Latest posts from the blog - Page 2
Is the "antioxidant" on an instant noodle label secretly a preservative in disguise? We check how frying drives moisture down to 4-6%—low enough to starve microbes—and how the Codex food standard lists preservatives and antioxidants as entirely separate categories, using water activity (Aw) thresholds as the yardstick.
The tomato debate is old news — the U.S. Supreme Court settled it in 1893 by ruling it's botanically a fruit but legally a vegetable. Strawberries and watermelon raise a stranger question: can one government's own rules disagree with each other about what counts as fruit?
A bottle bursts in the freezer because water expands when it freezes — but is water really the only substance that does this, and could enough pressure stop it? We trace the mechanism through hydrogen bonding and ice's hexagonal crystal structure, then check what the physics actually says about both questions.
If a painting sold for 400 francs in 1890, how much is that in today's money? It seems like there should be a single number—but economic historians use at least four different measures: real price (CPI), labor value (wages), income value (GDP per capita), and economic share (share of GDP). Pick a different measure, and the answer shifts by 54-fold or more—162-fold for a national-scale deal like the Alaska Purchase.
You may have learned that lift comes from the different path lengths above and below a wing — the equal transit time theory. NASA says that's wrong. So what really generates lift? We verify the actual physics against the Kutta-Joukowski theorem, circulatory flow, and the relationship between Bernoulli and Newton's third law.