- Happy Mole Day!
Happy Mole Day!
How did you celebrate this special holiday? You did know it was Mole Day, right?
No? Let’s review our moles, courtesy of mole-a-pedia and other holy moley types:
1. Moles are small cylindrical mammals adapted to a subterranean lifestyle. They have velvety fur; tiny or invisible ears and eyes; and short, powerful limbs with large paws oriented for digging.
A mole’s diet primarily consists of earthworms and other small invertebrates found in the soil and also a variety of nuts. Because their saliva contains a toxin that can paralyze earthworms, moles are able to store their still living prey for later consumption.
- Happy Star-nosed Mole Day!
They construct special underground “larders” for just this purpose—researchers have discovered such larders with over a thousand earthworms in them. Before eating earthworms, moles pull them between their squeezed paws to force the collected earth and dirt out of the worm’s gut.
The Star-nosed Mole can detect, catch and eat food faster than the human eye can follow (under .3 seconds).
2. Mole sauce is generally associated with Mexican cuisine. Because any number of Mexican sauces can be considered mole, it covers a wide area. As with many Mexican recipes, just about all mole sauce starts with some type of frying. Chili peppers, onions and garlic are usual Red Mole ingredients:
3 chipotle chiles
1 cinnamon stick,
broken into bits
3 tomatoes, chopped
1 clove garlic, chopped
1 large red onion, chopped
1 cup chicken broth
1 bay leaf, crushed
¾ cup sesame seeds
½ teaspoon ground nutmeg
½ teaspoon ground allspice
1 teaspoon fresh mint
1 teaspoon fresh cilantro
- Happy Cindy Crawford Mole Day!
3. A mole, a melanocytic nevus (also known as “Nevocytic nevus.”) is a type of lesion that contains nevus cells (melanocytes). Some sources equate the term mole with “melanocytic nevus.”
- Tootsie Roll
Left: A mole as modeled by our mole model, Cindy Crawford, both a supermodel and a role model.
The latter designation, for brevity and ease of communication, can be labeled: a super-role. Not to be confused with one of those giant Tootsie Rolls.
4. The mole is a unit of measurement used in chemistry to express amounts of a chemical substance.
If you answered Number 4 above, as the actual mole referred to in Mole Day, you are correct! Our friends at the Inquisitr define Mole Day is:
Celebrated annually on October 23 from 6:02 a.m. to 6:02 p.m., Mole Day commemorates Avogadro’s Number (6.02 x 10^23), which is a basic measuring unit in chemistry.
- Amedeo Avogadro, brilliant rake
Mole Day was created as a way to foster interest in chemistry.
In general, one mole of any substance contains Avogadro’s Number of molecules or atoms of that substance.
Mole jokes, we got them:
Q: How much does Avogadro exaggerate?
A: He makes mountains out of mole hills.
Personal confession: when learning of Avogadro’s number in high school, I always remembered it as Avocado‘s number. Surely, I was not the only one. Word in the laboratory: Amedeo Avogadro wielded a mean guacamole recipe. With garlic, holly-pen-neos, lime, all dat good schtuff.
Meaningless gastronomic trivia: A restaurant in Fort Collins, Colorado is called Avogardro’s Number.
Nerds rejoice! Yesterday was your day. Now get back to your computers and continue
blogging nerding out.
‘Til next year. . .
Post Script: One possible estimate of Amedeo Avo-gawd-dro’s Number is 602,214,141,070,409,084,099,072. Although, as calculated on my own home equipment, I got 602,214,141,070,409,084,099,073. A little help please, readers. Who is right, me or two brilliant physicists?