Chi Analysis

01/22/2026

01/21/2026

Asparagus isn’t just a spring vegetable — it has also been used in herbal wellness traditions for generations. Today, asparagus extract is gaining popularity as people explore plant-based nutrients and botanical supplements as part of their broader wellness routines.

https://chi-analysis.com/ingredient-spotlight-what-is-asparagus-extract-why-is-it-popular-in-wellness/

Asparagus isn’t just a spring vegetable — it has also been used in herbal wellness traditions for generations. Today, asparagus extract is gaining popularity

01/20/2026

❄Winter is here and many areas of the U.S. are cold or getting ready to have a winter storm. Chicken soup and broth are very warming when you are cold, but we love to make a chicken bone broth for the additional health benefits. Visit this post to find our favorite bone broth recipe!

https://chi-analysis.com/brrr-its-cold-this-bone-broth-is-healthy-and-will-warm-you/

01/19/2026

Did you know that chronic and excess inflammation can manifest as obesity, poor skin, fatigue, poor sleep, and mental illness. This increases the chances of most diseases, especially Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s Disease, autoimmune issues, cancer, and more.
Dr. Chi shared helpful information regarding inflammation in a recent newsletter we sent to our readers. Didn't receive our email? Send us a message and we will forward it to you.

01/18/2026

The Man Who Made the Lightbulb Actually Work
United States. Late 1800s.
Thomas Edison is taught as the man who brought light to the world.
What history usually leaves out
is why his bulb finally worked.
Early lightbulbs burned out fast.
The filaments were fragile.
The design was unreliable.
That problem was solved by Lewis Latimer.
Latimer was a self-taught engineer, draftsman, and inventor. He developed a durable carbon filament that dramatically extended the life of the lightbulb and made it affordable for everyday use.
Without that improvement, electric lighting stays a laboratory experiment.
Latimer didn’t just improve the bulb.
He helped install electric lighting systems across cities. He drafted critical patents. He wrote the first technical book on electric lighting.
He was also one of the only Black engineers working inside Edison’s company.
And yet, when the story was written, his name disappeared.
Edison became the symbol.
Latimer became a footnote.
Not because his work was smaller.
But because history often credits the brand, not the builder.
Lewis Latimer was born to parents who escaped slavery. He taught himself engineering at night. He rose in a system designed to exclude him.
And then history quietly stepped over him.
Today, every long-lasting incandescent bulb traces back to Latimer’s filament work.
But his name is rarely taught.
Rarely printed.
Rarely spoken.
This is not about tearing Edison down.
It is about recognizing who made invention usable.
Innovation doesn’t belong to one man.
It belongs to the people whose work survives.
Lewis Latimer didn’t invent light.
He made it stay on.
And history still owes him the credit it took away.

01/18/2026

She calculated Earth's shape by hand in a segregated Navy lab. Her math lives in every GPS device on Earth. They forgot her name. The year was 1930. Dinwiddie County, Virginia. A girl was born into a world that told her she would spend her life in to***co fields. Gladys Mae Brown's parents worked a small farm in a community where sharecropping trapped Black families in cycles they couldn't escape. The path was predetermined: school until the fields needed you, then a lifetime of crops and poverty. But Gladys saw something else. She saw numbers as doorways. While her hands picked to***co, her mind solved equations. Her parents noticed. Despite crushing hardship, they kept her in school. That decision changed the world. She became valedictorian at her segregated high school—the one with hand-me-down books and leaking ceilings. She earned a full scholarship to Virginia State College, where she studied mathematics in the 1940s South, where being Black, female, and brilliant meant fighting three battles at once. She won all three. In 1956, Gladys walked into the Naval Proving Ground in Dahlgren, Virginia. She was the second Black woman ever hired. One of four Black employees total. Surrounded by white men who didn't expect her to last a week. They underestimated her. She started calculating weapons trajectories by hand—complex differential equations that took hours. Her precision was legendary. Then computers arrived, and while others resisted, Gladys learned programming. She mastered punch cards and Fortran, turning calculations that took weeks into work completed in hours. In the 1970s, she was assigned to something called Seasat—the first satellite designed to study Earth's oceans from space. She became project manager, analyzing radar data that bounced off ocean surfaces. But her real work was invisible. Essential. Revolutionary. For GPS to work, you need to know Earth's exact shape. Not approximately. Exactly. Because Earth isn't a sphere—it's an irregular, gravity-warped, mountain-covered, ocean-troughed oblate spheroid. Gladys spent years building mathematical models of Earth's precise shape. She analyzed satellite altimetry data, tracked gravitational variations, created geoid models that described every curve and irregularity of our planet's surface. This wasn't glamorous. It was tedious, precise, mathematical work that most people would never see or understand. It was also the foundation of GPS. When GPS satellites transmit signals to calculate your location, they rely on mathematical models of Earth's shape. Gladys West built those models. Her equations live in every GPS-enabled device on Earth. Every time you navigate to a restaurant. Every time emergency services locate someone in danger. Every time a farmer uses precision agriculture. Every time a plane lands safely. Her math makes it possible. She worked at Dahlgren for 42 years. She retired in 1998. The GPS system was fully operational. Billions would use it. Almost no one knew her name. She didn't seek recognition. She raised three children with her husband Ira, also a mathematician at Dahlgren. She earned a PhD at age 70 after recovering from a stroke. She lived quietly. Then in 2018, a member of her sorority read her biography at an alumni event. Someone said, "Wait—you helped invent GPS? "The story spread. In December 2018, at age 88, Gladys West was inducted into the Air Force Space and Missile Pioneers Hall of Fame. Media outlets finally told her story. Schools added her name to curricula. Children learned that a Black woman from a Virginia farm had mapped the world. She remains characteristically modest. She credits her team. She emphasizes collaboration. But she's also clear: she faced discrimination every day. She was overlooked because of her race and gender. She had to be twice as good to receive half the recognition. Today, when you open your phone and follow GPS directions, you're using technology built on mathematics developed by a woman who grew up in to***co fields during the Great Depression, who wasn't supposed to amount to anything, who was systematically erased from the story she helped write. Gladys West mapped the world. Then the world forgot her. Until it didn't. Her life proves something profound: Your beginning doesn't determine your ending. The path may be hidden, but every step forward creates a trail others will follow. And sometimes, just sometimes, the world remembers to look back and see who showed them the way.

01/17/2026

01/16/2026

In 1948, Ed Sullivan shook Nat King Cole’s hand on live television. Sponsors threatened to flee. So he shook it again. And again. And again—every week for twenty-three years.

Ed Sullivan wasn’t a gifted performer.
He couldn’t sing. Couldn’t dance. Wasn’t charming. He stood stiffly under the lights, spoke in a halting monotone, and always looked slightly uneasy in his suit.

Critics said he had the warmth of a plank of wood.

They missed the point.

Ed Sullivan changed American culture more deeply than almost anyone in television history—not through talent, but through a stubborn, unyielding refusal to bend on dignity.

The Ed Sullivan Show premiered on June 20, 1948, originally called Toast of the Town. It was a variety show—something different every week. Comics. Acrobats. Broadway singers. Opera. Circus acts. Music.

And from the beginning, Sullivan did something almost no one else would.

He booked Black performers.

Not tucked away. Not isolated into “special” episodes. Not separated or diminished. They appeared alongside white performers, introduced the same way, treated the same way.

This was 1948.

America was still legally segregated. In*******al marriage was illegal in most states. Black Americans couldn’t share schools, restaurants, water fountains, or movie theaters with white Americans.

And Ed Sullivan put Black excellence into American living rooms every Sunday night.

On July 18, 1948—just the fifth episode—Sullivan paired Ella Fitzgerald with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. She sang with breathtaking ease. He danced with masterful precision. It was joy on display, broadcast across a divided nation.

For many white viewers, it was the first time they had ever seen Black artists treated with open respect on television.

Sullivan kept going.

Louis Armstrong. Nat King Cole. Pearl Bailey. Lena Horne. Duke Ellington. Count Basie.

And he didn’t keep his distance.

He shook hands. Kissed cheeks. Talked warmly on camera. Treated them as stars.

That basic humanity enraged sponsors.

Southern affiliates refused to air episodes. Advertisers demanded he stop “fraternizing.” Letters poured in accusing him of corruption and indecency.

Sullivan refused.

When he kissed Pearl Bailey on the cheek in 1952, sponsors exploded. He didn’t apologize. He booked her again.

He didn’t lecture America. He didn’t claim activism.

He simply refused to participate in humiliation.

Week after week. Year after year.

In 1956, he introduced Elvis Presley—music rooted in Black culture—into white living rooms. In 1964, he introduced The Beatles to America, launching a cultural earthquake.

But he never abandoned Black artists while elevating white ones.

James Brown. The Supremes. The Temptations. The Jackson 5.

The soundtrack of integration unfolded live on television.

Ella Fitzgerald appeared eight times over twenty-one years. She later said Sullivan gave people “a new beginning.”

That was his power.

Black performers trusted him to treat them with dignity. White audiences trusted him enough to let him challenge their assumptions.

He used that trust quietly, carefully, relentlessly.

By the time the show ended in 1971, integrated television was normal.

But it wasn’t inevitable.

It happened because one stiff, awkward man refused to segregate his stage.

Ed Sullivan wasn’t flashy.
He wasn’t cool.
He wasn’t beloved for charisma.

But he was decent.

And sometimes decency—practiced consistently, without compromise—changes everything.

He shook Nat King Cole’s hand.
Sponsors objected.
He did it again.

For twenty-three years.

That’s integrity.

01/15/2026

On February 29, 1940, Hattie McDaniel walked through the doors of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles wearing a rhinestone-studded turquoise gown, white gardenias tucked into her hair.
She wasn't supposed to be there.
The hotel's Cocoanut Grove nightclub, where the 12th Academy Awards were being held, had a strict "no Blacks" policy. Producer David O. Selznick had called in a special favor just to get her through the door.
Even then, she wasn't allowed to sit with her cast members. While the white stars of Gone with the Wind—Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh, Olivia de Havilland—sat near the stage, McDaniel was es**rted to a small table against a far wall in the back of the room. She spent the evening there with her es**rt and her agent, watching from a distance.
When they announced her name as the winner of the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, Hattie McDaniel became the first African American to win an Oscar.
She walked from the back of that segregated room to accept her honor.
"This is one of the happiest moments of my life," she said through tears. "I sincerely hope I shall always be a credit to my race and to the motion picture industry."
She had endured worse to get there.
Hattie McDaniel was born on June 10, 1893 (some sources say 1895), in Wichita, Kansas. She was the youngest of 13 children, born to formerly enslaved parents. Her father, Henry, was a Civil War veteran and Baptist preacher. Her mother, Susan Holbert, was a domestic worker and gospel singer.
In 1900, the family moved to Colorado—first to Fort Collins, then to Denver. Hattie was one of only two Black students in her elementary school class. She loved to sing so much that her mother reportedly bribed her with spare change just to get her to be quiet.
She left high school after two years to pursue show business, joining her father and brothers in the family's minstrel troupe. In 1925, she sang with Professor George Morrison's orchestra on Denver's KOA radio station—becoming one of the first African American women to sing on radio in the United States.
When the stock market crashed in 1929, the entertainment industry collapsed. McDaniel found herself stranded in Milwaukee, working as a bathroom attendant at Sam Pick's Club Madrid. Eventually, the club let her perform. Her talent was undeniable.
In 1931, her brother Sam convinced her to move to Los Angeles. He was working on a radio show and got her a small part. She was a quick hit with listeners. They called her "Hi-Hat Hattie."
Her film career began with tiny, uncredited roles. Her breakthrough came in 1934, when she sang a duet with Will Rogers in Judge Priest. More parts followed—though nearly all of them were maids, cooks, or servants.
She would appear in more than 300 films. She received on-screen credit for only 83.
In 1939, she was cast as Mammy in Gone with the Wind.
The role would make her famous. It would also make her controversial.
When the film premiered in Atlanta on December 15, 1939, none of the Black actors were allowed to attend. Georgia's segregation laws would have required McDaniel to stay in a "colored-only" hotel and sit in a separate section of the theater. Her co-star Clark Gable reportedly threatened to boycott the premiere unless she could attend. McDaniel talked him out of it.
She stayed home while the white cast celebrated.
Three months later, she won the Oscar—seated at a segregated table in the back of the room.
The Black community was divided about what to make of her success. Some celebrated her as a pioneer. Others, including NAACP executive secretary Walter White, criticized her for accepting roles that reinforced demeaning stereotypes of African Americans as servants.
McDaniel defended herself with characteristic directness: "I'd rather play a maid in the movies than be one in real life."
She believed she was fighting from the inside—taking the roles available and bringing dignity to characters that might otherwise have been played for mockery. "When I played Mammy," she said, "I thought of people like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and my grandmother."
In 1947, she became the first African American to star in a weekly radio program aimed at a general audience when she took over the role of Beulah on The Beulah Show. The show was about a Black maid—another stereotypical role—but the NAACP approved of her more nuanced portrayal.
In 1951, while filming the television adaptation of Beulah, McDaniel suffered a heart attack. She was diagnosed with breast cancer.
She died on October 26, 1952, in Los Angeles. She was 57 years old.
In her will, she requested a white casket, white gardenias in her hair and hands, and to be buried in Hollywood Forever Cemetery.
The cemetery refused her. It had a whites-only policy.
She was buried instead at Angelus-Rosedale Cemetery, the first in Los Angeles to accept people of all races.
It would be 24 years before another Black actor, Sidney Poitier, would win an Oscar. In 2010, when Mo'Nique won Best Supporting Actress for Precious, she wore white gardenias in her hair and said in her acceptance speech: "I want to thank Miss Hattie McDaniel for enduring all that she had to, so I would not have to."
McDaniel's Oscar was donated to Howard University, as she had requested. Sometime in the 1960s or 1970s, it disappeared. For decades, rumors swirled that it had been thrown into the Potomac River by civil rights protesters angry about the stereotypical roles she had played.
In October 2023, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences replaced the missing Oscar in a ceremony at Howard University's Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts. They called it "Hattie's Come Home."
Hattie McDaniel has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame—one for motion pictures, one for radio. In 2006, she became the first Black Oscar winner honored with a U.S. postage stamp.
She was a trailblazer who opened doors while sitting at a segregated table. She was a woman who won the highest honor her industry could give while being banned from sitting with her colleagues.
She never stopped believing she was advancing her race, even when her own community questioned her methods.
"I did my best," she once said, "and God did the rest."

01/15/2026

"Scientists filmed a singer's throat at 4,000 frames per second to prove what made Freddie Mercury's voice literally impossible to replicate."
On April 19, 2016, a team of scientists from Austria, the Czech Republic, and Sweden published something extraordinary: scientific proof that Freddie Mercury possessed one of the most unique voices in human history.
Led by Dr. Christian Herbst of the University of Vienna, the research team published their findings in the journal Logopedics Phoniatrics Vocology. What they discovered wasn't just impressive—it redefined our understanding of what the human voice can achieve.
The study revealed that Mercury was using vocal techniques that shouldn't exist in Western rock music.
He was literally throat singing—like the traditional Tuvan throat singers of Mongolia—in the middle of rock anthems.
Most humans never speak or sing using their ventricular folds. These are tissue structures in your throat that sit above your vocal cords, and they're essentially dormant in everyday life. Opera singers don't use them. Pop singers don't use them. The only people who intentionally vibrate their ventricular folds are specially trained Tuvan throat singers who spend years mastering the technique.
Freddie Mercury? He did it effortlessly while belting out "We Are the Champions."
This is called subharmonic phonation. The researchers filmed a professional rock singer's larynx at 4,132 frames per second trying to imitate Mercury's "growl" sounds. What they saw was extraordinary: a 3:1 frequency locked vibratory pattern where both the vocal folds AND ventricular folds vibrated simultaneously. This creates a richer, fuller sound—the impression of a voice pushed to its absolute limits while maintaining complete control.
It's what gave Mercury's voice that signature intensity.
Then there's the vibrato.
Your average singer has a vibrato that fluctuates between 5.4 and 6.9 Hz—a gentle, controlled wavering of pitch. Classical singers like Pavarotti aim for a smooth, regular vibrato close to a perfect sine wave, which creates that polished, operatic sound.
Freddie Mercury's vibrato? 7.04 Hz. Faster than almost anyone in recorded music history.
But speed wasn't even the most remarkable part. Mercury's vibrato was irregular—chaotic, almost electric. Where Pavarotti's vibrato charted as a smooth wave with a regularity value close to 1, Mercury's averaged 0.57. His voice didn't just vibrate; it pulsed with an unpredictable energy that made every sustained note feel alive, dangerous, ready to ignite.
Listen to the isolated vocal track of "Bohemian Rhapsody." That shimmer, that restless quality in his voice? That's his throat moving faster and more unpredictably than conventional vocal technique should allow.
The study also debunked one popular myth while revealing another truth. Mercury's vocal range wasn't the rumored four octaves—it was a respectable but not superhuman three octaves (G2 to G5). But here's the revelation: despite being known as a tenor, Mercury was actually a baritone.
Analysis of six interviews showed his median speaking frequency at 117.3 Hz—squarely in baritone territory. Opera soprano Montserrat Caballé, who performed with Mercury, confirmed it: "He had a baritone voice." He was singing as a tenor with such complete mastery that even experts were fooled.
Think about what this means: Mercury was naturally operating outside his base range, using techniques that Western singers don't use, vibrating his throat faster than humanly typical, and doing it all while commanding a stage with theatrical brilliance.
Whether he was belting "Bohemian Rhapsody," crooning "Love of My Life," or growling through "Fat Bottomed Girls," his voice had a versatility that transcended genre. He could shift from chest voice to falsetto, from breathy to pressed, adapting his sound to whatever the song demanded.
Dr. Herbst noted something profound in the study: "The occurrence of subharmonics aids in creating the impression of a sound production system driven to its limits, even while used with great finesse. These traits, in combination with the fast and irregular vibrato, might have helped create Freddie Mercury's eccentric and flamboyant stage persona."
In other words, his voice and his persona were inseparable. The science explained the magic.
Here's the beautiful irony: When asked, most great singers can't explain how they do what they do. Freddie Mercury almost certainly didn't know he was using subharmonics or that his vibrato was operating at 7.04 Hz. He just sang. The technique was instinctive, unconscious—pure artistry unaware of its own mechanics.
That's perhaps the most remarkable part. This wasn't calculated. It was natural genius.
Freddie Mercury died in 1991, but his voice remains timeless. The study confirms what millions of fans already felt in their bones: he wasn't just a great singer. He was a phenomenon—a voice that defied the laws of conventional vocal production and redefined what rock music could sound like.
"A true artist pushes boundaries, defies limits, and leaves a legacy that echoes through time."
Freddie Mercury did all this and more. Science has now proven it.
The voice of a generation. The sound of the impossible.
A legend unmatched.

01/15/2026

In the mid-1800s, as steam-powered fire engines became common, fire departments transitioned from hand-pulled engines to much larger wagons pulled by horses. Firehouses were often multi-story buildings: the stables with horses and equipment were on the ground floor, while sleeping quarters, kitchens, and sometimes hay storage were on the upper floors.

Architects and firemen installed narrow spiral staircases leading upstairs because these compact stairs were difficult or impossible for horses to climb, helping keep the animals where they belonged, with the equipment, not wandering into the firemen’s living spaces attracted by smells like cooking food. 

However, spiral stairs created a new problem for the fire crews themselves. When the alarm sounded, dozens of firefighters had to race down tight, twisting stairs to reach the horses and engines below, which was slow and inefficient in an emergency.

In 1878, in Chicago’s Engine Company No. 21, a practical breakthrough occurred: a fireman named George Reid used a long wooden hay-lifting pole to slide from an upper floor to the ground faster than his colleagues on the stairs, inspiring Captain David B. Kenyon to install a permanent sliding pole. This allowed firefighters to descend directly and quickly to the apparatus floor, often saving precious seconds in getting the horses hitched and the engine rolling. 

Once introduced, the fire pole spread rapidly across firehouses in the U.S. and later in other countries as a practical response innovation. By around 1880 the Boston Fire Department installed the first brass pole, and poles became a defining feature of many fire stations into the 20th century. Over time, as horses were replaced by motorized fire engines, the original need for spiral stairs to restrain horses disappeared.

Many modern stations now build single-story sleeping and apparatus floors or use safer alternatives like slides, but the legacy of those early architectural choices, spiral stairs to control horses and poles to speed descent, remains a fascinating part of firefighting history.