Debra Williams, просп. Європейського Союзу, 47, Київ, Kyiv (2026)

07/02/2025

Yoga: not as old as you think

No one denies that Hinduism’s most sacred and ancient texts, including the Bhagavad Gita, describe different kinds of yogic practices. But what does this ancient and sacred tradition of yoga have to do with what people all around the world do in yoga classes in gyms and fitness centres today? Some 16 million Americans do some form of yoga.

The reality is that postural yoga, as we know it in the 21st century, is neither eternal nor synonymous with the Vedas or Yoga Sutras. On the contrary, modern yoga was born in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. Contrary to the widespread impression, the vast majority of asanas taught by modern yoga gurus are not described anywhere in ancient sacred Hindu texts. Anyone who goes looking for references to popular yoga techniques like pranayam, neti, kapalbhati or suryanamaskar in classical Vedic literature will be sorely disappointed.

The four Vedas have no mention of yoga. The Upanishads and The Bhagavad Gita do, but primarily as a spiritual technique to purify the atman. The Bible of yoga, Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, devotes barely three short sutras (out of 195) to physical postures, and that too only to suggest comfortable ways of sitting still for prolonged meditation. Asanas were only the means to the real goal — to still the mind to achieve the state of pure consciousness — in Patanjali’s yoga.

There are, of course, asana-centred hatha yoga texts in the Indic tradition. But they definitely do not date back 5,000 years: none of them makes an appearance till the 10th to 12th centuries. Hatha yoga was a creation of the kanphata (split-eared) Nath Siddha, who were no Sanskrit-speaking sages meditating in the Himalayas. They undertook great physical austerities not because they sought to achieve pure consciousness, unencumbered by the body and other gross matter, but because they wanted magical powers (siddhis) to become immortal and to control the rest of the natural world.

22/01/2025

Iconic American movie star Marilyn Monroe once famously sang, "Diamonds are a girl's best friend". Scientists from the University of Liege in Belgium believe they have unearthed a gargantuan amount of these precious stones. There could be an 18-km wide layer of the gems beneath the crust of the planet Mercury. Our nearest planetary neighbour could quite literally be a celestial jewel. Researchers tested how Mercury formed, approximately 4.5 billion years ago. The planet evolved from a gyrating cloud of cosmic dust and gas. Over millions of years, the dust was compressed into graphite, which is chemically identical to diamond. Both are solid forms of the element carbon. It is unlikely Mercury's diamonds could ever be mined as they are about 500 km below the surface.

Researchers used a machine called an anvil press to simulate the conditions under which Mercury was formed. The press is used to make synthetic diamonds. Researchers mixed elements inside a graphite capsule. These included silicon, magnesium and aluminium. The capsule was subjected to pressure 70,000 times greater than that on Earth. It was heated to temperatures of 2,000 degrees Celsius. The lead researcher speculated about the diamonds on Mercury. He said: "Diamonds are made of carbon only, so they should be similar to what we know on Earth…They would [resemble] pure diamonds." Scientists believe there are a quadrillion tons of diamonds beneath the Earth's surface. Experts say the value of these hidden gems is pretty much incalculable.

15/01/2025

How Was Popcorn Discovered?

Figuring out when people started making popcorn is harder. There are several types of maize, most of which will pop if heated, but one variety, actually called “popcorn,” makes the best popcorn. Scientists have discovered phytoliths from Peru, as well as burned kernels, of this type of “poppable” maize from as early as 6,700 years ago.
You can imagine that popping maize kernels was first discovered by accident. Some maize probably fell into a cooking fire, and whoever was nearby figured out that this was a handy new way of preparing the food. Popped maize would last a long time and was easy to make.
Ancient popcorn was probably not much like the snack you might munch at the movie theater today. There was probably no salt and definitely no butter, since there were no cows to milk in the Americas yet. It probably wasn’t served hot and was likely pretty chewy compared with the version you’re used to today.
It’s impossible to know exactly why or how popcorn was invented, but I would guess it was a clever way to preserve the edible starch in corn by getting rid of the little bit of water inside each kernel that would make it more susceptible to spoiling. It’s the heated water in the kernel escaping as steam that makes popcorn pop. The popped corn could then last a long time. What you may consider a tasty snack today probably started as a useful way of preserving and storing food.

25/12/2024

Sweet peppers surge into ripeness in late summer and flourish into fall.

The things that we call peppers are actually chilies, not peppers at all. The misnomer started with a persistent case of mistaken identity and wishful thinking by Spanish and Portuguese explorers who confused New World capsicums — chili plants — with the plants that produce peppercorns, one of the profitable spices they had hoped to discover during their travels. Chilies are berries because they are the seed pods of the plants, botanically speaking.

Botanists and culinary historians tell us that peppers are native to Central and South America. When trade ships began to crisscross the globe during the 16th century, they carried peppers that got planted on new shores. Cultivated varieties now grow in all but the coldest of climates.

Some peppers are hot, but the rest are not. Hot peppers contain varying levels of capsaicin, a colorless, odorless but unmistakable fiery compound. Mild and sweet peppers carry a recessive gene that keeps them from forming capsaicin. The only way to know a pepper is to taste it, but in general most sweet peppers are green while unripe and change into colors (usually red, orange, yellow or purple). Sweet peppers tend to grow much larger than hot peppers.

No vegetable benefits from roasting more than ripe sweet peppers. Roasting intensifies their natural sweetness and removes their thin, tough skins.

The heat caramelizes the sugars in the peppers, so they must be ripe enough to have developed sugars. So don't try this with an unripe green pepper, because all you will get is an acrid, burned green pepper. (This caveat does not apply to green chilies because the point of roasting them is to char the skins, not sweeten the flesh.)

Leave the peppers whole and do not oil them. If using a gas burner or grill (either gas or charcoal), place them directly on the grate as close to the heat source as possible. Roast the peppers until they are blistered and blackened all over, turning as needed with tongs. Don't stop until they look ruined. Transfer the charred peppers into a large bowl and cover with plastic wrap. Let the peppers rest until they are cool enough to handle. The captured steam will finish cooking them. Gently pull out the stem and core of each pepper; most of the seeds will come out still attached to the core. Gently rub or peel off the blackened skin. It's fine if a few charred bits stay stuck to the flesh.

Use the peppers at once, or cover and refrigerate up to three days. You also can freeze the peppers in an airtight container for up to three months. Frozen peppers retain their flavor, but they soften, so they are best used in cooked dishes.

19/12/2024

The history and future of Earth-Moon system

According to the latest theories, the moon was born from the Earth, its matter torn off when a Mars-size planetoid hit the Earth in a grazing collision some 4.5 billion years ago, when the Sun and its court of planets were emerging from a contracting and spinning hydrogen-rich primordial cloud of matter.

Given that the moon emerged from Earth, their distance was once smaller. Simulations place the initial distance at about 10 Earth radii, while now it is at about 60, a huge difference. So, if today the full moon occupies an area in the celestial sphere comparable to that of your thumb nail (about 0.5 degrees), in the distant past the view was considerably more dramatic. Also, since the gravitational force varies with the square of the distance, in the past the mutual influence of Earth and moon was much larger.

Far into the future, with the continuous slowing-down of Earth's spin, a day will last about 47 hours and the distance to the Moon will be 43 percent longer than today. At this point, Earth will spin about its axis at the same rate that the moon will orbit the Earth — the pair will be tidally-locked: the moon will hover over the same point on Earth, somewhat like geostationary satellites do today. It will be a very weird reality, quite different from what we see today: on one side of the Earth there will be no moon to see; and there will be no tides. (Actually, no one will be around to see and it won't happen: the sun will blow up before then, destroying the Earth-moon system.)

The duration of a day changes, even if absurdly slowly for human standards. As of now, a day becomes longer by about 1.7 microseconds per century. At this rate, half a billion years ago a day lasted a bit over 22 hours and one year had 397 days.

12/12/2024

For reasons having to do with optics and the way your brain works, the camera can in fact make you look heavier than you are.

The main difference between a camera's view of the world and yours is that the camera has a single "eye" whereas you have two. That subtly changes the way things look. Here's an experiment. Pose a round object in front of a varied background — a coffee cup in front of the computer monitor worked well enough for me. From a distance of two or three feet, look at the object alternately with both eyes, then one. You'll notice that, seen with one eye, the object looms larger in your field of vision, and obscures more of what's behind it. It seems bigger and bulgier. In other words, it looks fat.

If you look at the object first with your right eye, then your left, you notice the familiar shift in perspective known as parallax — background features hidden from one eye can be seen by the other. When you look at the object with both eyes, the brain blends the two views together. You see more of what's behind the object, making it seem smaller. Result: binocular vision is slimming, monocular the opposite.

There are ways to compensate for the fattening effect of the camera. One is to use a telephoto lens when shooting portraits. Step back from the subject and zoom in — parallax, and thus the addition of pounds, diminishes with distance. (I knew a photographer who swore by the rule "Never use a lens whose focal length, in millimeters, is less than the weight of the woman.")

If you don't have a telephoto lens but you do have digital photo-editing software, you can still step back when taking portraits and crop out the extra background later on the computer. If you're on the other side of the camera, here's some advice: watch out for amateur photographers who feel they need to have the subject fill the frame. They'll tend to take portraits from three feet away, making it appear that your face has been painted on a balloon. And do not forget those vertical stripes.

06/11/2024

Some artists help us perceive the world more precisely. A rare few go further. They look beyond looking. Theirs is a deeper reality, more felt than seen. Claude Monet is one of those. In three visits to London between 1899 and 1901, the French Impressionist, then approaching 60 years of age, embarked upon one of the most ambitious series of penetrating paintings ever undertaken by any artist – a project that is now the focus of a groundbreaking exhibition at the Courtauld Institute, Monet and London: Views of the Thames.

From a murky miasma of toxic, soot-laced smog that choked the very breath of the Thames, Monet magicked up nearly 100 paintings – more than he would devote to any other subject in his long career. His evanescent visions, which dissolve the heft of London's crowded bridges and imposing palaces into intangible tapestries of vibrating vapour, would shape forever the way the world conceived of the "unreal city", as TS Eliot would later call it – a place beyond place that sits outside of time, an ethereal elsewhere.

19/10/2024

On 17 October 1969, Easy Rider burst on to cinema screens through a psychedelic haze. Infused with rock music, free love and drug-taking, this low-budget, freewheeling road movie vividly captured the counterculture spirit of the late 1960s, as well as the US's bubbling social tensions.

The film tells the story of two free-spirited bikers, moustachioed hippy Billy, played by its director, Dennis Hopper, and leather-clad Wyatt, played by its producer, Peter Fonda. Easy Rider starts with Billy and Wyatt smuggling co***ne out of Mexico to sell to a Los Angeles drug dealer, played by famed music producer Phil Spector (whose performance seems even more sinister in the light of his 2009 murder conviction). The pair, now flush with cash, then resolve to ride across the US to New Orleans in time for Mardi Gras.

27/09/2024

Work has begun on replacing and strengthening two coastal defence groynes at a popular Dorset beach.
The project at Hengistbury Head in Bournemouth is expected to take between six and eight weeks, depending on weather and tides.

Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole (BCP) Council said the new structures would be the same length as the existing groynes but made from "a hybrid of timber and rock".
It said a section of the beach would be closed to the public for safety reasons.
The council advised beachgoers to follow a diversion route.

16/09/2024

Hundreds of bottles of water have been made into an art installation to celebrate a county's chalk streams.
River Droplet has been created alongside the River Frome in Frampton, near Dorchester in Dorset.

It consists of 500 bottles of water and chalky sediment taken from the river.
The artwork has been created by artist Lorna Rees and architect Amanda Moore and was commissioned by the Dorset National Landscape.

09/09/2024

Chef Olivia Tiedemann loves flipping the bird to convention. Here are the Hamptons culinary experiences that get her thumbs up, from classic lobster rolls to elite farm stands.

When chef Olivia Tiedemann first arrived in the Hamptons to start the personal chef gig that would indirectly lead to explosive Instagram stardom, her first impression was awe.
"Coming from a very different lifestyle, driving up there for the very first time, where everything was so perfect," reminisces Tiedemann, now as famous for her punkish, bird-flipping, F-bomb dropping persona as she is for her elegantly plated dishes and the decadent pastas she whips up from scratch at midnight. "Pulling up to my client's house; this huge, immaculate beachfront mansion. It was very magical."
Tiedemann is hardly alone; the Hamptons – a cluster of luxurious seaside resort towns on the eastern end of New York's Long Island – have long fascinated visitors, who flock to the area for a summertime escape to a world of white linen, cocktail parties and impossibly lavish estates.

Debra Williams

07/02/2025

22/01/2025

15/01/2025

25/12/2024

19/12/2024

12/12/2024

06/11/2024

19/10/2024

27/09/2024

16/09/2024

09/09/2024

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