This top-secret space passenger doesn’t have the attributes often associated with astronauts–instead of being labeled brave and resolute, this passenger has been described as nutty, sweet, and buttery. Meet Le Brouere, a space-faring wheel of cheese.
The cheese in question was a passenger on SpaceX’s successful test of its Dragon crew capsule this week, a flight CNN describes as:
One small step for a cheese, one giant leap fromage-kind.
The mild French cheese Le Brouere isn’t the first of its kind to be blasted towards space, but it is the first to reach orbit and to be successfully recovered post-flight. The cheese orbited the Earth twice before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean on Wednesday. The test flight was the first ever orbital reentry and recovery mission by a commercial space company.
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At Discoblog, we do our best to keep the party going. So, even as we lurch back into existence after St. Paddy’s celebrations, we are looking forward to our next big party–which just might be the iPad launch party next month. So, here’s an idea for Apple-themed party food, courtesy Chef Ken at The Cooks Den.
There’s nothing like a cheese plate to make an occasion feel festive. For this recipe, you will need:
* 1 Steve Jobs Cheese Head
* Assorted gourmet cheeses such as brie, camembert or stilton
* Crackers
* Fruit
Oh! You’re not familiar with the culinary marvel known as the Steve Jobs Cheese Head? Forgive us. Chef Ken created this perfectly crafted head of the Apple CEO from a block of mozzarella; the chef thinks mozzarella works best, since the color of the cheese matches His Steveness’s pasty white pallor. It’s pretty simple to create this cheesy replica of a Jobs head. For step-by-step instructions, go here.
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A pair of genetic sleuths from New York City’s Trinity high school discovered a bit of food foul play. Seniors Matt Cost and Brenda Tan collected DNA samples from items around their homes and school, sequenced the fragments and analyzed them with a publicly available database, and found there is little truth in advertising, according to Cosmic Log:
The real detective work came into play when [they] matched the DNA code against a couple of publicly available databases for animal species. They found out that an expensive brand of sheep’s-milk cheese was actually made from cow’s milk, that “sturgeon caviar” was actually Mississippi paddlefish, and that dog treats supposedly made from venison were actually made from beef.
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• Gardak! To learn about children and language, Dad speaks to son only in Klingon for first three years of the child’s life.
• In Soviet Russia, blog writes you! Maksim Suraev, a Russian cosmonaut, joins the blogosphere with a healthy dose of cold war humor about life on the International Space Station.
• In a case of Project Mayhem gone terribly bad, Peru police say a gang drained the fat from their murder victims and sold it on the black market for use in cosmetics.
• Wisconsin looks to become the first state to recognize an official state microbe. Of course the bacterium, Lactococcus lactis, ferments the state’s $18 billion per year cheese industry.
• An Italian art collector found a mummified tooth, thumb, and finger of Galileo Galilei that have been missing since 1905, according to Florence’s History of Science museum.
Humans have sent plenty of things into space—monkeys, other humans, and those cute little invertebrate tardigrades, just to name a few.
Then came the hope that we could add solid cheese to that list. A group of British cheesemakers attempted to send the dairy product 18.6 miles into the atmosphere using a weather balloon with a GPS tracking device, and digital camera attached.
Once the 300-gram chunk of cheddar cheese reached its destination, the cheesemakers hoped, it would float peacefully back to Earth, thanks to a parachute that deployed once the balloon hit space. But to the chagrin of cheese-lovers everywhere, the mission met with disaster, and the cheese is now MIA, according to the Daily Mail:
Within ten minutes of taking off the tracking system failed. “We think it’s somewhere in the East of England—possibly in Essex or Hertfordshire,” said Dom Lane, of the West Country Farmhouse Cheesemakers’ Group. “We wanted to take a photograph of a piece of cheddar floating majestically in the firmament with the curve of the Earth below it.”
Let’s hope the cheese doesn’t fall from the sky onto some unfortunate fellow’s head.
Want to see more? Check out this cheesy video, courtesy of BBC News.
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Discoblog: Dear Aliens: Would You Like Some Processed Chips?
Discoblog: Children’s “Teddy-nauts” Shot Into Space
Discoblog: Bugs that Can Travel in Space…Naked
Image: flickr / Joi
