How birds get oxygen inside their eggs. File this great explainer under "questions previously unconsidered that have interesting answers." Read the rest

DHL has been shipping and losing packages for close to 50 years. Read the rest

Jokgu is a Brahma Bantam chicken who can peck her way through an operatic aria on a piano keyboard.

Yes, she follows the red light on the keyboard to do so but, hush now, it's still impressive. More importantly, it's entertaining. Impressive and entertaining enough to earn a spot on America's Got Talent.

Here's that performance, from 2017:

(Viral Viral Videos) Read the rest

A Bronx restaurant has one less chicken today, according to reports from ABC News in New York, with the pollo purloiner also making off with a tray of biscuits.

Employees are reportedly "crying foul."

After taking the food, the suspect flew the coop.

The suspect is described as a man with long braids. He was last seen wearing a black and pink shirt, blue jeans and blue sneakers. He also had a white towel over his head.

I needed kitchen shears, so I might spatchcock a chicken. These do the job nicely.

This fantastic video from America's Test Kitchen has kept me busy. It involves fun uses of cast iron.

I'm eager to try the 500F heated cast iron steak searing method, the chicken was fantastic. I also just like saying spatchcock.

KitchenAid Shears with Soft Grip Handles, Black via Amazon Read the rest

A video making the rounds shows fertilized chicken eggs incubated outside their shells. It's fascinating, but not a first. Read the rest

People who work in chicken and turkey processing plants run by America's biggest poultry producers are routinely denied bathroom breaks. Because of this, some resort to wearing diapers while they're at work on the processing line, Oxfam America said in a report released Wednesday.

`They are in danger of serious health problems,' says the report. Read the rest

Announced on Twitter, the Colonel's Adventures will be offered exclusively at the San Diego Comic Con (and therefore eBay within minutes of the doors opening.) You can have it signed at any branch of KFC by rubbing it on a greasy mass of their finest poultryform crude protein.

If you love comics and fried chicken and subliminal marketing, then you’ll love this exclusive #SDCC comic about me! pic.twitter.com/J06w4XSU7c

— KFC (@kfc) June 30, 2015

Read the rest

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Silly question. But if you're talking about chicken as we know it today — barbecued, boneless and skinless, served as sausages, bologna, nuggets, and burgers — the answer is actually "neither". What came first was Robert C. Baker, a Cornell University food scientist who is credited with popularizing chicken as a convenient, everyday meat.

At Slate, Maryn McKenna has a really interesting piece about Baker's role in the invention of the chicken nugget. Although you've probably heard that the nugget was invented by McDonald's research and development staff, Baker actually beat them to the punch by a couple decades, turning out "chicken sticks" in 1963. The catch is that, as a researcher at a publicly funded university whose primary goal was to increase the profitability of family-operated chicken farms in upstate New York, Baker never patented his own ideas.

Baker’s prototype nugget, developed with student Joseph Marshall, mastered two food-engineering challenges: keeping ground meat together without putting a skin around it, and keeping batter attached to the meat despite the shrinkage caused by freezing and the explosive heat of frying. They solved the first problem by grinding raw chicken with salt and vinegar to draw out moisture, and then adding a binder of powdered milk and pulverized grains. They solved the second by shaping the sticks, freezing them, coating them in an eggy batter and cornflake crumbs, and then freezing them a second time to -10 degrees. With trial and error, the sticks stayed intact.

In Salon, an article about series of lawsuits against Chick-Fil-A by former employees who claim managers "have wielded their authority over workers in ways that break the law: firing a Muslim for refusing to pray to Jesus; firing a manager so that she’d become a stay at home mom; and punishing workers for objecting to sexual harassment." In one incident, a supervisor is alleged to have phoned immigration authorities to have immigrant workers deported as punishment for complaining about sexual harassment. Kiss 'em goodbye today. Read the rest

The New York Times photography department is really on a roll with this deliciously absurd photo of a chicken. Read the rest