Quickies: GMO Potatoes, an Impossible Photograph, and Life in the Coldest Town on Earth

• If a gay Mormon man marries a woman, divorce is likely, study finds – “The LDS couples profiled on TLC’s ‘My Husband Is Not Gay’ may find these statistics sobering: Marriages like theirs — same-sex attracted husbands and straight wives — are two to three times more likely to end in divorce than others. That finding and others come from a newly released in-depth survey of 1,612 self-selected LGBT/same-sex attracted Mormons and former Mormons, thought by researchers to be the largest study ever conducted with this population.”
• GMO Potatoes Have Arrived. But Will Anyone Buy Them? – “On the face of it, the new potato varieties called “Innate” seem attractive. If you peel the brown skin off their white flesh, you won’t find many unsightly black spots. And when you fry them, you’ll probably get a much smaller dose of a potentially harmful chemical.” Wow, they sound terrible–wait no, I meant amazing.
• What It’s Like Living in the Coldest Town on Earth – “It got down to -24 degrees Fahrenheit in Oymyakon, Russia, over the weekend. As frigid as that seems, it’s typical for this town, long known as the coldest inhabited place on Earth. If that kind of number is hard to wrap your brain around, such a temperature is so cold that people here regularly consume frozen meat, keep their cars running 24/7 and must warm the ground with a bonfire for several days before burying their dead.”
• Here’s A Photo Of Something That Can’t Be Photographed – “In Vienna, a team of scientists led by Gabriela Barreto Lemos spent a good long time multiplying photons. First they created an experimental set-up in which a photon from a laser could take one of two paths; as long as they didn’t try to detect which path the photon took, the photon went simultaneously down both paths, making two virtual photons.”
• Ellen Craft, the Slave Who Posed as a Master and Made Herself Free – “A few days before Christmas, 1848, a man named William Craft gave his wife Ellen a haircut—in fact, he cut it to the nape of her neck, far shorter than any other woman in Macon, Georgia, where the Crafts lived. They picked out her clothes—a cravat, a top hat, a fine coat—and went over the plan for what felt like the hundredth time.”
• Orthodox Jewish Newspaper Photoshops Female Leaders Out of Paris March – “An impressive array of world leaders came together for the unity march in Paris on Sunday, paying tribute to those who had died in the previous week’s violence. One Orthodox Jewish newspaper, however, decided that the inspiring image of presidents and prime ministers arm-in-arm could use a little tweaking. The editors of HaMevaser used Photoshop to remove all of the visible women from the scene in their version of the image.”

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