Free Republic

It's said to be richer in protein than regular loavesA Finnish bakery has launched what it claims to be the world’s first insect-based bread, made from crushed crickets. Helsinki-based bakery Fazer made the bread using flour ground from dried crickets. Each loaf contains about 70 of the insects, combined with wheat flour and other seeds. At £3.55 (€3.99) a loaf, it is slightly more expensive than a regular wheat loaf which usually sells for about £2 (€2.24). Due to a limited supply of crickets, the insect-bread will initially only be sold in 11 Fazer bakery stores in Helsinki, but the...

A Sami (Lapp) family in Norway around 1900Photo: Library of CongressIn the freezing far northern reaches of Europe live an indigenous, semi-nomadic people of fishermen, fur trappers and reindeer herders. Like a thin but stubborn sheet of ice, these people have inhabited Sápmi, a large but sparsely populated area covering parts of northern Sweden, Norway, Finland and Russia’s Kola Peninsula for thousands of years. They remained closely tied to nature throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, as their clothes, dwellings and other trappings of culture bear witness – here beautifully frozen in film. These people are the Sámi.Sami family in...

MEN FROM EARLY MIDDLE AGES WERE NEARLY AS TALL AS MODERN PEOPLE COLUMBUS, Ohio – Northern European men living during the early Middle Ages were nearly as tall as their modern-day American descendants, a finding that defies conventional wisdom about progress in living standards during the last millennium. Richard Steckel "Men living during the early Middle Ages (the ninth to 11th centuries) were several centimeters taller than men who lived hundreds of years later, on the eve of the Industrial Revolution," said Richard Steckel, a professor of economics at Ohio State University and the author of a new study that...