Neat kitchen gadgets spend most of their time in a drawer. Here is a collection of high-end cooking gadgets beautiful enough for an art museum.
This kitchen gadget, the Alessi apostrophe avoids citrus catastrophe. Clawing your way into oranges is so last century. If you enjoy peeling oranges and getting all the citrusy goodness up under your thumbnail, this beautiful gadget may not be your thing.
Alessi Apostrophe Orange Peeler
Only 2.2 inches tall, one inch wide, and 10 ounces of matte finish stainless steel.
Honey, this is for you. Simple and timeless, this Alessi honey jar and serving wand please the eye the way honey pleases the palatte.
A truly space age kitchen gadget, the Alessi citrus juicer comes in two sizes, and comes with a citrus bonus (hint: it’s a punctuation mark).
Main Squeeze?
When it comes to citrus juicing, the Alessi My Squeeze is beautiful enough to be your new main squeeze. Five inches by two and a quarter inches and made of sculpted stainless steel, the My Squeeze should last for centuries under ordinary condition.
Dimensions: 5″L x 2.25″W
Mirro polich stainless steel
For all citrus fruits
Let’s recap these gorgeous kitchen gadgets, experience a little sticker shock, keeping in mind that Italian works of art aren’t cheap.
The best and strongest aircraft cable key ring is a simple loop of aircraft cable
Aircraft cable is a flexible plastic-coated stainless steel wire rope developed to manipulate control surfaces — flaps, ailerons, and tail rudders — on airplanes.
Aircraft cable now finds uses in bike locks, exercise machines and sailboat rigging.
Why aircraft cable for a key ring?
With a tensile strength of 890 pounds, a 1/16 inch aircraft cable may seem over-engineered for holding keys. The aircraft cable key ring was introduced in the 1970s. Some key rings manufactured back then are still in service.
This aircraft cable key ring has been in constant use since 1976. Despite fading, cracks in the plastic coating, and some play in the clasp, this key ring still works perfectly.
Get the right kind of air craft cable key ring, the twisty kind
There are three kinds of key ring cable clasps:
threaded carabiner-style — problem: fussy screw connector; can snag
ball in socket — problem: streamlined but disconnects too easily
twisty lock — fast, smooth, secure but you need to know how to use it
My personal recommendation comes after trying all three kinds of aircraft cable key rings.
Yes, the ball in socket type does disconnect when the ring is squeezed, if you are lucky, when the keyring is in your pocket. The threaded variety also unscrew and are fussy.
I have used a twisty lock aircraft cable key ring since about 1975. In 1976 while visiting a fair booth in San Diego, I talked with the company rep about these amazingly strong and wear-resistant key rings.
When I showed the company rep my purple aircraft cable key ring, he offered to trade me a brand new red one
I was hesitant to part with my reliable key ring. When he told me his company did research on wear and tear in used key rings, I agreed to the trade.
That red aircraft cable key ring has been in my pocket every day since 1976. Perhaps the company will offer to trade me a new one? I suspect the cable was made by the Loos Company.
Will your aircraft cable key ring last for 37 years? Get one now and start testing!
The history of ancient life on Earth is written in its oldest rocks. Paleontologists, detectives who track the ancient denizens of that early world, continue to gather fossil evidence of the earliest multicellular life, the Ediacara.
These mysteriouscreatures preceded the famous Cambrian explosion that began 541 million years ago.
The Cambrian, abundant with the fossils from the ancient ocean sediments, including the Burgess Shale in Canada, justifiably captures the popular spotlight.
This little devil, a Devonian trilobite, was armed with an as-yet unexplained trident. Photo credit: Wikipedia
Almost everyone has seen a trilobite, an animal that appeared in the Cambrian and roamed the ancient seas for 270 million years, right up to the Permian-Triassic extinction, the so-called “Great Dying” 252 million years ago.
Of course, even kids know the names of dinosaurs, which came to rule the Earth after the Great Dying until only 66 million years ago.
Ediacaran life has attracted much less celebrity
Beginning in the 1950s, a few fossils began to tell of complex animals that were not even supposed to exist prior to the Cambrian.
This pre-Cambrian time, the Ediacaran period, between 575 and 542 million years ago, followed the Marinoan glaciation or “Snowball Earth,” a period when the entire surface of our planet was frozen solid.
Not that long ago, the Cambrian was considered the boundary before which no multicellular life existed. That’s all changed.
Simple one-celled life appeared on Earth about a billion years after the planet formed 4.5 billion years ago, a time punctuated by massive meteor bombardments, including a whopping collision with a Mars-sized planet that sent molten rock into space to form our Moon.
White smokers at the Champagne vent, Northwest Eifuku volcano, Marianas Trench Marine National Monument Photo Credit: NOAA
Life Begins
Within less than a billion years life appeared. Life on Earth may have gotten its start near deep-sea geothermal vents, still the home of extremeophile bacteria and the animals that feed on them.
Whatever process led to the emergence of life, soon single-celled plants began converting the Earth’s carbon dioxide into oxygen and carbohydrates, the stuff you sprinkle on your cereal.
The first oxygen was consumed by iron dissolved in the oceans which became iron oxide or rust, laid down as rich ore deposits later used to make your car.
Dissolved iron in the oceans, which “rusted” when oxygen became plentiful, was deposited as banded ironstones.
The conversion of a carbon-dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere into oxygen may seem like a good thing to mammals like us. But carbon dioxide traps heat much better than does oxygen. Simple plants made too much of a good thing! Oxygen cooled the Earth.
Our planet froze into a Snowball Earth. Several times.
Why did ancient single-celled life dominate Earth for so long?
Appearing “only” a billion years after the Earth formed, single celled life took more than three billion years to begin forming more complex multicullular life forms during the Ediacaran Period about 600 million years ago. Meditate on this time line.
Ancient life took its sweet time to go from single cells, around 4 billion years ago, to more complex multicellular plants and animals, during the Ediacaran period, about 45 million years before the Cambrian. Photo credit: Wikipedia
These ancient critters now have their own explosion, the Avalon Explosion, a rapid increase in the diversity of Ediacara body forms that preceded the Cambrian Explosion by 33 million years. If 33 million years doesn’t sound like much, it’s a quarter the length of the dinosaurs’ reign and half as long as the Cenozoic, the Age of Mammals.
A Sample Collection of Ediacaran Life Forms
Unless noted all photo credits: Wikipedia
Dickinsonia
Dickinsonia grew as big as bath mats and apparently lay flat on the sea bottom, possibly grazing on microbial mats. The segments of the soft-bodied Dickinsonia have been described as liquid-filled chambers, something like an air mattress. First discovered by Reg Sprigg in 1946 in the Flinders Ranges of South Australia, apparently while eating his lunch, Ediacaran fossils were described in a paper submitted to, and rejected by, the journal Nature.
Charnia
Charnia was first discovered in 1957 in rocks in Charnwood Forest in central England by Tina Negus, a 15-year-old schoolgirl, but her geography schoolteacher ruled out the possibility of Precambrian fossils.
Later, a schoolboy Roger Mason, who later became a geologist, brought the fossils to the attention of scientists. Charnia lived attached to the sea bottom, too deep for sunlight to allow photosynthesis, suggesting that they absorbed nutrients directly from the seawater.
Charniodiscus
Also first discovered in Charnwood Forest, Charniodiscus was first discovered as only the circular base or holdfast that anchored the stalk and frond to the sandy sea floor. Similar to Charnia, the frond structure is different, although the source of nutrition for this an Ediacaran fossil was presumably similar. Two Charniodiscus forms have been found, one with a short stalk and fat frond, the other with a long stalk that held the frond 20 inches above the sea bottom.
Eoandromeda
Eoandromeda has eight radial spiral arms, spiraling either clockwise or counterclockwise. A few dozen fossils are known, ranging from 1 to 4 cm in diameter. This specimen from Australia has longer, more tightly coiled arms compared to Chinese Eoandrommeda. Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/groups/complex_life/
Spriggina
Named for Ron Sprigg, this segmented Edicaran organism reached about 3-5 cm in length and may have been a predator. Two rows of tough interlocking plates cover the bottom, while one row covers its top. Its front segments are fused to form a head, which may have borne eyes and antennae.
These are but a sample of a growing collection of Ediacaran organisms. Below is an artist’s conception of an Ediacaran garden
The Ediacara appear to have become extinct before the celebrated hustle and bustle of the Cambrian. Some suggest they are a “failed experiment” that left no descendents. As objects of scientific study the Ediacara are an active field with a growing list of Ediacaran genera.
Here’s how the Earth’s continents changed from Ediacaran times.
Finally a treat: David Attenborough shifts focus from life on today’s Earth to First Life, an account that includes the Ediacaran first toddling multicellular steps of ancient life. Enjoy!
