Beauty with nip

  Before empires and royalty, before pottery and writing, before metal tools and weapons there was cheese. As early as 8000 BCE,  the earliest Neolithic farmers living in the Fertile Crescent began a legacy of cheesemaking almost as old as civilization itself. The rise of agriculture led to domesticated sheep and goats, which ancient farmers harvested for milk. But when left in warm conditions for several hours, that fresh milk began to sour. Its lactic acids caused proteins to coagulate, binding into soft clumps. Upon discovering this strange transformation, the farmers drained the remaining liquid later named whey and found the yellowish globs could be eaten fresh as a soft, spreadable meal. These clumps, or curds, became the building blocks of cheese, which would eventually be aged, pressed, ripened, and whizzed into a diverse cornucopia of dairy delights. The discovery of cheese gave Neolithic people an enormous survival advantage. Milk was  rich with essential protei...

  Ethanol: this molecule, made of little more than a few carbon atoms, os responsible for drunkenness. Often simply referred to as alcohol,  ethanol is the active ingredient in alcoholic beverages. Its simplicity hepls it sneak across membranes  and nestle into many different nooks, producing a wide range of effects compared to other, clunker molecules. So how exactly does it cause drunkenness, and why does it have dramatically different effects on different people? To answer these questions, we will need to follow alcohol on its journey through the body. Alcohol lands in the stomach and is absorbed into the blood through the digestive tract, specially the small intestine. The contents of the stomach impact alcohol's ability to get into the blood because after eating, the pyloric sphincter, which seperates the stomach from the small intestine, closes. So the level of alcohol that reaches the blood after a big meal might only be a quarter that from the same drink on an emp...

  If you ho tothe store in search of milk, there are a dizzying number of products to choose from. Theres a dairy milk, but also plant based products. To turn a plant into something resembling milk, it must be either soaked, drained, rinsed, and milled into a thick paste, or dried and milled into flour. The plant paste or flour is then fortified with vitamins and minerals, flavored and diluted with water. The result is a barrage of options that share many of the qualities of animal milk. So which milk is actually best for you? Lets dive into some of the most popular milks, dairy, almond, soy or oat? A 250 ml glass of cow's milk contains 8 grams of protein, 12grams of carbohydrates, and 2 to 8 grams of fat depending on if its skim, reduced fat, or whole. Thats approximately 15% the daily protein an average adult needs, roughly 10% the carbohydrates and 2 to 15% the fat. Most plant based milks have less carbohydrates than dairy milk. They also have less fat but more of whats often ca...

  How many people does it take to make a cup of coffee? For many of us, all it takes is a short walk and a quick pour. But this simple staple is the result of a globe- spanning process whose cost and complexity are far greater than you might imagine. It begins in a place like the remote Colombian town of Pitalito. Here family farms have clear cut local forests to make room for neat rows of coffee trees. These shrub like plants were first domesticated in  and are now cultivated throughout equatorial regions. Each shrub is filled with small berries called "coffee cherries."  Since fruits on the same branch can ripen at different times, they are best picked by hand, but each farm has its own method for processing the fruit. In Pitalito, harvesters  from dawn to dusk at high altitudes, often picking over 25 kilograms per shift for very low wages. The workers deliver their picked cherries to the wet mill. This machine seperates the seeds from the fruit, and then sorts the...

     More than 100 years after his creator was laid to rest, Dracula lives on as the most famous vampire in history.  But this Transylvanian noble, neither the first fictional vampire nor the most popular of his time, may have remained buried in obscurity of not for a twist of fate. Dracula's first appearance was in Bram stoker's 1897 novel of the same name. But that was far from the beginning of vampire myths. Blood sucking monsters had already been part of folkore for at least 800 years. It was Slavic folklore that gave us the word vampire, or "upir" in old Russian. The term's first known written mention comes from the 11th century. Vampire lore in the region predated christianity's arrival and persisted despite the church's efforts to eliminate pagan beliefs. Stories of vampires originated from misinterpretations of diseases, such as rabies, and pellagra, and decomposition. In the case of the latter, gasses swelling the body and blood oozing from the mo...

  Juana Ramirez de Asbaje sat before a panel of prestigious theologians, jurists, and mathematicians. The viceroy of New Spain had invited them to test the young woman's knowledge by posing the most difficult questions they could muster. But Juana successfully answered every challenge, from complicated equations to philosophical queries. Observers would later liken the scene to "a royal galleon fending off a few canoes." The woman who faced this interrogation was born in the mid 17th century. At that time, Mexico had been a spanish colony for over a century, leading to a complex and stratified class system. Juana's maternal grandparents were born in spain, making them members of Mexico's most esteemed class. But Juana was born out of wedlock, and her farther a spanish military captain  left her mother, Dona Isabel,  to raise Juana and her sisters alone. Fortunately her grandfathers moderate means ensured the family a comfortable existence. And Dona Isabel set a st...

  There are lot of popular dietsout there. Investigating which ones are scientifically sound, and actually work. From the outside it seems like a simple equation your weight is determined by the balance between  the calories you burn. By changing what you eat or  activity level, you can tip this equation towards weight gain or loss. Which brings us to our first category of diets: calorie restriction.  Companies like weight watchers claim you can eat whatever you want, as long as you stay below a prescribed number of daily calories. Getting all your  calories from junk food is technically allowed, but from a health perspective, its important to think of the nutritional value of the foods too. If you dont, you risk heart problems, nutrient defdeficiencies and chronic health issues. Calorie Restriction with optimal nutrition or CRON diets, generally reduce their caloric intake by 20% while still meeting the daily nutritional requirements. For example,  of havi...

  Your favorite athlete closes in for a victorious win. The crowd holds its breath, and  at the crucial moment, she misses the shot. That competitor just experienced the phenomenon known as "chocking", where despite months, even years, of practice, a person fails right when it matteres most. Choking is common in sports, where performance often occurs under intense pressure and depends on key moments.  And yet performance anxiety also haunts public speakers, contestants in spelling bees, and even world famous musicians.  Most people intuitively blame it on their nerves, but why does being nervous undermine expert performance?  There are two sets of theories, which both say that primarily, chocking under pressure boils down to focus. First there are the distraction theories. These suggest that performance suffers when the mind is preoccupied with worries, doubts, or fears, instead of focusing its attention on performing rhe task at hand. When relavant and irreleva...

  In the summer of 1997, NASA s pathfinder spacecraft landed on the surface of Mars, and began transmitting incredible iconic images back to Earth. But several days in,sometimes went terribly wrong. The transmission syopped. Pathfinder was, in effect, procrastinating: keeping itself fully occupied but failing to do its most important work. What was going on? There was a bug, it turned out, in its sheduler. Every operating system has something called the sheduler that tells the CPU how long to work on each task before switching, and what to switch to. Done right computers move so fluidly between their various responsibilities, they give the illusion of doing everything simultaneously. But we all know what happens when things go wrong. This should give us, if nothing else, some measure of consolation. Even computers get overwhelmed sometimes. May be learning about the computer science of sheduling can give us some ideas about our own human struggles with time. One of the first insigh...

  Ah romantic love heartbreaking soul- crushing,often all the same time. Why do we put ourselves through its emotional wringer? Does love make our lives meaningful, or is it an escape from our loneliness and suffering? Is love a disguise for our sexual desire, or a trick of biology to make us procreate? Is it all we need? Do we need it at all?  If romantic love has a purpose, neither scienc nor psychology has discovered it yet. But ober the course of history, some of our most respected philosophers have put forward some intriguing theories. Love make us whole, again. The ancient Greek Philosopher Plato explored the idea that we love in order to become complete. In his "Symposium" he wrote about a dinner party, at which Aristophanes, a comic playwright, regales the guests with the following story: humans were once creatures with four arms, four legs, and two faces. One day they angered the ,and Zeus sliced them all in two. Since then, every person has been missing half of him ...

  Picture warm, goey cookies, cunchy candies, velvety cakes, waffle cones piled high with ice cream. Is your mouth watering? Are you craving dessert?  Why? What happens in the brain that makes sugary foods so hard to resist? Sugar is a general term used to describe a class of molecules called carbohydrates, and its found in a wide variety of food and drink. Just check the labels on sweet products you buy. Gluscose, fructose, sucrose, maltose, lactose, dextrose, and  are all forms of sugar. So are high fructose corn syrup, fruit juice, and honey. And sugar isnt just in candies and desserts, its also added to tomato sauce, yogurt, dried fruit, flavored waters, or granola bars. Since sugar is everywhere, its important to understand  how it affects the brain. What happens when sugar hits your tongue? And does eating a little bit of sugar  make you crave more? You take a bite of cereal. The sugars it contains activate the sweet taste receptors, part of the taste buds...

  If you are anything like me, you have fine tuned your morning toutine to get your day started on the right foot. But while we often focus on morning routines, our days are highly dependent on our sleep, and our sleep is largely influenced by our bedtime routines. Lets help you create an effective night routine. If a morning routine helps you get out of bed and lay the foundations to having an effective  day, then pre bed routine is the opposite. An effective night time routine should foccus on three main principles: 1. Set up for a successful tommorow  2. Activate the parasympathetic nervous system 3. Optimize for sleep Perhaps the most frequently overlooked factor to an effective night routine is knowing when to initiate it. Morning routine are easy, you just start them as soon as you wake up, but initiating  an evening routine is more challenging. We too often are distracted by our gadgets, a new show on Netflix, or chatting with our friends and family. Sometimes...

  In the third millenium BCE, Mesopotamian kings recorded and interpreted thier dreams on wax tablets. A thousand years  later, ancient Egyptians wrote a dream book listing over a hundred common  dreams and thier meanings. And in the years since, we havent paused in our quest to understand why we dream.  So  after a great deal of scientific research, technological advancement, and persistence, we still dont have any definite answers, but we have some interesting theories. We dream to fulfil our wishes. In the early Sigmund Freud proposed that while all of our  dreams, including our nightmares, are a collection of images from our daily conscious  lives, they also have symbiolic meanings, which relate to the fulfilment of our subconscious wishes.  Freud theorized that everything we remember when we wake up from a dream is a symbolic representation of our unconscious primitive thoughts, urges and desires. Freud beleived that by analyzing those rememb...

  Water is virtually everywhere, from soil moisture and ice caps, to the cells inside  our own bodies. Depending on factors like location, fat index, age and sex the average human is between 55-60% water. At birth, human babies are even wetter. Being 75% water, they are swimmingly similar to fish. But their water composition drops to 65% by their first birthday. So what role does water play in your bodies, and how much do we actually need to drink to stay healthy?  The H2O in our bodies works to cushion and lubricate joints, regulate temperature, and to nourish the brain and spinal cord. Water isnt only in our blood. An adults brain and heart are almost three quarters water. Thats roughly equivalent to the amount of moisture in a banana. Lungs are more similar to an apple at 83%. And even seemingly dry human bones are 31% water. If we are essentially made of water, and surrounded by water, why do we still need to drink so much? Well each day we lost two three litres throu...

  In 1917 doctors proposed an outlandish treatment for syphilis, the incurable bacterial infection that had revaged Europe for centuries. Step 1 : Infect patients suffering from the later stages of syphilis with the parasite that cause malaria, the deadly but curable mosquito - borne disease. Step 2 :  Hope that malaria fevers clear the syphilis. Step 3 :  Administer quinine to curb the malaria.  If all went according to plan, their patient would be left alive and free of both diseases. This killed some 15% of patients, but for those who survived, it seemed to work. It actually became the standard treatment for syphilis  until penicillin was widely used decades later. And its driving force was fever. There are many mysteries around fever, but what we do know is that all mammals, some birds and even a few invertebrate and plant species feel fever' heat.  It has persisted for over 600 million years of evolution. But it has a significant cost. For every one de...

  The earliest known divorce laws were written on clay tablets in ancient Mesopotamia around 2000 BCE. Formally or informally, human societies across place and time have made rules to bind and dissolve couples. Inca couples, for example started with a trial partnership, during which a man could send his partner home. But once a marriage was formalized, there was no getting out of it. Among the Inuit people, divorce was discouraged, but either spouse could demand one. Or they could exchange partners with a different couple as long as four people agreed. The stakes of who can obtain a divorce, and why , have always been high. Divorce is a battelefield for some of society's most urgent issues, including the roles of church and state, individual rights, and women's rights. Religious authorities have often regulated marriage and divorce. Muslims in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia began using the Quran's rules in the 7th century AD- generally, a husvand can divorce his wife wit...

  If you cant imagine life without chocolate, you are lucky you were not born before the 16th century. Until then, chocolate only existed in Mesoamerica, in a form quite different from what we know.  As far back as 1900 BCE, the people of that region had learned to prepare the beans of the native cacao tree. The earliest records tell us the beans were ground and mixed with cornmeal and chili peppers to create a drink not a relxing cup of hot cacao, but a bitter, invigorating concoction frothing with foam. And if you thought we make a big deal about chocolate today, the Mesoamericans had us beat. They beleived that cacao was a heavenly food gifted to humans by a feathered serpent god, known to the Maya as Kukulkan and to the Aztecs as Quetzalcoatl. Aztecs used cacao beans as currency and drank chocolate at royal feasts, gave it to soldiers as a reward for success in battle, and used it in rituals.  The first translantic chocolate encounter occured in 1519,  when Herna...