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The Show:

As my two-year old goes from infant to toddler and is more of a sponge soaking up data and information I try to keep his media above board with things on education, and having Sesame Street as your driver in the club bag is a clutch one I have to say. He can watch Elmo, or Kermit or Bert and Ernie with content while I get his meals ready, and he gets the chance to learn something in the process. So yeah, damn right I grabbed Awesome Alphabet Collection as a surrogate parent!

The disc is less a series of show episodes and more focused on segments, all of which surround a particular letter of the alphabet, that the Sesame Street puppets and humans talk through in a means of education and illustration. Occasionally a celebrity will pop by, whether its singers like Norah Jones, Pharrell Williams or Smokey Robinson, or actors like Ricky Gervais (Read the entire review

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Sesame Street was one of the only things I was allowed to watch on TV in my early years, and it's no question that it helped to shape me. It was one of the first times that TV had been used to educate children on things like numbers and spelling without being either boring or silly. Its creators had noticed that children memorized TV commercials easily, so they thought the same approach could be used to make them learn things that were actually important. The resulting show has been in a format of clips, primarily focusing on Sesame Street itself with its Muppet and human inhabitants, but also interspersed with separate sketches featuring those characters and some live-action or animated segments that I always felt took place in another universe- having some educational value and a unique quality to them, but having absolutely nothing to do with the main characters or setting, and they were never co...Read the entire review

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This second DVD release from Shout Factory Kids celebrating Sesame Street's 50th anniversary consists of a special made this year for prime time on both HBO (where the show has moved for its first run episodes) and PBS (which still presents the show delayed after the HBO showings, and with an annoying "E/I" symbol at the top of the screen to count towards the FCC's required hours of "educational programming" each week- in that regard it's likely for the better that its new primary home is HBO.) Like the 25th anniversary special, which was one of the very first DVD releases back in 1997, this focuses mostly on songs from the show but most of them are new performances, done on the show's set, rather than archival clips. There's a number of celebrity appearances but for some reason Joseph Gordon-Levitt, born after I had already outgrown the show on TV, was chosen to be the main "star". He takes a cab t...Read the entire review

A top U.S. commercial bakery is pushing back on a Food and Drug Administration warning to stop using labels that say its products contain sesame — even when they don't

The post Bakery that makes Sara Lee and Entenmann’s pushes back on FDA sesame warning appeared first on Boston.com.

Featuring Little Leaf Farms' fan-favorite Baby Crispy Green Leaf lettuce, the new Sesame Ginger Salad Kit includes Thai seasoned wonton strips, sliced almonds, toasted quinoa and sesame ginger dressing, delivering a convenient, fresh, flavor-packed meal ready to be enjoyed anytime.

The ID10 beamline of the SESAME (Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East) synchrotron light source in Jordan was inaugurated in June 2023 and is now open to scientific users. The beamline, which was designed and installed within the European Horizon 2020 project BEAmline for Tomography at SESAME (BEATS), provides full-field X-ray radiography and microtomography imaging with monochromatic or polychromatic X-rays up to photon energies of 100 keV. The photon source generated by a 2.9 T wavelength shifter with variable gap, and a double-multilayer monochromator system allow versatile application for experiments requiring either an X-ray beam with high intensity and flux, and/or a partially spatial coherent beam for phase-contrast applications. Sample manipulation and X-ray detection systems are designed to allow scanning samples with different size, weight and material, providing image voxel sizes from 13 µm down to 0.33 µm. A state-of-the-art computing infrastructure for data collection, three-dimensional (3D) image reconstruction and data analysis allows the visualization and exploration of results online within a few seconds from the completion of a scan. Insights from 3D X-ray imaging are key to the investigation of specimens from archaeology and cultural heritage, biology and health sciences, materials science and engineering, earth, environmental sciences and more. Microtomography scans and preliminary results obtained at the beamline demonstrate that the new beamline ID10-BEATS expands significantly the range of scientific applications that can be targeted at SESAME.

Archival still from the documentary "Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street"; Credit: HBO

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

The Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act of 2004 (FALCPA) identified eight major food allergen categories that accounted for more than 90 percent of all documented food allergies in the U.S.

Fighting over ‘white gold’: Sesame in Ethiopia and Sudan Expert comment LJefferson 3 April 2023

The supply chain of a seemingly innocuous cash crop – sesame – has intersected with transnational conflict dynamics, exacerbating tensions between Ethiopia and Sudan.

Late 2020 saw the beginning of the devastating war in Tigray and the occupation of a disputed region on the Ethiopia–Sudan border – Al Fashaga – by the Sudanese army. These shocks disrupted settled patterns of land ownership and control in both Ethiopia’s volatile north and Sudan’s borderlands, historically the heart of the sesame and oilseed production that is economically vital to both countries.

These seemingly harmless cash crops are now embedded in local, subnational and national political contestations in both countries. Sesame value chains are being reshaped, with power and profits being used to entrench the grip of political and armed actors who are reinforcing new patterns of land control and driving informal and illicit trade – impacting the coping mechanisms of local communities and threatening to fuel further conflict.

Regional rivalries drive contestation over the Ethiopia supply chain

Internal borders between most of Ethiopia’s regions are marked by boundary disputes, which often degenerate into violent conflict. The most important is between the Tigray and Amhara regions. Since the war began in 2020, the Amhara region has annexed vast areas of western and southern Tigray, which the Amhara region claims were taken from them by Tigray 30 years ago, after the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) dominated ethnic coalition came to power.

Ethiopia’s exports of spices, oilseeds and pulses brought in over half a billion dollars in 2021, roughly a quarter of the country’s total export revenues and second only to coffee. The sector has been rocked by the war in the north, which accounted for much of Ethiopia’s sesame production, with an estimated 500,000 hectares of sesame fields taken out of cultivation during the 2021 growing season. Conflict has exacerbated a steady decline in formal revenues from sesame exports, dropping over $115 million from 2016 to 2021.

Alongside falling production, the previously integrated value chain has been disrupted and decentralized by political fragmentation and land competition between Amharas and Tigrayans. Before the war, the agricultural sector in Western Tigray/Welkait was dominated by Tigrayan business interests, through the TPLF’s regional endowment fund EFFORT, a business conglomerate including subsidiaries such as Guna Trading House, and Hiwot Agricultural Mechanization.