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The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has for the first time cleared the commercial marketing of leeches for medicinal purposes.

Leeches can help heal skin grafts by removing blood pooled under the graft and restore blood circulation in blocked veins by removing pooled blood.

Leeches have been used as an alternative treatment to blood-letting and amputation for several thousand years. They reached their height of medicinal use in the mid-1800’s. Today they are used in medicine throughout the world as tools in skin grafts and reattachment surgery.

I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space.

Imagine a vast sheet of paper on which straight Lines, Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and other figures, instead of remaining fixed in their places, move freely about, on or in the surface, but without the power of rising above or sinking below it, very much like shadows — only hard and with luminous edges — and you will then have a pretty correct notion of my country and countrymen. Alas, a few years ago, I should have said “my universe”: but now my mind has been opened to higher views of things.

Colours have always been a very important part in graphic design, architecture and interior design. People working in these and other fields often put a lot of effort into getting the exact right colours. On the web, however, this is often not the case.

My hope with this site is that some of you who happen to stumble upon it will gain a better realization of the importance of colours — and perhaps learn that there is more to colours than you once thought. This will be a step in the right direction for colours on the web.

“Math that Makes you go Wow” is just that. We hope that by using a multi-disciplinary approach to something as abstract — and yet very “cool” — as non-orientable surfaces, students who are otherwise uninterested in more traditional algebra will be enthused by math. Few things are worse, either for the teacher or the student, for a child to sit through a boring math class utterly uninterested in understanding. Too many math classes teach the “how” and not the “why.” For those not necessarily mathematically inclined, there is nothing fascinating about memorizing the cosine of 30°; we challenge even the least mathematically-inclined student not to find beauty in a Klein bottle or be fascinated by the idea of living on a Moebius band. A student who sees math all around — in music, in literature, in art — will use her interest in those subjects as a door to the world of mathematics.�

On any given Web page, users will either…

• click something that appears to take them closer
  to the fulfillment of their goal,
• or click the Back button on their Web browser.

Worcestershire sauce has its roots in India, but was actually created by accident in its namesake town of Worcester, England in 1835. As the story goes, Lord Marcus Sandy had returned home to England to retire after successfully governing Bengal, India for many years. He so missed his favorite Indian sauce that he commissioned drug store owners John Lea and William Perrins to come up with a reasonable facsimile. The original intent of the chemists was to keep some of the batch to sell in the store, but the fish and vegetable mixture had such a strong odor that they decided otherwise and stored it in the cellar. It lay forgotten for two years, until it was rediscovered during a clean-up mission. The batch had aged into a wonderfully flavored sauce which was bottled and quickly became a hot item with customers.

“Cooking is easy,” said Laura Shapiro, a food historian who is the author of Something From The Oven, published this month by Viking. It is about how in the 1940s and ’50s the food industry tried to convince American women that cooking was difficult in order to persuade them that they needed newly developed packaged and frozen foods and cake mixes.

It was the winter of 1620, so the legend goes, and the famished Pilgrims of the New World were scavenging for something to eat. A friendly Indian introduced the white man to a new grain — corn — and showed how its kernels could be ground by stone into powder, mixed with water and cooked over an open fire.

Four centuries later, jonnycakes — flat, gritty pancakes — remain a staple for some Rhode Islanders, and a major point of culinary pride in this tiny state…

Historians tend to agree that the settlers perfected the cooking with iron skillets they had brought with them from Europe. The cakes’ durability made them a hit; the colonists would cook the cakes in the morning, and put them in knapsacks to eat in the fields, out hunting, or while traveling to another settlement.

The simple, filling food became known as “journey cakes.”

Many of us at Macworld are fans of Alton Brown, host of the funny and educational Good Eats on TV’s Food Network. (He also hosted the recent Iron Chef USA revival show.) But AB is also a fan of Apple and the Mac. So when I mentioned to him in January that we were trying to do a yearlong celebration of the Mac, he offered to whip up a brand-new recipe incorporating apples and “mac” — macaroni, that is.

An Adult’s Weekly Rations

• Bacon and ham – 100g/4oz
• Butter – 50g/2oz
• Cheese – 50g/2oz
• Marg – 100g/4oz
• Cooking fat – 100g/4oz (often dropping to 2oz)
• Milk – 3pts/1800ml (but not always)
• Sugar – 8oz/225g
• Preserves – 1lb/450g every two months
• Tea -2oz/50g
• Eggs – one shell egg a week if available
• Dried eggs – one pack per month
• Sweets -12oz/350g a month
• Plus monthly points scheme for fish, meat, fruit or peas

Takeru Kobayashi of Japan won Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog Eating Contest on Coney Island, N.Y., Sunday.

For the fourth year, Kobayashi was named the world’s top hot dog eater for eating 53-and-a-half hot dogs in 12 minutes.

America deserves a lot more respect than it gets. But we aren’t a country of whiners. We aren’t going to beg the rest of the world to appreciate us. But it might be timely on this day to point out some of the great inventions and achievements America is responsible for (in no particular order).

• The microwave oven. This revolutionary way of cooking allowed home chefs to elevate cooking to new sophisticated heights.
• Microwave pork rinds. With this invention, microwave cooking reached its zenith.

Gardeners should be glad to see snakes around the garden, according to Oregon State University snake expert Bob Mason. These much-maligned reptiles consume garden pests including slugs, grubs, mice, voles and rats. But he knows that snakes startle or terrify many folks.

“The vast majority of snakes in Oregon are very beneficial,” said Mason, a professor of zoology at OSU. “Some, like garter snakes, eat slugs. Others, like the sharp-tailed snake, eat slugs and grubs, including the pest Japanese beetle grub. Rubber boas specialize in eating mice and voles, going down their tunnels after them.”