Synopsis:
3. food & berverages:
BBC 00004.txt
From 1976 onwards, marine scientist Marianne Riedman, together with her colleague Burney Le Boeuf, studied adoption among the seals oe and why it was happening.
it's easy for elephant seal pups to get separated from their parents (Frans Lanting/Mint images/SPL) The researchers counted a total of 572 orphaned pups over the course of the four consecutive breeding seasons.
Some adult elephant seals are more likely to adopt a pup than others (Frans Lanting/Mint images/SPL) Elephant seal pups aren't the only ones to win adoptive parents either.
then they could also receive more food by more easily outcompeting smaller adoptive siblings. But why would the adoptive parents allow the intruder into their nest
White storks allow baby intruders to share their nest and food-but why?(Thinkstock) Given such high risks for adoption, why hasn't evolution endowed these birds with a better ability to identify oe and reject oe intruders?
they didn't need to give up too much of their own food so that it might survive. A female capuchin would barely notice a tiny marmoset clinging to her fur,
BBC 00088.txt
The fish that find refuge form the basis of an immense ocean food web and a huge fishing industry.
BBC 00132.txt
Astronaut food: Can you cook fries in space? If humans ever voyage to a planet far bigger than Earth,
the journey is sure to be arduous and full of danger. But there's a consolation: french fries cooked at the planet's surface will be crispier.
Preparing food in space presents unique challenges. Apart from the obvious difficulties of floating crumbs
liquids and peelings, the basic physics of cooking is different. For example, in zero gravity there's no convection in hot fluids to redistribute the heat,
Preparing drinks like percolated coffee is a challenge, because there's no gravity to pull the water down through the granules.
plenty of thought has gone already into methods of improving food preparation in space, to enhance tastiness
Fully sealed food preparation units have been proposed that dispense with the need for a human chef to do any chopping
Still, astronauts sometimes lament the drabness of their pre-prepared space meals, and have expressed even cravings for fries.
In their initial experiments, they decided to cook in increased gravity rather than zero gravity,
because they want to map out the whole landscape of how gravity influences the cooking process to get some idea of the overall trends and patterns as the tug of gravity changes.
The rate at which foods heat up in water or oil is affected by the way hot liquid circulates.
Lioumbas and Karapantsios fixed a deep-fryer containing potato sticks in half a litre of hot oil onto the end of the 8m-long arms of the Large Diameter Centrifuge at the European Space Research
This could be worth knowing for the food industry, where centrifugal"flash-frying  might be worth a try.
BBC 00176.txt
Beethoven immediately let out a food call standard behavior for a chimpanzee. After promptly devouring the whole bunch oe chimpanzees tend not to share food,
even with their infants oe Beethoven settled down for an afternoon nap, leaving a hungry Dilly to groom him.
Dilly did not utter a food cry, as chimpanzees normally do watched, but simply as Goodall placed the banana outside on the ground.
By stifling her food call, she could keep Beethoven in the dark, none the wiser about her illicit snacking.
the apes were given a choice to ask for food either from a human who could see them clearly,
while begging for food in all but the most obvious cases. Â If chimps couldn't even understand what others could
The flaws of such experiments led evolutionary anthropologist Brian Hare to develop a more naturalistic,
which a subordinate chimp could compete for food with a more dominant chimp. Â In his experiments, Hare set up enclosures containing two chimps, one at either end.
He placed food in the centre. Thanks to well placed barriers, sometimes both chimps could see the food;
sometimes only one. Â In one instance, Hare allowed a dominant and a subordinate chimp to watch as he put food in the middle.
However, the food was obscured from the dominant one once it was placed down. Â As is typical for chimpanzees in this sort of scenario,
the subordinate all but ignored the food, leaving it for the dominant. Subordinate chimps know better than to take food from dominant group members,
just as Dilly knew not to let Beethoven catch her eating that banana. Even though the dominant couldn't see the food,
it knew where it was. Then Hare added a twist: when the dominant chimp was replaced with a second dominant who hadn't seen the food oe all she could see was opaque barriers oe the subordinate had no problem gobbling it down.
The conclusion? Chimpanzees don't just know what others see; they also know what others know.
Animal trickery  The so-called Hare task has since been adapted and modified for a wide range of animals.
A clever experiment in which rhesus monkeys could steal food either from a silent box or from a box outfitted with bells showed that they anticipated
what others would and would not hear. Another set of studies demonstrated that ravens, too, know what others do
and do not see. The food-caching corvids were more likely to hide their caches in a spot hidden from the view of others.
If while caching, they discovered a potential raider watching them, the ravens usually picked up
and tried to hide their cache elsewhere. Together, these experiments demonstrate both the ravens'gaze-following abilities and their tactical deception skills.
How about our pets? Well, researchers know dogs can be sneaky. In one experiment, dogs were instructed not to take food from boxes, a few
of which were rigged with noisy bells. Yet when a researcher wasn't looking, the dogs would steal a meal,
and would deliberately avoid the boxes with bells to avoid detection. The evidence gathered so far suggests that many clever animals are capable of deception,
and some can make basic predictions about the knowledge states of others. They can predict what others can see,
BBC 00191.txt
Growing food, curbing floods, cleaning airhave you ever noticed a certain similarity in public parks and back gardens in the cities of the West?
 From natural systems to deal with surface water run off and pollution to green corridors to increasing interest in urban food production,
 There are patches that provide shade and cooling, places of local food production, and corridors that connect both residents and wildlife to the surrounding native environment.
and monitored to meet the unique needs of each city for food production, water use, nutrient recycling, and habitat.
for example, might be designed to provide food, shade, wildlife habitat, and pollution removal all in the same garden with the right choice of plants, configurations,
and urban food gardens. Â However, until recently we have been lacking the datasets and science-based specifications for designs that work to serve all of these purposes at once.
BBC 00197.txt
Hook up a spud to a couple of cheap metal plates, wires and LED bulbs, they argue, and it could provide lighting to remote towns and villages around the world.
Others have made"earth batteries  using two metal plates and a pile of dirt, or a bucket of water.
each sandwiched by a copper and zinc plate, to make a series.""We found we could improve the output 10 times,
First, there's the issue of using a food for energy. Olivier Dubois, senior natural resources officer at the United nations Food
and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), says that using food for energy oe like sugar cane for biofuels oe must avoid depleting food stocks
and competing with farmers.""You first need to look at: are there enough potatoes to eat?
"So if eating potatoes is covered, selling potatoes is covered, and there's some potatoes left, then yes,
the potato is the second most important food for families after maize. Smallholder farmers produced around 10 million tonnes of potatoes this year,
BBC 00200.txt
At baby showers in the US, a game involving eating chocolate from clean, unused nappies still thoroughly grosses participants out.
Psychologist Paul Rozin, of the University of Pennsylvania, argues that our disgust response reduces the likelihood of ingesting disease-causing microorganisms in decayed meat, faeces, vomit, or blood.
Some other species also quite sensibly prefer foraging for food far from where they defecate. Cows, for example, do not just graze randomly.
and deer mouse (Peromyscus maniculatus) re-inhabit the burrows of previous occupiers that contain both food and faeces.
or near food suggests safety from predators. When the wrong move could land you between the teeth of a bigger animal,
BBC 00211.txt
and Dress of the Best American Society, suggested women should emulate the moss-rose to become beautiful in spirit and in intellect,
on the other hand, have used traditionally fragrances based on musks and spices. Of course humans have been masking their true odours for thousands, not just hundreds, of years.
Since failure to feed can ultimately result in dehydration or death, some researchers think that the ability to identify those odours may itself be critical in promoting feeding-related behaviours.
For example, both clementine and vanilla are reported as pleasing, but while clementine is thought of as stimulating,
vanilla apparently makes people feel more relaxed. Smell is important to various other animals too.
BBC 00215.txt
but to do so will require the means to create reliable and sustainable food and power souces.
where they only need occasional course-correction to maintain a rough position. This will be accomplished by nimble harvesting vessels driven by pioneers of this new life on the water.
but land-based agriculture may also be in danger due to a predicted shortage of the crucial nutrient phosphorus by the year 2050.
The cool water pumped to the surface contains the exact ratio of nutrients oe including phosphorus oe needed to support plant growth.
supercharged by Otec's nutrient-rich byproduct. At the bottom of this food chain, algae will feed fish,
which feed bigger fish, which will feed in turn seafarers and landlubbers alike. Sinking fish waste and seaweed detritus will gradually sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere
it's not far-fetched to imagine hundreds of these plants grazing the high seas, trading abundant seafood surpluses with cities on land.
We are already researching ways to harvest food and energy in deeper, more remote parts of the ocean.
BBC 00230.txt
Built between the 1890s and 1940s, this infrastructure still sustains some nine million people with over 1. 2 billion gallons of drinking water every day.
We can make drinking water from water that's already been used by industry. For example, a new groundwater replenishment system in California's Orange county creates near distilled water from secondary wastewater after filtering
For example, at the UK's Peterborough Power station, waste water from a nearby sewage treatment plant is used instead of drinking water.
Composting toilets add nutrients for local farmland for lacking nitrogen and phosphorus. Sand filters and UV filter drinking water.
Grey water goes straight back to kitchen gardens. In 1949, the environmental scientist Aldo Leopold  wrote:"
BBC 00319.txt
It's soothing to drink, and at least you are getting something nutritious inside you. This remedy has been around for years in countries where milk is popular.
which could explain why people with ulcers typically experience pain a few hours after a meal.
Studies comparing coffee, tea, beer and milk found they all stimulated the secretion of acid.
Beer and milk have the greatest effect, which suggests, somewhat surprisingly, that the ph of a drink is irrelevant
when it comes to acid production. So what is the ingredient in milk that causes the stomach to produce acid?
with added sugar if they preferred. The other group ate the usual hospital diet and both groups were offered also additional fruit,
while fewer than expected got better in the milk-drinking group. Milk appeared to hinder the healing process.
drinking milk is encouraged still, as it is a good source of protein and calcium. But could very large quantities of milk present a problem?
They found that heavy milk drinkers (defined as four or more glasses a day) were more likely to develop an ulcer, especially amongst the men.
But the risk was also high in those drinking large quantities of milk, despite not having symptoms,
BBC 00340.txt
Using butter to treat burns is an old folk remedy that has been around for centuries.
when the Prussian Surgeon general Friedrich Von Esmarch recommended in his influential 19th century handbook on battlefield medicine that burnt surfaces should be covered with an oil, grease or butter.
but was he right about butter? Plenty of us still use folk remedies, and for some reason burns seem to have attracted more than their fair share of myths and exotic treatments.
and bran followed by cork and ashes. Far more recently surgeons at a hospital in The british city of Sheffield noticed a series of cases of children with burns being brought into its casualty department still wearing hot clothes
which don't work, including the use of butter, milk, cooking oil and toothpaste. The researchers were concerned that as this was a hypothetical question posed in a calm situation
while half had used inappropriate alternatives including yogurt, toothpaste, tomato paste, ice, raw egg whites, or sliced potato.
 As for butter, save that for your bread, unless you find yourself in one very specific situation.
a fatty substance like butter can help to remove it, reducing the pain and making it easier for doctors to assess the severity of the burn.
BBC 00344.txt
Artificial food: Incredible or inedible? Pass the salt. And the pepper. And while you're at it, the ketchup too.
They said it politely, but these were among the reactions of the two expert"tasters  who earlier this month got the first taste of a potential food of the future oe a burger grown in a laboratory.
Funded by Google cofounder Sergey Brin, the five-year project took cells from organic cows,
cultured them in a nutrient solution to develop muscle tissue, and then teased them into thin strands of meat.
To make what was barely a quarter-pounder required tens of billions of lab-grown cells and nearly 20
000 of the cultured strands. Plus egg powder, beetroot juice, breadcrumbs, salt and saffron to add texture,
flavour and colour to the otherwise white meat. And $330, 000. The result? One taste tester said it was"close to meat,
but not that juicy Â. Another described it as"like an animal protein cake Â. Commercial cultured meat is at least a decade away,
and with the backing of billionaire Brin and others, issues of taste and feel should be solvable.
We do not yet know whether it can ever be produced cheaply and in large quantities. However with an estimated billion people are clinically obese, another billion seriously malnourished,
And what might we be making a meal of decades or centuries from now? Perhaps science fiction can offer some clues.
which offer chillingly detailed dystopian visions of near futures in which food is either blandly synthetic, badly genetically modified, or both.
and underfed New york. Only the ultra-rich have access to meat or other fresh produce.
The best that most in the apple-free Big Apple can dream of is a soylent steak made of soya and lentils.
spoiler alert high-energy wafers secretly made of human corpses were on the menu. Less intellectually nourishing sci-fi food staples include the entire meal in a pill (or dollop or slab of gunk
as featured in Lost in Space, Silent Running and The Fifth Element, in which Leeloo puts chicken pills into a microwave
and a second later pulls out a full roast with all the trimmings. Almost equally common are variations on Star trek's replicators
The idea of all-in-one food pills goes back to the 19th century and has been the subject of much serious research.
Nasa recently admitted that as part of a programme"to turn science fiction into fact  they are funding work to develop a 3d food printer.
So if we do ever send astronauts to Mars they might be tucking into freshly printed pizza.
Another dish frequently cooked up is a future in which we've embraced entirely nouvelle cuisine:
something delicious, nutritious and entirely fictitious. I'm rather partial to Slurm, the disturbingly more-ish soda made from the secretions of giant extraterrestrial slugs in Futurama.
But perhaps the best example is named spoo (so because it's oops backwards) in Babylon 5,
but that's what some experts believe will be inevitable as conventional food sources run out. There may be plenty more fish in the sea
but not the ones we're used to eating. As a result, less traditional species are expected to increasingly find their way into trawlers, supermarkets and restaurants.
A recent report published UN's Food and Agricultural Organisation concludes that as the climate changes
and waters warm there will be a global shift"from a fish to a jellyfish ocean Â. Its author Ferdinando Boero, Professor of Zoology at Salento University,
And keep the salt, pepper and ketchup handy. If you would like to comment on this article
BBC 00384.txt
The price of hypocrisy Evgeny Morozov Frankfurter Allgemeine 24 july 2013 Lessons from the Snowden affair."
BBC 00387.txt
It means we will have to produce more food in the next 40 years than we have had to for the past 8, 000 years,
while needing to produce perhaps 60%more food, would require something quite extraordinary. I've discussed issues like rethinking our use of fertilisers before
but what if we could increase food production at its most fundamental level? What if we could engineer crops to make photosynthesis more efficient?
Ultimately all of our food oe indeed, all life On earth oe relies on the conversion of carbon dioxide into sugars by photosynthesis,
including corn (maize), sugarcane, sorghum and millet. But many of the most popular crops, including wheat
while using less water and nutrients. Researchers have begun with rice because it is a genetically simple plant oe with two sets of chromosomes like us oe unlike,
BBC 00393.txt
I stood outside a cafe in the bucolic Devonshire town of Totnes, pondering the questionable ethics of taking food away from a homeless person in the name of journalistic enterprise.
I'd ducked into a covered alley to escape a sudden springtime downpour and the icy ankle-deep stream it sent coursing through the narrow streets,
and there I chanced across the Happy Apple cafe. A sign in the window tallied the number of"suspended purchases  on offer:
six coffees, two snacks and one meal had been paid for by the cafe's previous visitors,
I could have done with a hot meal to warm my cold bones. And I wasn't about to let myself buy one.
As recently as 2012, British supermarkets were reporting bulk thefts of chewing gum which is used in some parts of Romania as a substitute currency.
the Happy Apple cafe is one of the few places in Britain where I might be able buy a coffee while complying with this self-imposed challenge.
 The shop is a clutter of porcelain figures, tea towels, crystal jewellery, calendars, fudge, snowglobes and postcards.
house renovation, gardening, cooking type deals, stuff I have less time for, Â she says.
Food stampsorganising the weekly grocery shop oe the final item on my list oe was less successful.
of which have grown so big that they've spilled out to cover restaurants, leisure centres, gyms, florists and much more.
So I buzzed the team at Nectar to ask where I could get a loyalty card pre-loaded with points."
but there doesn't seem to be much of a trade in pre-loaded Nectar cards.
which has a roaring grey-market trade in exchanging electronic food stamps for cash. These electronic welfare cards can't be used to purchase cigarettes or alcohol,
so inevitably some people are willing to sell them for liquid currency. A motion for a similar system in the UK was withdrawn quietly in 2012 out of fear of the unregulated trade that might arise.
I manage to convince a friend to give me an antiquated Nectar card, under the solemn promise to reimburse her in kind for
Arriving at the self-service checkout believing that I have enough points to pay for a week's supply of pizza and beer,
only to discover the Nectar card has wilted over time and is thoroughly unresponsive. Chalk up another advantage to sterling oe even the coins
whether they be Totnes pounds, postal orders or Nectar points. Â Government-backed currency underlies all of these exchanges.
BBC 00404.txt
Susan Berfield Business week 3 july 2013 Story behind the introduction of the Mcdonald's Mcwrap,"a 10-inch, white-flour tortilla wrapped around 3 ounces of chicken, lettuce, spring greens
and cheddar jack cheese Â. Everything was focus-grouped, from the name to the dressing.
First time cucumbers have been used in a Mcdonald's product. Gently does it.""We talked a lot about the veggies.
People thought it was a salad. Â America's artificial heartland Venkatesh Rao Aeon 11 july 2013"The modern system of retail oe distant large-scale production facilities coupled with local human-scale
If distant tea and coffee plantations were the first modern clouds, A&p stores and mail-order catalogues were the first browsers and apps.
BBC 00408.txt
We are also living in close proximity to domestic creatures like pigs, chickens and ducks.
and their crops and cattle spread into unoccupied land giving most people a richer diet.
Industry, food production, and the trappings of our modern world economy would all suffer, but this could be to the benefit of the environment.
Fewer people would mean less production of everything from food to plastics. That could mean fewer industrial emissions
BBC 00454.txt
The experimental buildings illustrated here often tend to be characterised by delicacy. They increasingly move from older forms of a static, rigid world into the dynamic and sensitive qualities of a living metabolism.
BBC 00460.txt
The earliest glazes, dating from the late fifth millennium BC and found in the Near east,
As the technology advanced, the stones were carved often exquisitely before being coated with a blue copper-based glaze to make objects now known as faience.
Because these copper glazes appear during the so-called Chalcolithic period oe the"Copper Age  that preceded the Bronze age oe it has been thought long that they were discovered as an offshoot of the smelting of copper ores such as malachite to make the metal.
The glazes are forms of copper silicate, made as copper combines with the silicate minerals in the high temperature of a kiln.
The more of it, the greener the glaze. Sometimes these copper glazes are crystalline, with regularly ordered arrays of atoms.
But they can also be glassy, meaning that the atoms are disordered rather. In fact, it seems likely that copper smelting stimulated
How exactly might a blue glaze have been made this way? Another early Egyptologist, Alfred Lucas, who worked with Howard Carter of Tutankhamun fame,
and rock salt alone covered the quartz surface with a rather pale, greenish, dull and rough coating:
not at all like ancient blue glaze. An extra ingredient oe calcium carbonate, or common chalk, which the Egyptians used as a white pigment among other things oe made all the difference,
producing a rich, shiny turquoise-blue glaze above 950c. That looked good oe but it forces one to assume that salt,
chalk and quartz all somehow got into the kiln along with the copper scale. It's not impossible,
rock salt. Matin reasoned that dried cattle dung, which contains significant amounts of both alkalis and salt (chloride), was used widely as a fuel since the beginnings of animal domestication in the eighth millennium BC.
This too produced a nice, shiny (albeit slightly paler) blue glaze. Â Of course, there's nothing that proves this was the way glazing began.
BBC 00465.txt
What's for dinner? For that matter, what's to eat, full stop? In a few decades time, that second question may become pressing.
Mankind's awareness of our food supplies has been heightened by massive crop failures due to millennial level floods, protracted droughts,
and numerous food-borne disease outbreaks caused by microbes such as salmonella, E coli strain 0157, toxoplasma and listeria.
Consumers the world over now demand to know where their food comes from and how it is produced.
or is it causing irreparable damage to the environment that will eventually turn today's serious problem of today into a food crisis of epic proportions in the near future?
and for a time flourished in concert with the fields that provided their sustenance. Yet despite the invention of farming, eventually all of these early cities fell into disrepair,
Food and drinking water would be even scarcer than in many of today's developing cities.
Within just the past 10 years, an increasing interest in city farming has been paralleled by the creation of the slow food and locallly sourced,
Collectively, these examples show the validity of growing food in the city. Not only could be they be carried out efficiently oe such as rooftop greenhouses giving much higher yields than outdoor farms oe
Urban agriculture has the potential to become so pervasive within our cities that by the year 2050 they may be able to provide its citizens with up to 50%of the food they consume.
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