1) You can eat Ginkgo seeds! The fruit are what give male ginkgo trees their distinctive fermented cheese scent, and you don't want to eat those. In fact, you'll want to handle those carefully -- they can cause a similar rash to poison ivy or poison oak, if you're sensitive to them. However, if you peel off the fruit (using gloves or similar protection), there's a nut inside that's similar in structure to a pistachio without the split down one side. You can bake those and crack open the shells, yielding a soft, rich nut inside, almost a bean more than a nut. They're pretty tasty.
2) You know the spiky balls on sweetgums? Well, if you don't, sweetgums have very distinctive round spiky balls. You've probably seen them. Anyway, today I learned that the trees those come from are called sweetgums, *BUT* that's not the cool thing I learned -- the cool thing I learned is that when they're ripe (green, not shriveled and brown like you'll often find them), they're full of tiny little seedy things, and if you shake them they sprinkle those tiny little seedy things all over the place.
3) That woman I mentioned a couple of days ago, Jane Marset, who wrote one of the most popular chemistry books of the 19th century? Turns out she received neither attribution nor pay for most of the American editions of that book -- she was British, and America didn't offer copyright protection for foreign authors at the time (that came in 1891).
No comments:
Post a Comment