happy to part with the land for a fair price, and as soon as the papers were signed, Anil and Pamela started working on reforestation. All they had to do was plant a few native trees and let nature take its course. First, the grass started growing again, then the trees started spreading, and as the new rainforest took shape, wild animals and birds moved in.

Soon, the two wildlife crusaders realized that there was no pointing in nurturing their forest on one side of the river if farmers on the other side were using large amounts pesticides. So they started buying their lands as well, whenever they were up for sale. Many of the farmers were happy to sell, as very little grew on their farmland. And so the little wildlife kept expanding, and today it stretches over 300 hectares.

Photo: video screengrab

“People thought we were quite crazy,” Pamela Malhotra told Great Big Story. “But that’s ok, a lot of people have thought people that have done some amazing things were crazy.”
And “amazing” is the perfect word to describe what Anil and Pamela have achieved over the last two and a half decades. They took a patch of wasteland that nobody wanted and turned it into a biodiversity hot-spot. Today, the Malhotras’ Save Animals Initiative (SAI) Sanctuary is home to hundreds of different indigenous trees and plants, over 300 species of birds, and dozens of rare and threatened species of animals, including Asian elephants, Royal Bengal Tigers, river otters, civet cats, giant Malabar squirrel, lesser loris, various types of deer, monkeys and snakes.

Photo: video screengrab

“I remember walking through the forest, you wouldn’t hear anything but the sound of your own feet,” Pamela says. “Now, the place is alive with sound.”

The SAI sanctuary has been referred to as  “Noah’s Ark” by an Oxford University scientist, one of the many who have traveled here to study indigenous plants and animals that are found nowhere else on the planet.

Photo: Pamela Malhotra/Facebook

But while amazing, the journey undertaken by Anil and Pamela Malhotra over the last 25 years has been anything but easy. Nature was ready to take back the lands offered by the two, but keeping mankind from interfering with its work was a difficult task. Many of the locals did not understand what “this couple from the US” was doing, and started hunting and poaching in the young rainforest. Convincing them to stop was tough, and Pamela remembers fighting poachers with logs, at one point.

“A priest of a temple located on a nearby hillock was killed by a tiger and villagers were afraid. We helped them rebuild the temple at a safer location, but our condition was that they’d give up hunting and poaching,” 64-year-old Pamela told Times of India. “When they asked us why, we asked them why they worshiped Hanuman and Ganesha but killed animals. It worked.”


We keep striving to do more and more, but the initial goal has been more than achieved,” Pamela Malhotra said. “My hope for this forest for the next 10 years is that it will continue to be protected and expanded. We both feel a tremendous amount of joy when we walk through the sanctuary. I’ve never felt this kind of joy in anything else that I’ve done in my life.”

Anil and Pamela Malhotra are now trying to convince big companies to buy more land and let the forest grow naturally, as part of their corporate responsibility plans. “Corporates should extend their CSR activities towards this sector,” says Pamela. “Without water, what business will you do?”



The amazing story of how SAI sanctuary came to be reminds us of another incredible human being – Jadav Payeng, India’s Forest Man, who single-handedly planted a 550-hectar forest.

For further information log on website :
http://www.odditycentral.com/travel/couple-spend-25-years-turning-barren-patch-of-land-into-paradise-of-biodiversity.html

The Bottle Cap Alley – A Dumping Ground Turned Tourist Attraction

Author
By Spooky


Bottle Cap Alley is a unique roadside attraction located at the north edge of the Texas A&M University campus, in College Station Texas. As the name suggests, it is paved with hundreds of thousands – by some accounts, millions – of beer and soda bottle caps.
No one knows exactly how the tradition of paving the 50-meter-long by 2-meters-across alley with metal caps began, but seeing as it is located between the iconic Dry Bean pub and the Dixie Chicken restaurant, some people believe that it started out as a dumping site for the two establishments. Patrons who took their drinks outside followed their example, and as word of the Bottle Cap Alley spread, other local bars started bringing in their nightly haul of bottle caps here as well. It is estimated that the tradition goes back four decades.



Bottle Cap Alley was officially recognized as a local attraction in the early 2000s, when local authorities recognized its potential as a place of interest for tourists. They installed a large sign over it, added lights so it could be visited at night and began promoting it as a part of the local sightseeing tour. The move didn’t sit well with many “Aggies” (A&M students and graduates), who accused officials of Disney-fying their decades-old tradition, but it did turn the once obscure alley into a popular roadside tourist attraction.


Photo: Dixie Chicken/Facebook

In its heyday, most of the pavement for Bottle Cape Alley was provided by Dixie Chicken and Dry Beam, but Atlas Obscura reports that neighborhood establishments no longer contribute too much to its preservation. They don’t sell as many beer bottles as they used to and have become more environmentally conscious. But the unique alley still has a special place in the hearts of A&M students, many of whom save their bottle caps and bring them here by the thousands, to keep Bottle Cap Alley alive.


Photo: Dixie Chicken/Facebook

Several Texas businesses have also contributed to the preservation of Bottle Cap Alley over the years, with the latest being the Shiner Beer Company, which unloaded a whopping 380,000 beer bottle caps there, last month.



At one point, some people noticed that most of the hundreds of thousands (possibly millions) of beer bottle caps all came from American brands, and made it a point to add a variety of caps from imported beers as well, turning the place into an international bottle cap gallery. Unfortunately, that made Bottle Cap Alley all the more appealing to bottle cap collectors.



Bottle Cap Alley is a gold mine for people who collect bottle caps, and it has been reported that some collectors travel to College Station from far away for the specific purpose of finding rare caps for their collections. Taking one or two caps may not seem like a big deal, but considering that average visitors often take a few as souvenirs, it’s easy to see why constant bottle cap contributions are vital to the preservation of Bottle Cap Alley.


Photo: Dixie Chicken/Facebook

Bottle Cap Alley is definitely not a place you want to visit barefooted, as cutting yourself on dirty, rusted metal is pretty high. And while many photos show tourists walking around in open footwear like slippers and sandals, I don’t really recommend it. Before night lights were installed by the city, Bottle Cap Alley had a reputation for helping people avoid long bathroom lines at neighborhood bars and restaurants, if you know what I mean…



For some reason, this unusual tourist attraction reminds me a lot of the Seattle Gum Wall, America’s stickiest destination.

For further information log on website :
http://www.odditycentral.com/travel/the-bottle-cap-alley-a-dumping-ground-turned-tourist-attraction.html

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