Elbahrain.net During his journey to the United States more than a century ago, British theatrical impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte was so impressed by the new American hotels he stayed in that he decided to return home and open Britain’s first purpose-built luxury hotel in 1889 – the Savoy.

Like every high-end hotel, it needed to have a solid food and beverage offering. Enter, the American Bar. Deliberately designed for US visitors, over the decades it attracted such luminaries as Ernest Hemingway and Marilyn Monroe.

Nowadays, thanks to the many culinary awards, guidebooks and TV shows out there, experiencing local cuisine is an essential part if not the entire focus of any travel experience. But, like the patrons of the American Bar before us, seeking out home comforts when abroad is still something we all do. And there’s a good reason.

“The Savoy itself was the first luxury hotel to open in London, designed to appeal to discerning American travelers,” says Andrea Di Chiara, bar manager of the now-famous venue, which remains London’s longest-surviving cocktail bar and was named the world’s best bar in 2017.

“The American Bar opened as an extension of that ideology, and continues to draw an international crowd.”

It shouldn’t be a surprise that venues both at the high and low ends of the travel scene are cashing in on the homesick or those seeking familiar flavors.

The rise of culinary travel
In a culinary tourism market projected to be worth over $1.1 trillion in 2024, more than 34% of tourists surveyed in 2022 said they chose destinations inspired by the cuisine they liked, according to a recent report by Future Market Insights.

Those numbers are expected to keep climbing, predicted to reach $5.6 trillion in 2034, a whopping 17.1% compound growth rate per year.

This phenomenal growth might be positive news for those in the dining industry, but it also means that a person is more likely to be judged for food neophobia – the fear of trying new foods – or side-eyed for opting for something they could find back home.

At a recent dinner in Hong Kong, one of my companions admitted that all he wanted on his first day in Paris was a steaming bowl of noodle soup to soothe his “Asian stomach.”

“Why would you even…?”

The idea was so unfathomable that another fellow diner couldn’t even finish his question. A few moments later, even he admitted, “Maybe I’d have an occasional craving for McDonald’s.”

Stories like this are far from rare, though many of us hate to admit it.

Most of us have a friend who gets teased for packing Diet Coke in their suitcase or admits to preferring Starbucks to a local coffee shop when traveling. My British colleague brings Yorkshire teabags with him when he heads abroad. My own mother, who lives in Hong Kong, travels with a mini rice cooker and a bag of rice “for emergencies.” When I lived in London, I missed the taste of Hong Kong bubble waffles so much I opened up a market stall.

We are all essentially seeking the same thing – a taste of familiarity in a foreign land – and none of us should be mocked, according to industry experts and scientists who say the decision to try or not try unfamiliar local dishes is intrinsically programmed within us.

The science behind not trying new foods
A 2019 joint study carried out by professors in the US found that cultural familiarity, motivational factors and personality traits influence tourists’ food decisions more than cost and convenience.

“Travelers seemed more driven by comfort and safety,” says Angel Gonzalez, an associate professor at California State University, Monterey Bay who co-authored the study.

“Those who are more cautious or unfamiliar with local cuisine tend to lean towards familiar food.”

Interestingly, Americans of Hispanic ethnicity are more inclined to try local foods, he says.

“This may relate to broader familiarity with diverse food experiences,” Gonzalez speculates, while reminding us that the research only offers a limited snapshot of food behaviors. The study was based on interviews with 330 people in the US, all questioned on how likely they’d be to try local foods when traveling.

“While the findings are interesting, we’d need a more extensive study to offer a deeper and more nuanced understanding of why travelers make certain food choices abroad,” he notes.

In the absence of a more definitive explanation, Judson Brewer, a neuroscientist and behavioral professor at Brown University, invites us to look inward.

He tells CNN there are two key processes our brains go through when it comes to food choices.

“Travel is, or can be, a trade-off between the excitement of discovering new things and going to what we know,” says Brewer, who wrote a book on eating behaviors called “Hunger Habit.”

“Do we try a new food or eat at the familiar fast food franchise that happens to be on the corner?”

In these situations, he says our orbitofrontal cortex, which is in charge of our decision-making processes, tries to assess which option is more rewarding for survival.

Dubbed the explore vs exploit dilemma, this instinct is rooted in our hunting and gathering ancestry – when humans had to decide whether to find a new food source or forage what was in front of them before resources ran out.

In the case of traveling, he says our planning brain might decide that it’s safer to stick with food we know to avoid potential physical discomfort.

“Our brains don’t like uncertainty, and travel (especially to new places) can be scary,” says Brewer.

These uncertainties can trigger anxiety, leading to another process in our brains.

“As kids, we learn to connect food with mood and emotion. We learn to associate food with comfort – hence the term ‘comfort food,’” Brewer says.

“The psychological comfort provided by familiar foods is akin to a sense of ‘home.’”

Food has increasingly become a way to cope with our feelings, thanks to modern marketing campaigns and pop culture. Remember when a broken-hearted Bridget Jones dug into a tub of ice cream in the movie?

When emotions arise, the planning part of our brain goes offline and the survival part takes the wheel.

To numb the pain, it encourages us to find consolation in food – even when we aren’t hungry – releasing dopamine (a feel-good hormone) as a reward and reinforcing the habit of choosing familiarity.

“Familiar tastes can serve as an anchor that provides psychological comfort and security, making us feel less adrift in a new environment,” says Brewer.

Elbahrain.net Exactly 16 years ago, an impossibly young-looking Barack Obama was barnstorming through Ohio on a bus tour, electrifying huge crowds and emphatically closing the deal on his thumping 2008 election victory.

On another October night on Thursday, the 63-year-old ex-president was back on stage, with a vast American flag for a backdrop, trying to do for Kamala Harris what she’s so far struggled to do herself — put away the 2024 election.

The snowy haired Obama had swapped Ohio, which ceased to be a closely contested presidential state as soon as he left the White House, for this year’s potentially decisive state, Pennsylvania. That the hope and change prophet of 2008 is still his party’s most effective political orator four presidential elections later is an indictment of Democrats. But the urgency of his message in Pittsburgh told a more immediate story — his nemesis Donald Trump may be poised for an Oval Office return.

when Bill Clinton took Obama’s woolly reelection pitch and created a rationale for voters weary of economic pain to send him back to the White House.

Obama on Thursday painted a searing picture of Trump as a malicious, ridiculous and incompetent menace, while trying to weave a rhetorical case for voters who are feeling economically insecure to vote for Harris, who is part of an incumbent administration, nonetheless.

“I am the hopey changey guy so I understand people feeling frustrated, feeling we can do better,” Obama said. “What I cannot understand is why anybody would think that Donald Trump will shake things up in a way that is good for you, Pennsylvania. I don’t understand that.”

Democrats are beginning to worry about Harris’ prospects
Obama’s impassioned appeal for Harris in a state that could doom her presidential hopes comes at a moment when Democrats are fretting that her early momentum after taking over the campaign from President Joe Biden has ebbed, leaving potentially the most critical general election in decades at best a toss-up with less than a month to go.

“He’s clear-eyed about how close this race is,” a source familiar with Obama’s remarks told CNN’s Kayla Tausche. The ex-president savagely mocked Trump, asking whether his successor had ever changed a tire or a diaper and condemning his single term and “mean and ugly” border policies.

Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris walks to board Air Force Two as she departs for New York, at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, on October 7, 2024.

Obama slams Trump over false hurricane conspiracy theories
The former president on Thursday accused Trump of violating basic American values. “Those didn’t used to be Republican and Democratic values. It used to be we’d have arguments about tax policy and foreign policy, but we didn’t have arguments about whether you should tell the truth or not,” he said.

He slammed Trump over his false claims that the Biden administration denied hurricane aid to Republicans. “You are going to have leaders who try to help and then you have a guy who will just lie about it to score political points and this has consequences,” Obama said. “When did that become OK?”

But the Trump campaign is not letting go of claims that were debunked even by many Republican state and local officials. “You’ve got a lot of people who could have been helped, a lot of lives that could have been saved, that weren’t, and there’s a lot of details to figure out,” Sen. JD Vance, the GOP vice presidential nominee, said Thursday.

An emerging strategy for Harris in the election endgame
Obama’s remarks were directed especially at traditional Republicans who may abhor Trump’s conduct and the male voters who form his power base.

Earlier, Obama had sought to shore up another traditionally Democratic constituency — Black men, CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere reported. At a Harris campaign office, Obama wondered whether the reticence of some “brothers” to support the Democratic nominee came down to sexism. “You’re thinking about sitting out or supporting somebody who has a history of denigrating you, because you think that’s a sign of strength, because that’s what being a man is? Putting women down?” Obama said. “That’s not acceptable.”

Yet the former president can only do so much. He’s not on the ballot and for all his undimmed appeal to Democrats, he’s yesterday’s man. And in the past, his quintessential appeal has not always been transferable to other Democrats. He worked hard to elect Hillary Clinton, who was defeated in 2016. One big question now is whether Harris, who has been basing her campaign on generational change and her biography, can build on Obama’s critiques of Trump to make her own sharpened closing argument.

Elabahrain.net A couple walked from opposite ends of China’s Great Wall and met in the middle. Then they broke up

The Great Wall of China has inspired countless works of art in its more than 2,000-year history. Among the most famous is “The Great Wall Walk,” a dramatic 90-day performance that saw lovers Marina Abramović and Frank Uwe Laysiepen (the late German artist known as Ulay) trek towards each other from opposite ends of the landmark.

Abramović began in the east at the so-called “dragon’s head” — where the Great Wall dips into the Bohai Bay like a dragon drinking from the sea — while Ulay started at the “tail,” more than 3,000 miles to her west, in the Gobi Desert.

When the idea was initially conceived, under a full moon in Australia’s outback, the pair had planned to meet and get married in the middle. But obtaining permission from Chinese authorities would take over eight years, by which time their romantic relationship, despite having achieved global fame and success as a performance art duo, had fallen apart amid infidelity, jealousy and a failed threesome. Still, neither wanted to give up on the project and, in March 1988, they embarked on their respective journeys.

“We both decided that we have to address new circumstances, which means our separation… (We would) say goodbye,” Abramović told CNN on a video call from the Modern Art Museum (MAM) Shanghai, where she opens her first ever museum exhibition in China this week. “Great love,” she added, encompasses everything: “Love, hate, disappointment, and forgiveness. We explore all of it.”

The 77-year-old Serbian artist’s new show, “Marina Abramović: Transforming Energy,” features interactive artworks inspired by the Great Wall journey, as well as over 1,200 never-before-seen images taken along the way.

The photos, which will be projected onto the museum’s walls, are divided into four categories that curator and MAM’s artistic director Shai Baitel grouped as “the preparation and beginning walk, encounters with locals, walking the wall and meeting Ulay, and staged experiments and landscapes.”

Baitel said he was “blown away” by the trove of unpublished film negatives Abramović held in storage. “It is a treasure for a curator, for anyone that is in the business of art, or art history research, (to) document (what has) not been digitized yet but exists there in large quantities.”

Abramović is shown traversing through some of the most stunning, wild parts of the wall against a backdrop of mountains, crumbling ruins and varied terrain. There’s a clear sense of isolation — but this loneliness provided space for contemplation and reflection, the artist said, admitting she must have been a “very strange” sight to everyone she encountered.

“I was a woman, walking alone… without a husband, without children, not speaking the language,” she recalled. “What am I doing there?”

Since planning the exhibition and trawling through her photo archive, the artist has been flooded with memories of the support and hospitality she experienced along the way.

“(Local people) were always giving more food… But I couldn’t carry it all. I was given goose eggs, but they are so big, so I would have one in my left pocket and one in my right pocket, to keep balance.”

Abramović was prohibited from camping on the wall, so she instead stayed in small villages along the way. In each one, she would try to meet the oldest resident — some well into their 100s — and through a translator who accompanied her, ask them to share their stories about the wall.

The Great Wall, which stretches across northern China, was built to keep out invaders, but for the locals Abramović spoke to, its winding shape was less about military history and more to do with an earthly representation of dragons and the Milky Way, she said. The quest became as much spiritual as it was physical.

“I realized the old stories are related directly to the minerals that I had been walking on,” the artist said at a press conference in Shanghai. “If I was walking on a ‘black dragon’ that would be on (iron-rich) hematite… a ‘red dragon’ would be clay, it was completely different ground,” she added, explaining that as she walked on various minerals and crystals, she was able to feel different “energies.”

After embracing, the couple parted ways (not before Abramović learned that Ulay had impregnated his Chinese translator during the trip) and did not see each other for another 22 years. That was until 2010, when Ulay surprised Abramović at the Museum of Modern Art in New York during her performance “The Artist is Present,” in which she sat in front of visitors, one at a time, and held their gaze in silence.

“I didn’t know he was going to sit with me,” she said, recalling the moment she opened her eyes to find Ulay across the table. “My whole life went to the front of my eyes and I started crying. It was a very strong moment.” Breaking her own rule, she reached across the table and held his hands, an emotional reunion that went viral.

Elbahrain.net The 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry has been awarded to a trio of scientists who used artificial intelligence to “crack the code” of almost all known proteins, the “chemical tools of life.”

The Nobel Committee lauded David Baker, a US biochemist, for completing “the almost impossible feat of building entirely new kinds of proteins,” and Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, who work at Google DeepMind in London, for developing an AI model to predict proteins’ complex structures – a problem that had been unsolved for 50 years.

“The potential of their discoveries is enormous,” the committee said as the award was announced in Sweden on Wednesday. The prize, seen as the pinnacle of scientific achievement, carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million).

Proteins, a string of amino acid molecules, are the building blocks of life. They help form hair, skin and tissue cells; they read, copy and repair DNA; and they help carry oxygen in the blood.

While proteins are built from only around 20 amino acids, these can be combined in almost endless ways, folding themselves into highly complex patterns in three-dimensional space.

A ‘Google search’ for protein structures
The committee said Wednesday’s prize had two “halves.” The first went to Hassabis, a British computer scientist who co-founded Google’s AI research laboratory DeepMind, and Jumper, an American researcher who also works at DeepMind.

Hassabis and Jumper were honored for using AI to predict the three-dimensional structure of a protein from a sequence of amino acids, allowing them to then predict the structure of almost all 200 million known proteins.

“It’s really a standalone breakthrough solving a traditional holy grail in physical chemistry,” Anna Wedell, a professor of medical genetics at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, told.

Their AI program – the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database – has been used by at least 2 million researchers around the world. It acts as a “Google search” for protein structures, providing instant access to predicted models of proteins, accelerating progress in fundamental biology and other related fields. The pair have already won the 2023 Lasker and the Breakthrough prizes.

“They’ve made everything public, so more or less every field can now turn to this database and use these tools to address their particular problem. So it’s made leaps possible in very, very many different areas,” Wedell, who uses the tool in her own work in rare diseases, said.

Since the pair’s key paper was published in 2021, it has been cited more than 16,000 times. David Pendlebury, head of research analysis at Clarivate’s Institute for Scientific Information, described this as “unprecedented and reflects the revolutionary impact of this work.” Out of a total of 61 million scientific papers, only around 500 have been cited more than 10,000 times,

Creating proteins ‘not seen in nature’
The second “half” of the prize went to Baker, a professor at the University of Washington, for using computerized methods to create proteins which did not previously exist and have entirely new functions.

Johan Aqvist, a member of the Nobel committee, said Baker had used his computer program first to “draw protein structures in new dimensions,” then to “figure out what sequence of amino acids would give you this structure.” This allowed Baker to create these new proteins, “most of which had never been seen before and didn’t exist in nature.”

He said the variety of proteins Baker had created was “absolutely mindblowing.”

“It seems that you can almost construct any type of protein now with this technology,” Aqvist said.

The committee said that being able to construct new proteins has a vast range of potential uses, from creating new pharmaceuticals to developing new vaccines more quickly.

Wednesday’s chemistry prize has reinforced the huge influence of AI in science.

The Nobel Prize in physics, awarded Tuesday, was shared by Geoffrey Hinton, dubbed the “Godfather of AI,” and John Hopfield, for their work on artificial neural networks – the same technology that helped underpin the work of the new chemistry laureates.

“The Nobel Foundation’s selections of laureates in physics and in chemistry this year can only be described as bold,” Pendlebury said. “The acknowledgment of the transformational role of AI in research in two categories, back-to-back, is unprecedented.”