Science

Recumbent bicycles have been in production for decades, with a history stretching back to the 19th century along with its more familiar bicycle brethren. Recumbent bikes place the rider in a more horizontal position with more framing and a larger seat, with the alloy frame extended between the larger wheelbase to position the rider directly … Read more

On the surface there aren’t many things more solid than rock, but over thousands of years it can change dramatically. Nowhere is this more evident than the world’s coastlines where the rock is constantly under barrage. The hydraulic action of the waves slamming into the cliffs causes fractures, which over time grow into cracks, which … Read more

We’ve all taken things we never wear or use on holiday. This can be avoided with a little more foresight. Lay your gear out on the floor before putting a single item in your case and write a list of what you’ll need. Check what’s available at the accommodation to save taking big items like … Read more

As the global oil supply dwindles over the coming decades, plastics manufacturers will turn to natural gas, biomass and recycling as the feedstock of the future. Today, just about every plastic product, from Tupperware bowls to polyethylene carpet, is derived from petroleum, a non-renewable fossil fuel that will eventually dry up. The plastics industry has … Read more

Hero of Alexandria, a Greek engineer and mathematician who lived in the first century CE, introduced the first vending machine. For a small fee, you could purchase your very own holy water. A coin was placed into a slot where it fell onto a pan attached to a lever. The lever controlled a valve allowing … Read more

Radon is a radioactive, colorless and odorless gas that is found all around us in very small amounts and is responsible for most of our daily dose of radiation. Radon gas is one of the decay products of radium, which in turn is a decay product of uranium, the most common naturally occurring radioactive substance … Read more

The Globe Theater was an Elizabethan era playhouse part-owned by the great playwright William Shakespeare. Built from the remains of an existing theater in Shoreditch, London, made by English actor and theater owner Richard Burbage and his brother Cuthbert, the Globe was constructed over just a few months in 1599. The playhouse became the home … Read more

The pedoscope was a modified medical device consisting of a metal box, covered by wood and with a series of viewing portals. Marketed to shoe shops in the early-20th century, it claimed to enable sales assistants and customers to take a detailed look at the fit of a pair of shoes. The customer would place … Read more

The Peruvian coastal plain in South America is home to a wonder of archaeology. The ground is scarred by images, or geoglyphs, known as the Nazca lines, thought to have been constructed by the people of Nazca between 500 BCE and 500 CE. The ancient artworks, most easily viewed from the air, were created by … Read more

Imagine a beast taller than a giraffe and heavier than two elephants. Paraceratherium was the dinosaur of its day. It filled the same ecological niche as the huge sauropod dinosaurs, like Diplodocus, that lived 120 million years earlier, roaming through lightly forested plains and eating the leaves of trees, which it stripped off the branches … Read more

Tidal power plants use the rise and fall of tides to produce electricity. One way to harness tidal power is to build a barrage, a dam with gates that regulate water flow, across an estuary. When the gates are open, water flows through turbines, generating electricity. Water flows through at high tide, filling up the … Read more

Over 1 million cars are scrapped every year, but this is not the end of their life. Cars contain a wide variety of valuable metals that can be recycled and reused. Powerful car crushers compact the scrap steel, making it much easier to transport for the recycling process. Modern car crushers tend to employ hydraulics … Read more

An excited hush falls across the deserted tower block. Neighboring residents look on as the police helicopter overhead double-checks that the exclusion zone is clear. The countdown reaches zero and the button is pushed. An explosive shockwave ripples through 1,500 separate charges, shattering the supporting concrete columns. With surprising grace, the huge 24-storey tower block … Read more

Few other naked-eye astronomers have plotted the movement of planets quite as accurately as Danish nobleman Tycho Brahe. His observations of a new star in 1572 and the Great Comet of 1577 helped to shake off the Aristotelian belief that the planets and stars were unchanging and locked in ‘immutable’ celestial spheres. Brahe’s schooling began … Read more

Any two bodies that are gravitationally bound, such as Earth and the Sun, have five regions of gravitational stability. In these regions, the forces of gravity from the two bodies balance out, and anything located at these regions, known as Lagrangian points (or simply Lagrange points) will remain stationary. Lagrangian points are fascinating, and it … Read more

The age of the universe is calculated by measuring its rate of expansion and working backwards to the Big Bang. It was first estimated by American astronomer Edwin Hubble, whose initial calculation we have improved upon today. In 1929, Hubble realized the universe is expanding when he noticed the farther a galaxy was from Earth, … Read more

Throughout the year, Earth’s axis tilts slightly towards or away from the Sun, so that one hemisphere will have a longer day than the other, depending on which is more inclined towards our star. But every March and September, Earth reaches a point in its orbit where neither hemisphere is tilted towards the Sun, as … Read more

Astronomers use two impact hazard scales to describe the risks associated with Near Earth Objects (NEOs). The simpler Torino Scale runs from 0 to 10. Objects rated 0 are either highly unlikely to strike Earth, or too small to survive the passage into the atmosphere, while an object meriting a 10 would be a certain … Read more

Uranium is a metal of the actinide series: a group of large, radioactive elements, represented as an additional row on the periodic table. It is the heaviest of the naturally occurring elements and has 92 protons and 92 electrons. Like every element heavier than lead – which has 82 protons and 82 electrons – uranium … Read more

The active ingredient in pepper spray, capsaicin, comes from the chilli plant. Produced to protect the plant’s seeds from being crushed by the teeth of grazing animals, this molecule binds to TRPV1 receptors on the endings of pain nerves, causing them to fire and inducing a feeling similar to burning. Pepper spray is a concentrated … Read more

We all know water comprises just two chemical elements, oxygen and hydrogen, both of which exist as gases in Earth’s atmosphere. Making water should therefore be as simple as smashing the two together with enough force to overcome the energy barrier keeping them apart – right? However, this reaction produces a huge amount of energy, … Read more

The incredible geometric patterns may look artifi cial, but they are, in fact, the visualisation of how sound waves interact as they travel across a surface. The study of these figures is called cymatics, which derives from the Greek word ‘kima’ (wave) and was first coined by Swiss scientist Hans Jenny in 1967, but the … Read more

At California’s National Ignition Facility (NIF), 192 lasers are poised and ready to unleash four million joules of energy on their target: a pea-sized pellet of frozen hydrogen. Making up the world’s highest energy laser system, their goal is to create the intense pressures needed to initiate nuclear fusion – the reaction that powers the … Read more

Meerkats might not be the biggest animals on the African plains, nor appear to boast any particularly formidable weapons, like the rhino’s horn, or impressive skills, like the cheetah’s speed. Nevertheless, through a combination of hardy biology, smart tricks and a unique community spirit, these mammals have adapted perfectly to their harsh environment. They escape … Read more

Anyone who has ever spent the day at a beach will know that the sea is not static. Indeed, over 24 hours a shoreline can change dramatically as the gravitational interaction between Earth, the Moon and the Sun dictates the ocean tides. But are other large bodies of water on Earth subject to tides as … Read more

Also called sea cows, manatees might not immediately resemble your average land-based bovine, but they do share a number of their characteristics. They are bulky, generally peaceful creatures and spend a large proportion of their time grazing on plants; in fact, they’re the only marine mammal with an exclusively vegetarian diet. Surprisingly graceful in the … Read more

Antarctica is Earth’s coldest, driest and windiest continent, but many resilient life forms have adapted to survive the harsh environment. Among them is Earth’s tallest penguin, the largest mammal and the Antarctic icefish – the only bony animal with transparent blood. The coldest temperature ever officially recorded was on a high snow plateau in Antarctica, … Read more

In 2014 touchscreens will no longer be merely small, rectangular panels embedded into two-tiers of mobile electronic devices, but instead flexible, transparent and widely integrated screens found everywhere, from walls to tables and even food menus. Indeed, in 2013 Taiwan’s Polytron Technologies already managed to produce a completely transparent smartphone, equipped with a fully functioning … Read more

The secret, as Julius Caesar might have said, is that all rubber is divided into three parts. Or, in somewhat more modern language, that which we call rubber by any other name would not bake as well. I’ll try again. There are three basic kinds of rubber, coming from three different kinds of plants: natural … Read more

Heat Capacity: Let’s take water as the most familiar example of a material that has a relatively high heat capacity. When we heat water, we’re pumping calories of heat into it; its temperature will therefore rise. Temperature is a measure of how fast the molecules are moving. Because water molecules stick quite tenaciously to one … Read more

Heating two servings of something takes less than twice the amount of time required for heating one. Different foods absorb microwaves to different degrees. Water and fats absorb microwaves efficiently, while proteins and carbohydrates don’t absorb much at all. That’s why different foods require different amounts of time to heat or cook. Furthermore, the microwave … Read more

Heat, the energy we use in cooking, is the most universal form of energy. All other energy forms, chemical energy, energy of motion (kinetic energy), electrical energy, nuclear energy, eventually degenerate into heat, which you might say is a sort of energy of last resort. As chemical reactions give off energy, as moving things slow … Read more

In 1714 a German glassblower and amateur physicist named Gabriel Fahrenheit (1686-1736) made a gadget that would indicate how hot or cold an object was by how far up or down a thin column of mercury inside a glass tube would expand or contract as its temperature changed. To put numbers on it, he decided … Read more

Most dishwasher detergents for machines, as opposed to the dishwashing detergents for hand-washing dishes, contain the highly alkaline compound sodium carbonate, also known as good old-fashioned washing soda, not baking soda, which is sodium bicarbonate. Alkaline chemicals are needed in the dishwasher because they gobble up grease, transforming it into soap. A soap is one … Read more

Like every other householder in this country, I have religiously kept an open box of Arm & Hammer (is there any other kind?) baking soda in my refrigerator, and I can testify that I have never smelled a bad odor. It must also have worked to repel tigers. because not once did I encounter a … Read more

Essential oil is an unfortunate name. An essential oil is not necessarily an oil in the chemical sense, and may not even feel oily at all. Nor is it “essential” in the sense of being indispensable. Aromatherapy and cosmetic flacks take advantage of this misunderstanding by touting the essential oils in their products as if … Read more

Some types of rice are stickier than others. Bear with me and we’ll reveal an ancient Chinese secret, okay, a modern American one, for using chopsticks. There are tens of thousands of varieties of rice known today, but in the interests of sanity we can divide them into three categories: short-grain (less than 5 millimeters … Read more

When the waiter in the Chinese restaurant asks, “Do you want me to pack the rice also?” when you ask for a doggy bag. And you say, “Yes, please,” while thinking, “Not really, but I paid for it, and I don’t want him to think I lack respect for the soul food of his homeland.” … Read more

Have you ever wondered why split pea soup has to be made from split peas, rather than whole ones? I know I have. After all, once they’ve been reduced to pottage. who cares whether they were originally intact spheres or, one must presume, had been carefully split in two at the factory by a tribe … Read more

Mashed potatoes would seem to be the easiest thing in the world to make: just boil ’em and mash ’em, right? But potatoes are mostly starch, and a lot depends on how the starch behaves. Potato flesh is made up of plant cells. Inside the cells are thousands of starch granules, little round packages in … Read more

Also called grains, cereal grasses supply us with the starchy, edible seeds we treasure: wheat, rice, rye, oats, barley, and corn. Not only do these six plants sustain most of the world’s human population, but they feed the cattle and poultry who turn them into meat. Grains are the most ancient and still the most … Read more

The succulent “fruits” of the tropical cashew tree Anacardium occidentale, often called cashew apples, are about the size and shape of a pear. They are not only edible but quite delicious. Since they are highly perishable, however, you won’t find them very far from the trees. I was lucky enough to taste them when I … Read more

In the eighteenth century, American colonists in New England came up with an ingenious way of boosting the alcohol content of apple wine without the complicated apparatus of a still. They just left barrels of the wine out in the cold New England winter, where the surfaces froze. But water freezes at 32°F (0°C), while … Read more

Hard cider, apple wine, apple brandy, and applejack differ mainly in the ingenious methods that have been invented to arrive at their percentages of alcohol. Apple juice can be allowed to ferment naturally by just leaving it around in the open and letting airborne yeast cells fall into it. These microscopic, single-celled plants feed on the … Read more

In this country, apple juice and apple cider are often used interchangeably, referring simply to the liquid that runs out of pressed apples. But in most other countries, cider means apple juice that has been allowed to ferment and produce alcohol, just as grape juice ferments to produce wine. We Americans would call fermented apple … Read more

Although most apples will float, they can vary somewhat in their aquatic stabilities. Buy samples of a few varieties several days before the party and test them. Then go back to the store and load up on the best floaters. Asking your guests to bob for apples that sink to the bottom would severely compromise … Read more

Whenever two water solutions containing different amounts of sugar (for example) are on opposite sides of a plant’s cell wall, water molecules will move spontaneously through the cell wall in the direction of the more concentrated (stronger) solution, making it less concentrated, diluting it. That’s osmosis. When you cook the berries in plain water without … Read more

Olives are unusual sources of oil, in that almost all other vegetable oils reside in the fruits’ seeds, whereas in olives the oil is in the flesh. As olives ripen, their colors change from straw-colored to green, purple, and, finally, black. The transformation from green to black takes place over a period of about 3 … Read more

Light olive oil does not contain fewer calories than other olive oils or, for that matter, any edible oils. As far as calories are concerned, an oil is an oil, all oils are fats, and all fats give us approximately 9 calories of energy per gram. The word light is thrown around by food manufacturers … Read more

Electrons, not unlike people, have a strong compulsion to pair up. A free radical is an atom or group of atoms that contains one or more unpaired electrons; that is, one or more of its electrons is missing a partner. The etymology of “free radical” in the chemical, rather than the political, sense is convoluted … Read more

The word rancid is a sort of catchall that comes from the Latin rancidus, meaning rank or stinky. The word has no explicit chemical meaning. It is used loosely to mean bad-smelling and tasting, most often in reference to over-the-hill fats. There are several things you can do to avoid fat rancidity. But first, let’s … Read more

A molecule of any fat (a triglyceride) contains three fatty acid molecules attached to a glycerol (glycerin) base. The three fatty acids can be any combination of saturated, monounsaturated, or polyunsaturated. The health consequences of any given fat are purely those of the fatty acids (I’ll call them FA’s from here on) it contains. The … Read more

There is a lot of confusion surrounding trans fatty acids or “trans fats.” The public’s concern about trans fatty acids was heightened on July 1, 2003, when the FDA issued its final rule on the labeling of foods containing trans fatty acids, to wit: “In this final rule and given the current state of scientific … Read more

Oils are liquids whose molecules don’t stick together very strongly, so they can slide easily past one another. That’s what makes them slippery. But chemically speaking, edible oils and inedible oils are quite different. And thereby hangs an embarrassing tale. A few decades ago I was teaching graduate-level chemistry in Spanish (what chutzpah!) at a university in … Read more

Plantains are tropical fruits closely related to bananas, both members of the genus Musa, but much starchier and containing much less sugar when ripe. They’re also known as cooking bananas, which is a clear tip-off that they’re not meant to be eaten raw. Plantains are a staple in Africa and especially in Latin America, where … Read more

As bananas ripen and get sweeter, that would be creating calories, and calories are energy. Energy can come only from other forms of energy (heat, mechanical, electrical, and so on) or from matter via E = mc2. If a banana knew how to convert matter into energy, as uranium does, we could make atomic “B-bombs” … Read more

If you smashed all the bottles of chemicals in a chemistry lab with a baseball bat, you wouldn’t be surprised at any unusual chemical reactions that occurred as their spilled contents ran together on the floor, would you? Well, plants are made up of remarkably packaged, exquisitely organized little “bottles of chemicals” called cells. When … Read more

The chemical changes that take place in ripening fruits are quite complex, with different fruits differing mainly in the timing of those reactions. For every type of fruit, there comes a time when the ripening reactions reach their peak, after which senescence (deterioration) sets in, ultimately leading to decay. That’s Nature’s dust-to-dust plan, and the … Read more

In the pages of his published works, William Shakespeare used the words fruit or fruits 122 times. On the pages of the King James Bible, the words fruit or fruits appear 361 times. On the ethereal pages of today’s World Wide Web, the words pop up more than 600 million times. In metaphor, we speak … Read more

Always do what your mother says. When I was a kid my mother told me that if I wore my rubber rain boots in the movies it would ruin my eyes. I forgot to take them off once, and today I have to wear glasses. But seriously, your mother’s dictum is somewhat more rational. Garbanzos, … Read more

As the key element in amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, nitrogen is a necessary component of all living things, both plant and animal. On Earth, there is a virtually unlimited supply of nitrogen gas molecules (N2) in the atmosphere; air is about 80 percent nitrogen. But the bond between those two nitrogen atoms … Read more

One thing you can do to prevent farts is to cut down on the amount of alfalfa in your diet. But giving up all those other legumes, including peas, peanuts, lentils, and the dozens of kinds of beans, would be too much to ask. It’s just one of those many times in life when we … Read more

Miso, known as “fermented soybean paste” in English, is one of the most versatile products you can find in Japanese and Korean markets. It’s sold either by itself, to be used in home cooking, or already incorporated into soups, salad dressings, and sauces. Like soy milk and tofu, miso begins with soaked, steamed, and ground … Read more

Tofu is made by curdling soy milk, and then they manipulate the curds in different ways. A variety of acids, enzymes, bacteria, and salts are able to coagulate the proteins in soy milk, that is, to unwind their long, twisted molecules, allowing them to rebind (cross-link) to one another like rungs in ladders, forming a … Read more

Many people have often wondered how they milk those little soybeans, haven’t you? Soy milk is made by soaking, boiling, grinding, and pressing the liquid out of soybeans. The liquid is called “milk” because it is white, but it bears as little relationship to cow’s milk as does milk of magnesia. Soy milk is a … Read more

Cucumbers have been cultivated for thousands of years, and like many food plants, they have been improved by cross-breeding to accentuate the better and eliminate the bitter. Old recipes often include a de-bittering step, such as soaking the slices in salt water. (I doubt that that works anyway.) But modern varieties are rarely bitter except … Read more

Vidalias aren’t unique in their mildness. There are several brands of mild onions grown in other parts of the country, including the Maui, Walla Walla, Texas 1015, and OSO. Note that I have called them “mild,” not “sweet.” They don’t necessarily contain more sugar than other onions; they simply contain lesser amounts of both the … Read more

What makes us cry is all the misinformation going around about onions, primarily about what causes the eye irritation and how sweet onions differ from ordinary ones. The tear-producing chemical (the lachrymator) in onions is not pyruvic acid, as has too often been stated in print. Nor does pyruvic acid “come from sulfur in the … Read more

Plants in general are made up almost entirely of compounds of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, compounds that chemists refer to as organic, with no relation to the word used to designate foods that conform to the USDA’s National Organic (Foods) Program. Minerals, on the other hand, are the seventeen inorganic chemical elements that are essential … Read more

If you check the “USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference”, you may be surprised to find that spinach does not contain an unusual amount of iron: it has less than most breakfast cereals, about a quarter as much as raw clams, and about the same as canned pork and beans (not counting the can). … Read more

All parts of the rhubarb plant (Rheum rhaponticum) contain various amounts of oxalic acid and its chemical progeny, oxalate salts, ranging from to 1.4 percent. That’s largely what gives rhubarb its prodigious pucker power, which must be tamed with sugar in the pie. Oxalic acid and oxalates are indeed poisonous. During World War I, when … Read more

Yukon Gold potatoes, along with cabbage, onions, and yellow rice, get their yellow color from chemicals called anthoxanthins. Anthoxanthins react with traces of metals such as iron and aluminum, which turn them blue-gray. A carbon steel knife can have that effect, so it’s best to cut and slice these vegetables with stainless-steel knives. Other varieties … Read more

Haven’t we become a bit of a paranoid society? Our drugstores and supermarkets cater to our fears (or do they encourage them?) by displaying dozens of antibacterial soaps, sprays, gels, lotions, hand washes, body washes, wipes, deodorants, and mouthwashes. Television commercials strike terror in our hearts by suggesting that there might be a germ or … Read more

The green color in plants and algae is a miraculous molecule called chlorophyll that can absorb the energy of sunlight and use it to convert carbon dioxide and water into glucose and oxygen gas. The plants then either use the glucose directly for their own growth energy or polymerize it (connect thousands of glucose molecules … Read more

The kaleidoscope of brightly colored fruits and vegetables, the red tomatoes, watermelons, strawberries, and beets; the orange carrots, sweet potatoes, pumpkins, apricots, and mangoes; the yellow lemons and squashes; the bluish-purple grapes, plums, and cabbages; and all the green beans and leafy vegetables, are due to a variety of phytochemicals that can be classified into … Read more

Thousand-year-old eggs, called pidans in Chinese, are a tongue in cheek eggsaggeration. Less lyrical Chinese may call them hundred-year-old eggs. Truth be told, however, they’re only about a hundred days old, which may strike you as bad enough. Here’s how they’re made. Take a fresh duck egg in the shell, plaster it all over with … Read more

It may be difficult for any mortal to achieve divinity, but with patience you can do it. Pasteurized-in-the-shell eggs are intended to eliminate the hazards of the food-poisoning bacteria Salmonella enteritidis and other salmonella species that can be found in poultry, meat and meat products, raw milk, and the yolks (usually not the whites) of … Read more

The American Egg Board recommends the following method for making hard-boiled eggs: “Place eggs in single layer in saucepan. Add enough tap water to come at least 1 inch above eggs. Cover. Quickly bring just to boiling. Turn off heat. If necessary, remove pan from burner to prevent further boiling. Let eggs stand, covered, in … Read more

A hen’s egg contains a small air pocket just inside the shell at the broad end, the purpose of which is to let the chick breathe while pecking its way out on its birthday. Because the shells are porous and permeable to gases, outside air can diffuse in and exchange with the air inside. As … Read more

The albumen, or white, of an egg is 88 percent water and 12 percent a mixture of about a dozen different proteins. But most (54 percent) of the protein is ovalbumin, each of whose huge molecules contains more than three thousand atoms, including only six atoms of sulfur. Nevertheless, that tiny amount of sulfur can … Read more

First of all, the greenish-black color of hard-cooked egg yolks is harmless. Even if the colored substance were a toxic compound (it’s not), it is present in only trace amounts. As an egg ages, some of the sulfur-containing protein in the egg white slowly decomposes, forming a small amount of evil-smelling hydrogen sulfide gas, H2S. Heat … Read more

When the eggs are done, cool them down quickly in cold running water. That shrinks the albumen away from the shell somewhat and makes an egg easier to peel. It also keeps the yolks from turning green. Very fresh eggs are harder to peel because the albumen tends to stick to the membrane on the … Read more

It’s not true that adding salt to the water before boiling eggs prevents the eggshells from cracking. Salt (sodium chloride) has no effect on eggshells (calcium carbonate), either chemically or physically. An eggshell can crack when there is a sudden temperature difference between a cold shell and hot water. The heat makes the shell expand … Read more

In general, the yolks in double yolk eggs are smaller but the eggs overall are bigger. About 3 to 5 percent of hens’ eggs have two yolks. Some hens, driven by their genes and the conformation of their oviducts, seem to specialize in producing these twins. When you find a double yolker in an otherwise … Read more

Red spots in eggs doesn’t mean that the egg was fertilized, and it will not hatch no matter how long you sit on it. Hens that lay eggs for commercial distribution have never even seen, much less “dated,” a rooster. Layers just aren’t breeders. The red spots are indeed blood, from the rupture of a … Read more

Unfortunately, we agree with every other printed dissertation on eggs to assure you that no differences in flavor or nutrition have been found between brown eggs and white eggs. Just as brown-skinned people produce brown-skinned children, brown-feathered chickens lay brown-shelled eggs. Among the brown-egg layers are the Barred Plymouth Rock and the Red Rock Cross, … Read more

The USDA grades eggs according to quality, not according to freshness, as AA, A, or B. To earn a grade of AA, an egg must have an air cell within the wide end that is less than an eighth of an inch (3 millimeters) deep; a shell that is well shaped and clean, with very … Read more

Calling butter a fat is like calling a truffle a mushroom. Butter’s magic arises from its uniqueness, not only in its history and renowned flavor but in its composition. Butter contains a relatively large amount of water, and it’s the water that gives butter its unfat-like properties, such as being able to bring a sauce … Read more

In addition to the hundreds of classic cheeses developed over more than a thousand years in various parts of the world, we are blessed today with many options for adding cheese flavor, be it natural or artificial, to our snacks and dishes. Dozens of cheesy (often in more ways than one) factory-produced concoctions beckon to … Read more

String cheese is a novelty form of mozzarella, a soft, white, elastic cheese. American mozzarella, made from cow’s milk, is a poor relation to the Italian mozzarella (rnozzarella di bufala) from the region along the shinbone of the Italian boot. Mozzarella di bufala is made from milk of the Asian water buffalo, introduced into Italy … Read more