This is the natural color of a neutral gold atom. Normally, gold in this form is in an aqueous solution. You can make it yourself by diluting chloroauric acid in water, adding a small amount of a reducing agent like sodium citrate, and stirring them together. That red liquid you get as a result is actually tiny gold particles suspended in water. People have actually been doing this for centuries. The ancient Romans used to use solutions like these (called “colloidal gold”) to stain glass. It was even suggested that this red liquid gold had the potential to be an “Elixer of Life”.
The current record for largest pumpkin is 1810.5 pounds. Chris Stevens’ pumpkin at the Stillwater Harvest Fest in Stillwater, Minnesota was recognized in October 2010 by the Guinness World Records as the largest pumpkin. Compare that to Manuel Uribe who, until recent years, held the record as world’s heaviest man, clocking in at 1300 pounds. (As we've mentioned before, he has since lost a lot of that weight).
The heaviest man in recorded history, Jon Brower Minnoch, was approximately 1400 pounds at his peak, still quite a bit lighter than Chris Stevens’ pumpkin. This is true for everyone else on the list of the heaviest people on Wikipedia.
You can read more about this enormous pumpkin here.
Water is typically a very good conductor; most people already know that they shouldn’t get electronic devices wet, let loose cables near wet floors, or touch electric sockets with wet hands. This is bad news for those of us who prefer to make our toast when we’re in the tub.
However, it turns out that purified water is a particularly poor conductor. When the Mythbusters proved that an electrical appliance placed in a tub could kill a person, they also found that adding salt to the water (by adding bath salts or urine) makes it even more dangerous. It turns out that the opposite is also true: water with less salt is less dangerous. Most of water’s conductivity is caused by the water’s impurities in the form of dissolved salts. The more purified the water, the less conducive it becomes. For instance, salt water is 1,000 times as conductive as your average drinking water, and 1,000,000 times as conducive as highly purified water. Hypothetically, perfectly pure water with absolutely no salt ions wouldn’t be conductive at all.
That isn’t to say you should ever jump in the tub with your favorite electrical appliance, purified water or no. A human body would still contribute salt to a tub of otherwise pure water; the water would cease to be pure as soon as you stepped in. On the other hand, you should probably be safe if you use GFCI.
We normally think of chicken soup as just a common folk remedy. Still, there must be a reason that people have sworn by its cold-fighting abilities for centuries. There’s no real way to cure a common cold anyway; cold medicines just reduce the symptoms, antibiotics are not recommended, and the best treatment is usually just bed-rest and consuming fluids and vitamins. Chicken soup’s combination of heat, fluid, and salts actually make it about as good a cold treatment as anything else. The National Institutes of Health even lists it as a potential treatment on their website.
