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...