the world's great wonders Machu Picchu, Peru

Clinging to a remote ridge high in the Andes, the ancient city of Machu Picchu was built, lived in and deserted in fewer than 100 years – then lost to civilization for centuries. During construction, the Inca didn't use wheels to transport the blocks. Instead it's thought they hauled them up the slopes by hand, as protrusions have been found on a few stones (suggesting grips for workers' hands). Ingenious engineering solutions were used to counteract earthquakes: L-shaped blocks anchored corners together, doors and windows tilted inward, and no mortar was used between stones so that, if shaken, they could move and resettle without collapsing.

Make the trip: there are only two options to get to Machu Picchu: trek it or catch the train to Aguas Calientes, where you take a bus from the ticket office on the main road.



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The Formula for Coca-Cola

It's no surprise that one of most profitable companies ever would want to keep their formula a secret. Even with hundreds of imitators, Coke still dominates world-wide sales of caramel colored drinks. But doesn't that stuff only have, like, four ingredients? Fizzy water, high fructose corn syrup, caffeine and Brown Dye #4? There isn't exactly a vibrant symphony of flavors in each can.

Yet, the formula is so fiercely protected that the company even pulled out of India in the 1970s because they would have been legally required to divulge their ingredient list to their government.

It even managed to stall a divorce case. When one of the Coke heirs ended his marriage to his wife, she demanded some of his great-grandfather's (the founder of Coca-Cola) original notes as part of her settlement. The company had to get involved and put a stop to it out of fear the notes could contain information on the formula.

Who Knows:

Only two Coke executives know it. Urban legend says they each only know half, but that's false--that part was invented for an old ad campaign.

The original copy of the formula is kept in an undisclosed SunTrust Bank in Atlanta. To keep SunTrust on the side, Coke gave them some 48.3 million shares of stock as well as having executives from each company sit on the other's board of directors.

The company has policies surrounding the secret that range from the paranoid (the two executives who knew the formula could not fly on the same plane) to the bizarre (no one could view the formula without God, Jesus and Elvis present or something to that extent).

All of this is pointless in the end. Coca-Cola still derives some of its flavor from the coca plant; the same place that cocaine comes from. Due to the obvious drug related issues that would arise from importing lots of coca plant into America legally, only one company has government permission to do it. That company is Coca-Cola. So even if someone broke into the bank and managed to take the formula, they would never be able to produce an exact Coke rip-off.
And if another company did somehow get permission to import coca, hell, there is at least one better way to make money with it.

Incredible fishing boat in the storm

KFC's 11 Herbs and Spices

The secret KFC recipe dates back to the 1930s when Harland Sanders served chicken to people who stopped at his gas station in North Corbin, Kentucky. It was an amazing success. And while he never joined the military, in 1936, he was given the title of honorary Kentucky Colonel by the governor in recognition of his contribution to the state's cuisine.

Eventually, Sanders expanded his restaurant into a chain. While KFC has diversified its menu over the years, the main thing that sets the restaurant apart is still its special blend of 11 herbs and spices. And boy do they know it.

Who Knows:

As with Coke, only two executives have access to the recipe for KFC's 11 herbs and spices. Man, wouldn't it be weird if it was the same two guys?

How it is Kept Secret:

The recipe is at KFC's headquarters. But unless you are Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible, you have no chance of getting it.

"We fortified the ceiling and the floor around here with concrete bricks two feet thick," Dietl said. "We put in motion sensors also CCTV that's hooked up to security downstairs. They have 24/7 armed guys downstairs, so in the amount of 30 seconds you'll have somebody up here. Once in here, you have to have two people with two keys and two different PIN numbers, and that's what you have to have. This safe is bolted down and there is no way anybody can get in here unauthorized without us knowing about it."

Holy. Fuck.

But will this be enough to thwart the hordes of people who are trying to steal the secret recipe? Just in case it's not, half of the ingredients are mixed at one location, half at another, and they are combined at a third.

This is chicken we're talking about. CHICKEN! Fast food chicken. See, we're going to share a little secret with you guys who're risking your lives to protect that recipe: no one eats at KFC because they have the best chicken in the world. People eat it because it's a pain in the ass to make at home and the line was too long at Popeye's.

Tuna Sold for $37,500 in Tokyo

A sushi restaurant chain owner paid ¥4.51 million ($37,500) for a 180 kilogram Bluefin tuna at the first auction of the year in Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market.

Kiyoshi Kimura, president of Kiyomura Co., has won the year’s first bid for four consecutive years since 2012. He told reporters Monday after his purchase that it was cheaper than he had expected thanks to a successful haul of tuna near the Tsugaru strait this year.

While $37,500 may seem too much to pay for a fish, it is a bargain compared to what Mr. Kimura had to spend in 2013.

In January 2012, Mr. Kimura won the bid at the first tuna auction of the year for $736,700. He then paid $1.76 million for a 222 kilogram tuna in January 2013, which remains an all-time record.

Prices for tuna tend to get inflated at the year’s first auction. Mr. Kimura had been in a fierce bidding war with a restaurant chain owner in Hong Kong prior to his success in recent years.

Tsukiji market is commemorating its 80th anniversary this year since opening in February 1935. It is scheduled to relocate to the Toyosu area in Tokyo in November 2016.

Tuna Fishing Towns

Marlin fishermen like to think that blue, or black marlin, depending on which ocean you fish in, is the baddest, hardest-fighting fish in the sea. Well, it’s time to wake up, buttercup — they’re not. A marlin loses its fighting advantage by its instinct to come up and jump when trying to rid itself of whatever is causing its distress. Tuna, on the other hand, go down. That’s why everyone gets so pissy in the cockpit when a bit marlin starts heading for the bottom. You know it might be a long time before you see that fish again.

With a tuna, you know from the get-go what it’s going to do — it’s going to punish you. The deeper the water you hook a tuna in, the more line you’re going to need, because tuna fish head for the bottom and never give an inch on the way back up. Frankly, if you’re fighting any tuna over 100 pounds while standing up, then I hope it was an accidental hookup — either that or you must be some sort of masochist, but to each his own.

Bluefin tuna represent the true heavyweights and routinely break the 1,000-pound mark, but bigeye and yellow fin routinely top 300 pounds, presenting a challenge on any tackle. Here, then, are five great places to tangle with tuna that reach truly gigantic size — I know that there are plenty of fellows out there itching for the ultimate pull.

Tuna Bidding in Japan  http://weknow2015.blogspot.com/2015/06/tuna-sold-for-37500-in-tokyo.html

Coral Breeding May Help Cooler Reefs

The study, by scientists in the United States and Australia, raises the possibility of deliberate breeding to pass on heat-tolerant genes to combat climate change, linked by almost all scientists to a build-up of man-made greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

"Coral larvae with parents from the north, where waters were about 2 degrees Celsius [3.6 Fahrenheit] warmer, were up to 10 times as likely to survive heat stress, compared with those with parents from the south," the scientists found. And cross-breeding of the corals, of the Acropora millepora species common in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, brought offspring that were "significantly" better at coping with rising temperatures than the cooler southern corals, they wrote.

Corals, which are tiny stony-bodied animals, form reefs that are vital nurseries for many fish and are big draws for scuba-diving tourists.

"What I think is the most viable strategy is simply to transplant adult corals - we make a reef and let then cross with the natural corals," Mikhail Matz, a co-author at the University of Texas at Austin, told Reuters.

Other dangers

A United Nations report last year said that there were early warning signs that warm water corals and the Arctic, where ice is melting fast, were among the most vulnerable parts of nature and already suffering irreversible changes because of warming.

The experts cautioned that warmer waters were only one of many problems facing corals — others including pollution and an acidification of the oceans.

The fact that corals can inherit heat tolerance "is not a magic bullet that will safeguard corals from the multitude of stressors they are currently facing," Line Bay, a co-author at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, told Reuters.

The study adds to wider debate about deliberately relocating animals and plants because of climate change, despite risks for instance that they unwittingly bring diseases to their new homes.

Make Morphine farm

The latest finding follows recent success in engineering brewer's yeast to synthesise opiates such as morphine and codeine from a common sugar, boosting the prospect of "home brew" drug supply.

But whether making morphine in bubbling vats of yeast will be commercially viable — either for drug companies or criminal gangs — is far from certain, since poppies are very efficient natural factories.

"Poppies are not going to be displaced overnight, by any stretch of the imagination," said Ian Graham, a professor at the University of York, who worked on the latest gene discovery.

While extracting opiates from genetically engineered yeast is now a real possibility, he sees more immediate benefits from applying the latest knowledge to developing better poppy plants.

Having the gene allows scientists to develop molecular breeding approaches to creating made-to-order poppy varieties that make different compounds, he told Reuters. And that could lead to agricultural production of drugs such as noscapine, a cough-suppressant that may also fight cancer, as well as improved plant strains with higher yields of morphine.

The University of York team worked on the project with scientists from GlaxoSmithKline. The drugmaker has long been a major supplier of opiates but agreed in March to sell its Australian-based business to India's Sun Pharmaceutical Industries.

$12B in Annual Sales

For centuries, opiates have been the go-to drugs for pain relief, and they remain the most potent treatments for severe pain, generating global prescription sales of around $12 billion annually.

Morphine and codeine are used directly as painkillers, while a third compound, thebaine, is a starting point for semisynthetic opiates, including oxycodone and hydrocodone.

The molecular structure of these drugs is so complex that chemists have never been able to produce them from off-the-shelf components. But understanding the genetics means it is now possible to engineer a microbe like yeast to do the job.

The discovery of the so-called STORR gene by Graham and colleagues, reported in the journal Science on Thursday, provides the missing piece in the biosynthesis puzzle.

The gene plays a vital role in the back-to-back steps in the plants' morphine-producing pathway by converting a compound known as (S)-reticuline into a variation called (R)-reticuline.

Why do We Like to Share Things Online?

The world is social media, and we’re just living in it. Gone are the days of Talkomatic in the 1970s where only five people at a time could chat and AOL that had an upwards of 17 million subscribers in its heyday. As of 2015, Alexa and U.S. Traffic Rank report that Facebook has over 900 million unique monthly visitors. Other social media platforms, such as Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, and Instagram, also have nine-digit unique monthly visitors. After cable and DSL modems debuted along with platforms like MySpace and Friendster in the 2000s, people had more larger and faster options for interacting with others on the Web, making the chat rooms that defined the 1990s Internet experience obsolete. Although the core concept of AOL and Yahoo chat rooms still lives on through applications like the group chat option in Facebook Messenger, today’s social media is a different experience altogether.

So what makes social media the titan it is today? What appeal does social media have that compels people to post pictures of their family?, a 13-year-old to post a funny video on Vine, or businesses to reach out to customers via Twitter? Sharing information with others is not a new phenomenon. However, the vastness of the Internet and hyper-speed of technology allows people to share more information with a greater amount of people faster than ever before. The New York Times Customer Insight Group has pinpointed five reasons people share things online. Although each reason is different, every reason revolves around a person’s relationship with others. These reasons, ordered biggest to smallest, are to:

– Support/not support brands and causes.

– Cultivate relationships.

– Feel self-validation.

– Define who they are.

– Give enriching information.

– Support/Not Support Brands and Causes

In the study conducted by the Customer Insight Group, 84 percent of people said one of the reasons they share information is to tell others that they like/support or dislike/do not support a certain brand or cause. Everyone has causes they support and brands they either like or do not like – the company that makes the most amazing pints of ice cream or that politician that they do not want elected to office. Before the Internet, people would share information about brands and causes via word of mouth, flyers, community boards in stores, and the telephone. While those methods are still used, social media and other Web avenues allow people to reach a wider, more diverse audience. Spreading the word invokes feelings of empowerment. When people share their opinion on brands and let others know about causes they want to see succeed, or not succeed, it makes people feel like their voice matters.