Louisiana confirms Naegleria fowleri brain infection in resident who swam in Lake Claiborne Though “brain-eating amoeba” infections are rare, they are almost always fatal. Read more: 📷: Jeremey Allen/Wikimedia Commons

They ate dirt, and they stomped the poison out with their bare feet! The potato. Wild potatoes in the Andes were packed with glycoalkaloids such as solanine and tomatine. The compounds kept pests away, yet they left the raw tubers so bitter and poisonous that eating them could bring on severe cramping, paralysis, or death. Early Andean people dealt with that in two odd ways: they ate dirt, and they stomped the poison out with their bare feet. Geophagy came first. They dipped the bitter potatoes in a slurry of a particular local clay called chaco or pasa. The fine particles bound the toxins in the stomach so the body never absorbed them; they simply passed through. Clay handled the immediate danger. It offered no way to store a large harvest. For that, the Tiwanaku and later the Inca invented freeze-drying and produced chuño, apparently the first such process anywhere. In the high altiplano winter they spread the potatoes on the ground and let them freeze overnight. The cold shattered the cell walls. When the sun rose the tubers thawed. Villagers then walked over them barefoot, squeezing out water and the bitter juices the frost had released. They repeated the freeze-thaw-trample cycle for several days until the potatoes were flattened and dry. To make the paler, refined version known as tunta or white chuño they submerged the tubers in a cold mountain stream for a few weeks so the last toxins could leach out, then dried them in the sun once more. The finished chuño was safe. Moisture and toxins gone, it could sit in woven storehouses for more than a decade without rotting. That light carbohydrate supplied the calories that let vast Andean empires thrive in an unforgiving climate. Potatoes spread across the ground to freeze-dry into chuño in the high Andes. Photo by Chuck Moravec (Wikimedia Commons) is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

I noticed Wikipedia is asking for donations. Never donate anything to Wikipedia. The world would be a better place if Wikipedia didn't exist. It's a highly biased propaganda arm of the radical left, spreading disinformation and fake news to advance a far-left political agenda.

✨launching "blinkipedia" - its wikipedia but the article changes every time you blink 😭 had this stupid idea in the shower. i blink way too many times every day and nothing happens. complete waste of eyelids :( so, i built this. - wink left eye to go back to the prev article - space bar works if your eyes get tired camera stays local. ok, don't trust me - source code is open source, 1 html file a completely unnecessary use of computer vision 👍 github repo -

… speaking of badges (Wikipedia User: 20 year editor badge in my previous post) … I got the Hacktoberfest 2025: Level 0 Registered badge from Hacktoberfest @hacktoberfest @digitalocean! via @holopin_ Personal site link:

Saturday was my 20th #Wikipedia# editing anniversary. I’ve created 25+ articles and 100+ redirects. Five this year: * Governors Public Health Alliance * #RaptureTok# * Northeast Public Health Collaborative * West Coast Health Alliance * Take California More: