Don't stop believin'

Good morning Staker! Here’s what’s cookin’ today: What fruits are actually best for you; Why do we say ‘make a beeline’; and how a teacher aimed for the moon and reached the stars!  

But first our weekly poll!

Doctors recommend anyone over the age of 10 should eat roughly 400 grams of fruit and vegetables every day. The way fruit is consumed matters, though, with different methods providing different benefits and drawbacks.

A study published recently in Frontiers in Nutrition recruited 400 participants and evaluated the health outcomes of their fruit consumption habits. The four variations were: low consumption, juice consumption, smoothie consumption, and whole fruit consumption.

The researchers found those who rarely ate any fruit had the most detrimental health outcomes, including a higher likelihood of developing hypertension or heart disease.

They also found those who chose to drink fruit juice or rarely consume fruit at all had a higher body mass index than those who drank smoothies or ate whole fruits.

Part of the reason juice isn’t as healthy as a smoothie is because the multivitamin properties of a fruit are often eliminated or reduced when fruit is processed into a juice.

That’s not the case with smoothies, meaning components like fibre are retained better, along with vitamin C and folate, giving the person more access to the benefits of those nutrients.

Whole fruits were unsurprisingly found to be the healthiest option across the board.

According to a memo shared in wide circulation with Meta employees, the company plans to enact a project called the Model Capability Initiative (MCI). Aimed at training Meta’s AI agents, MCI will be learn, in part, using data collected from employee keystrokes.

MCI will track the typing and clicking of employees when they’re in programs like Salesforce’s Slack and Atlassian, Microsoft’s Github, Meta’s Threads and Manos, and over a hundred other websites including Google, Wikipedia, and LinkedIn.

The project is housed inside the Meta Superintelligence Labs team, which released its first model in early April. Called Muse Spark, it’s intended to compete with Claude, ChatGPT, and Google’s Gemini.

Internal messages viewed by CNBC included employees expressing concern over what they described as “dystopian” employee surveillance that could expose highly sensitive information to company executives and third parties.

When you gotta go, you gotta go, and after getting into the house, you might describe your actions as making a “beeline” to the bathroom. Is that not a strange way of describing it?

We tend to internalize idioms in a way that sheds the origin of the word or phrase, forgetting that—without context—their use may sound ridiculous.

In the case of the word “beeline,” it’s origin is quite direct; it refers literally to the observed directness of a honeybee’s flight back to the hive after a day’s work or being held captive by a person or predator.

The term was first used in print almost 200 years ago.

“Departing to some distance, at right angles to the bee-line just ascertained, he liberates another, observes, its course, and thus determines the position of the hive,” wrote the American Quarterly Review on June 1, 1828.

Given the word was also used in newspapers around the same time to describe the speed and intention of people rather than bees, it’s likely the idiom was actually in conversational use for quite some time even before first appearing in the written word.

As the Great One said, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.

That’s a lesson Benjamin Gillham, 37 of Liverpool, learned recently when he declined his friend’s request to sign him up to sing Nessun Dorma at a karaoke pub in front of 12 people, but she signed him up anyway.

It’s not uncommon for viral sensations to emerge from seemingly innocuous situations, but let us be clear when we say this: Gillham’s tavern rendition of Puccini’s heavenly aria is as close to on par with Pavarotti as it gets.

What he thought was just a couple of friends having fun at Cooper’s Townhouse Pub in Liverpool has been viewed millions of times on social media, and even earned Gillham offers from both The Voice U.K. and Britain’s Got Talent.

“The response has been incredible, social media can be soul-destroying but it has been really nice seeing all the comments about my voice,” said Gillham.

Gillham actually auditioned for both shows years ago, and neither of them selected him to advance to the televised portion. While those wrongs appear to have been righted, both programs have quite a bit of explaining to do!

“It has been quite emotional for me receiving all the comments about my voice, and then to be contacted by the talent show was just an incredible feeling,” said Gillham. “I am looking forward to seeing what happens next.”

Quizmaster’s choice

It’s Friday and you know what that means! Time for trivia à la carte. It’s a little of this, a little of that, and a whole lotta fun.