At long last, spring officially arrived in Chicago on Saturday, the vernal equinox. Or at least it did according to the calendar. Unfortunately, Mother Nature forgot to check the calendar and treated us to some very winter-like weather today.
The forecast is for above-freezing temperatures tomorrow and Wednesday before dropping again at the end of the week, so with any luck, our Winter Wonderland will be gone before the cold weather returns.
Here’s some news that comes as no surprise to me: research done at Connecticut College shows that Oreos may be more addictive than cocaine.
CBS News reports that Connecticut College psychology professor Joseph Schroeder and four of his students conducted a study with rats to determine whether high fat, high sugar foods can be as addictive as drugs of abuse.
“We found that the behavior they exhibited was equally strong for Oreo cookies as it was for cocaine or morphine,” Schroeder, the director of the Behavioral Neuroscience program at Connecticut College, told WCBS 880. “When we looked in the pleasure center of the brain, we found that the Oreo cookies activated the pleasure center more so than cocaine would activate the same center.”
The study was initiated by a student interested in researching the obesity epidemic, noting that low-income areas tend to have a prevalence of fast-food options.
Schroeder told WCBS 880 “Overall, [the study] lent support to the hypothesis that high fat, high sugar foods can be viewed in the same was as drugs of abuse and have addictive potential. It could be used to explain why some people have a problem staying away from foods that they know they shouldn’t eat or that they know are addictive.”
As some who has found himself polishing off a dozen Oreos in short order many times, this new research should be filed under the heading “Duh, yeah!”
Google’s Field Trip app is giving users free admission into 23 museums and zoos during July. In Chicago, users of the app can get free admission to the The Field Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art. Other participating institutions are located in Washington D.C., New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland, and Reno.
Google Field Trip app
How it works
The free Google Field Trip app tracks your location through your phone’s GPS. Google has assembled data on restaurants, venues, public art, movie locations and points of historical interest from 110 different content partners. Depending on how you have set the notifications in the settings, when you are in the vicinity of one of those locations, the app will notify you.
To promote the app, during July Google is giving free admission by simply showing the free ticket on your phone. To take advantage of the free ticket, download Google Field Trip from the iTunes App Store or Google Play. When you are near one of the attractions included in the offer, a free pass will automatically appear within the Nearby Tab, with your free tickets.Each museum has only a limited number of free passes.
Participating museums
The complete list of museums participating in Google’s Field Trip promotion are:
Museum of the City of New York, NYC
The Museum of Arts and Design, NYC
Bronx Zoo, NYC
Central Park Zoo, NYC
National Building Museum, Washington DC
Crime Museum, Washington DC
President Lincoln’s Cottage, Washington DC
The Field Museum, Chicago
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
Conservatory of Flowers, San Francisco
Walt Disney Family Museum, San Francisco
Exploratorium, San Francisco
Legion of Honor, San Francisco
de Young Museum, San Francisco
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Pittock Mansion, Portland
Portland Art Museum, Portland
Portland Children’s Museum, Portland
Terry Lee Wells Nevada Discovery Museum, Reno
Nevada Museum of Art, Reno
The May 4 release date of The Avengers is drawing near and the excitement is building. For the few people who haven’t heard about the movie, The Avengers features a star-studded cast, which includes Robert Downey, Jr., Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Tom Hiddleston, and Samuel L. Jackson. In the film, Nick Fury (Jackson), director of the peacekeeping organization S.H.I.E.L.D., recruits Iron Man (Downey), the Hulk (Ruffalo), Thor (Hemsworth), and Captain America (Evans) to join the other members of the S.H.I.E.L.D. team – including Black Widow (Johansson) – to save the world from destruction.
Several new clips have been released including this action-packed clip bringing all the superheroes together in a group:
For a limited time, buy advance tickets to The Avengers on Fandango and get a free song download on iTunes!
Here is a video of my beautiful grandson. I took this near the beginning of March when he was 5 weeks old while I was spending a week with Catie in Virginia Beach.