chocolate

Chocolate and lip balm, 18th century style

Mon, 12/21/2009 - 13:13

Every century has an epic lady cookery writer: Elizabeth David and Isabella Beeton obviously spring to mind for the 20th and 19th centuries, but how many of you have heard of Hannah Glasse? Like all great cookery writers, Hannah's life was a bit of a mess, but her most famous work, Art of Cookery, first published in 1747 was the household book of the 18th century. It would eventually save Hannah from the debtors' prisons of the Fleet and the Marshalsea, and enable her as a widow to raise her eight children.

The Chocolate Serum That Isn't

Tue, 12/15/2009 - 15:27

A company called Ikove is advertising on its website an Acai Chocolate Age-Resisting Serum. The magic C word caught my attention.

According to the press release: 'ikove means 'keep alive' in Tupi-Guarani, an indigenous South American language, and the luxurious Ikove Acai Chocolate skincare range does just that!'

Resisting the temptation to apply some of the products to a small dying animal to see if they would indeed keep it alive, I looked at the description of the serum.

Açaí Chocolate Age-Resisting Serum

Antioxidant

Using Chocolate to Exterminate Coyotes

Mon, 11/23/2009 - 13:23

Chocolate, like many of the things we eat regularly, is a potentially fatal poison, and so it should come as no surprise that a study by the unimaginatively-named John Johnston (at the USDA National Wildlife Research Center) shows that our favourite sweet could prove to be an effective pesticide, for use against coyotes [1].

Is nothing sacred?

Tue, 10/13/2009 - 12:00

It's National Chocolate Week (although in my world, that's every week) and the purveyors of something that looks like chocolate but smells considerably worse are trying to muscle in. Is nothing sacred?

Russell Grant has consulted his astrological charts and listened to the voice of the cosmos to come up with a list of which chocolate is best suited to each star sign. According to him, my star sign - Libra - likes the finer things in life and is likely to choose soft and smooth chocolate fillings preferably wrapped in a heart-shaped box to share with their partner. Hand-made chocolate moulded in novelty shapes will amuse this chocolate lover.

BBC News Go Mental, Again (And I'm back from a break!)

Mon, 04/28/2008 - 07:58

Well I'm back after three weeks off writing, you know, science. It's nice to see from the stats that a core audience have remained loyal enough to keep reading while I've been away - so I'd like to give a shout out to Stuart "Core Audience" Walton. Anyway, I'll be blogging properly later on a variety of subjects, but on seeing the BBC News website this morning I felt obliged to comment.

The story in question is under the headline "Chocolate 'may cut diabetes risk'". When I clicked the link, I assumed this would be a report on a recent study that linked chocolate with cutting the risk of diabetes.

Erm, no.

You Say Organic Potato, I Say Poisonous Lump of Neurotoxins

Sun, 03/30/2008 - 02:10

Browsing a thread on the JABS forum recently I came across a man pointing to some research indicating that thimerosal, a vaccine ingredient, may be a genotoxin. I'm not going to get into the whole antivaccine nonsense here because others have done a far better job (in doing so prompting the very weird thread I was looking at). But I was reminded what potatoes can teach us about faulty logic.