“The automatic rice cooker is a mid-century Japanese invention that made a Sisyphean culinary labor as easy as measuring out grain and water and pressing a button. These devices can seem all-knowing. So long as you add water and rice in the right proportions, it’s nearly impossible to mess up, as the machines stop cooking at exactly the right point for toothsome rice. But creating an automatic rice cooker was not so easy. In fact, it took decades of inventive leaps, undertaken by some of the biggest names in Japanese technology.” The Battle to Invent the Automatic Rice Cooker. (I’m glad I learned about this because my BBQ’d rice hasn’t been working out well…)

+ Brain scientists haven’t been able to find major differences between women’s and men’s brains, despite over a century of searching. (They should come to my house. They’d learn the superiority of the female brain in like ten minutes, which is how long it would take me to forget they even did the study…)