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Mad honey or how the Poison King and some bees outwitted the Romans
Mithridates VI, King of Pontus, was one of the young Roman empire’s most feared and formidable enemies in the eastern Mediterranean. Respected by the Romans as a strong, intelligent and, most of all, cunning ruler, he also possessed a ruthlessness and a cruelty so well developed that, at various times during his reign, he put Continue reading
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Trophic shadows and the tyranny of the energy pyramid
Ernest Rutherford, the famous physicist, supposedly claimed that “Science is either physics or stamp collecting”. At the cost of no longer being welcome in the biology department Rutherford was making the point that everything is subject to the laws of physics and ultimately these laws can describe any natural phenomenon. In real life we usually Continue reading
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Quick bite: The secret life of vegetables
As Harold McGee points out in his book, On Food and Cooking, plants are essentially chemical factories. Plants are famously stationary and lacking any motive power must interact with the external world, for the most part, through a dazzling array of chemicals that they synthesise from basic chemical elements. The same plant will simultaneously produce Continue reading
The Science of Food 