In 1908, at a lab in Niagara Falls, New York, a metallurgist named Auguste Rossi invented a brilliant white pigment that would become almost ubiquitous in human-made stuff and is found today in everything from paint to plastic to pills.  The chemical, titanium dioxide, became what color researcher Matthijs de Keijzer calls the “most significant contribution” to an explosion in 20th-century pigment technology, in what some historians refer to as a chromatic revolution, a new look for the world.  But archaeologists say that Rossi didn’t get there first.  In 2018, researchers in the United States discovered titanium white in 400-plus-year-old ceremonial wooden drinking cups made by the Inca and residing today in various museums.  Carved with elaborate geometrical designs, the cups, called qeros, traditionally were not colored.  But around the time of the Spanish conquest of Peru in 1530, the Inca started mixing pigments, including titanium white, into resin and decorating qeros with the bright goo.  Adam Rogers  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/inca-discovered-prized-pigment-180977704/ 

It's long been observed that many plants produce leaves, shoots, or flowers in spiral patterns.  Cauliflower provides a unique example of this phenomenon, because those spirals repeat at several different size scales—a hallmark of fractal geometry.  This self-similarity is particularly notable in the Romanesco variety because of the distinctive conical shape of its florets.  Now, a team of French scientists from the CNRS has identified the underlying mechanism that gives rise to this unusual pattern, according to a new paper published in Science.  Fractal geometry is the mathematical offspring of chaos theory; a fractal is the pattern left behind in the wave of chaotic activity.  That single geometric pattern repeats thousands of times at different magnifications (self-similarity).  Many fractal patterns exist only in mathematical theory, but over the last few decades, scientists have found there are fractal aspects to many irregular yet patterned shapes in nature, such the branchings of rivers and trees—or the strange self-similar repeating buds that make up the Romanesco cauliflower.  Each bud is made up of a series of smaller buds, although the pattern doesn't continue down to infinitely smaller size scales, so it's only an approximate fractal.  The branched tips, called meristems, make up a logarithmic spiral, and the number of spirals on the head of Romanesco cauliflower is a Fibonacci number, which in turn is related to what's known as the "golden ratio."  The person most closely associated with the Fibonacci sequence is the 13th-century mathematician Leonardo Pisano; his nickname was "filius Bonacci" (son of Bonacci), which got shortened to Fibonacci.  In his 1202 treatise, Book of Calculation, Fibonacci described the numerical sequence that now bears his name:  1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 . . . and on into infinity.  DOI:  Science, 2021. 10.1126/science.abg5999  Jennifer Ouellette  https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/07/what-fractals-fibonacci-and-the-golden-ratio-have-to-do-with-cauliflower/ 

Romesco sauce is an unforgettable sauce.  It’s bold, zippy and full of roasted tomato and pepper flavor.  Romesco originated in a city called Tarragona in Catalonia, the northeastern-most region of Spain that touches France.  Tarragona is a port city, and the fishermen there made romesco sauce to liven up the day’s catches.  Find recipe at https://cookieandkate.com/easy-romesco-sauce-recipe/ 

The Pontalba Buildings form two sides of Jackson Square in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana.  They are matching red-brick, one-block-long, four‑story buildings built in the late 1840s by the Baroness Micaela Almonester Pontalba.  The ground floors house shops and restaurants; and the upper floors are apartments which, reputedly, are the oldest continuously-rented such apartments in the United States.  Baroness Pontalba, an accomplished businesswoman, invested in real estate, purchasing the land on the upriver and downriver sides of the Place d’Armes.  She constructed two Parisian-style row house buildings between 1849-51, at a cost of over $300,000.  The buildings include the first recorded instance in the city of the use of cast iron 'galleries', which set a fashion that soon became the most prominent feature of the city's residential architecture.  The cast-iron panels in the first floor balustrade feature her initials, 'AP', intertwined in the design.  The building fronting Rue St. Peter, upriver from Jackson Square, is the upper Pontalba.  The building on the other side, fronting Rue St. Ann, is the lower Pontalba Building.  Baroness Pontalba died in France in 1874, and the Pontalba family retained ownership of the buildings until the 1920s; but they did not take an interest in the townhouses, so they fell into disrepair.  The heirs sold the lower building to local philanthropist William Ratcliffe Irby, who in turn bequeathed the property to the Louisiana State Museum.  Local civic leaders acquired the upper building, which they sold to a foundation in 1930, the Pontalba Building Museum Association.  The foundation turned the upper building over to the City of New Orleans, which has owned it since the 1930s.  According to Christina Vella, historian of modern Europe, the Pontalba Buildings were not the first apartment buildings in the present-day U.S., as is commonly believed.  They were originally built as row houses, not rental apartments.  The row houses were turned into apartments during the 1930s renovations (during the Great Depression).  In the short story "Hidden Gardens," Truman Capote describes them as " . . . the oldest, in some ways most somberly elegant, apartment houses in America, the Pontalba Buildings."  They were declared a National Historic Landmark in 1974 for their early and distinctive architecture.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontalba_Buildings  See pictures and read about Micaëla Almonester, Baroness de Pontalba at https://www.hnoc.org/publications/first-draft/woman-behind-new-orleanss-famous-pontalba-buildings 

Julia Child (August 15, 1912–August 13, 2004)  Julia Child is known around the world as an incredible chef.  She made French cuisine accessible to the American public and was the first woman to host her own cooking show on television.  However, during World War II, years before Child began cooking for the country, she worked with the Secret Intelligence Branch of the Office of Strategic Services in Southeast Asia.  Child, who at the time was unmarried and known as Julia McWilliams, began volunteering with the Pasadena, California chapter of the American Red Cross in September of 1941 to help prepare for war.  She created and supervised the Volunteer Stenographic Services.  After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Child assisted in tracking ships along the coast with the Aircraft Warning Service.  But Child wanted to do more and decided to join the military.  She took the civil service exam and applied to the Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES) and the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps (WAAC).  However, she was rejected from both organizations because of her height.  At over six feet, she was just too tall.  Still wanting to be more involved, Child moved to Washington, DC in 1942 in hopes of finding other ways to support the war effort.  So, she took a position as a junior research assistant with the Secret Intelligence Branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a forerunner to the CIA.  She was one of 4,500 women who worked for the OSS during the war. Child became a Junior Research Assistant under Colonel Donovan the Director of the OSS.  She was “directly reviewing, filing and performing minor research in connection with the reports and documents flowing into Colonel Donovan’s office.”  In 1943, Child worked as part of the Emergency Rescue Equipment Special Projects division of OSS.  She was an executive assistant to Captain Harold J. Coolidge the head of the division.  During an interview with fellow OSS Officer Betty McIntosh, Child spoke of her experience with the division, “I must say we had lots of fun.  We designed rescue kits and other agent paraphernalia.”  Child also helped to develop a repellent that was coated on underwater explosives to prevent sharks from bumping into them and setting them off.  See pictures at https://www.womenshistory.org/articles/recipe-adventure 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2403  August 13, 2021