The case of the omnipresent onion

Afternoon all, Think for a minute about what you ate for dinner. Were onions in it? How about the last time you went to a restaurant? If you're not sure, they probably were smuggled in somehow - onions are everywhere. 70 million tonnes are produced every year. When we wrote about this previously, we got an email from someone who is well aware of their ubiquity. Father Gary Donegan is allergic to onions. He has more or less given up on eating out. He found out the hard way that many restaurants use pre-prepared sauces - even the expensive ones. Why onions can cause more than tears Fox hunting was banned a while back, wasn't it? Well not quite. Ten years after the Hunting Act came into force, hunts continue to meet. The Countryside Alliance goes so far as to claim the number of hunt members has actually increased since the ban. What was banned 10 years ago was allowing a dog to kill a fox. One or two dogs can be used to remove a fox from cover. It then can be shot. It becomes tricky when things go wrong and a dog ends up killing a fox. Then the prosecution has to prove that the humans in charge intended this. Did fox hunting disappear? Life imitates art. Actually, life imitates Inspector Gadget. Or even more specifically, life imitates what we think was in Inspector Gadget but can't quite remember. The latest imitation is an airbag for skiers. About a dozen skiers in the Italian Alps pulled the cord to deploy their airbags after being caught in an avalanche. These airbags increase the wearer’s volume, causing them to rise to the top - crucial, as asphyxiation is the biggest cause of avalanche deaths. Some of the skiers survived as a result of their airbags. How do airbags protect against avalanches?

Meanwhile... Boston is running out of space to dump collected snow The Canadian army have lost GPS-guided shells The Earth’s core expands by around 0.5mm per year

That's it from us today.