Most foods are best as fresh as possible. I remember picking peaches at my grandfather’s ranch in Northern California and eating them on the spot. What a taste! But the exceptions to this rule are the many wines that actually need some aging to taste their best. Winemakers know this, and work to control the aging process including decisions they make about how to bottle up their product.
Fat-burning fat exists, but might not be the key to weight loss
When you think about body fat, it’s probably white fat that comes to mind. That’s where our bodies store excess calories, and it’s the stuff you want to get rid of when you are trying to lose weight. But white fat isn’t the only kind of fat in the body – you also have brown fat and beige, or brite, fat, which can actually burn calories instead of storing them.
Dry January - is it worth giving up alcohol for a month?
The psychology of New Year’s resolutions
Research has shown that about half of all adults make New Year’s resolutions. However, fewer than 10% manage to keep them for more than a few months. As a professor of behavioural addiction I know how easy people can fall into bad habits and why on trying to give up those habits it is easy to relapse. Resolutions usually come in the form of lifestyle changes and changing behaviour that has become routine and habitual (even if they are not problematic) can be hard to do.
Our prettiest pollutant: just how bad are fireworks for the environment?
The bangs and fizzes of fireworks are rapidly replacing the chimes of Big Ben as the defining sound of New Year’s Eve celebrations in London, while around the world, city landmarks are becoming stages for increasingly spectacular pyrotechnic displays. Since the millennium, the popularity of fireworks has even extended into back gardens, where smaller fireworks or sparklers are lit up at the stroke of midnight.
Should I throw away food once a fly has landed on it?
Explainer: the mysterious dark energy that speeds the universe’s rate of expansion
Animals are evolving faster than you think – here’s the living proof
Explainer: what is a neutron star?
Neutron stars, with a solid crust (and even oceans and an atmosphere!) are the densest solid object we can observe, reaching a few times the density of an atomic nucleus at their core. A sample of neutron star material the size of a grain of sand would weigh roughly the same as the largest ship ever to sail the seas – more than 500,000 tonnes.
Explainer: what is mass?
Explainer: can you be addicted to food?
Taking a hot bath after exercise improves performance in the heat
How to clean up space debris – using game theory
A piece of debris just 10cm in diameter could cause an entire spacecraft to disintegrate and it is estimated that there are more than 29,000 objects larger than 10cm in Earth’s orbit. This poses a major risk to the spacecraft to-ing and fro-ing from the International Space Station, not to mention the hundreds of satellites that are now essential to daily lives.
Did ‘dark matter’ or a star called Nemesis kill the dinosaurs?
The dinosaur extinction 66m years ago was most likely caused by a comet or big asteroid hitting the Earth. But given that asteroids don’t actually hit our planet very often, could this really be the whole story? Many scientists are now asking whether some sort of cosmological event could have boosted the number of comets at the time, making such a collision more likely.
How we discovered that the Earth’s inner core is older than previously thought
Water, water, everywhere – where to drink in the solar system
Science fiction movies about aliens threatening the Earth routinely ascribe them the motive of coming here to steal our resources, most often our water. This is ill thought-out, as water is actually extremely common. Any civilisation coming to our solar system in need of water (either to drink or to make rocket fuel) would be foolish to plunge all the way inwards to the Earth, from where they’d have to haul their booty back against the pull of the sun’s gravity.
Explainer: what are fundamental particles?
It is often claimed that the Ancient Greeks were the first to identify objects that have no size, yet are able to build up the world around us through their interactions. And as we are able to observe the world in tinier and tinier detail through microscopes of increasing power, it is natural to wonder what these objects are made of.
Reef fish can even smell like coral as they seek to evade predators
Is glass a solid or a liquid?
We want to build tiny backpacks for bees – here’s why
An exciting attempt to help honey bees has come about thanks to an unlikely intellectual marriage. One of us is an ecologist who wants to keep an eye on individual bees over their entire two to three-mile range and monitor their behaviour. The other is an expert in micro-electronics. Together, we want to develop miniature bee “backpacks” that will power tracking devices by harvesting the energy honey bees generate while flying and visiting flowers.