The secret is the Maillard reaction! In 1912, Louis-Camille Maillard discovered that bread crust, coffee beans, beer and roasted meat all turned brown because of a chemical reaction between sugars...
The word “barbecue” derives from the ancient Caribbean tradition of supporting food over a fire with a scaffolding made from green wood which in Spanish was called "barbacoa." The technique itself...
The short answer is that if you note a scent, some of the chemicals responsible for the aroma are finding their way into your body. Whether or not these are harmful depends on which specific...
We haven’t heard much about polychlorinated biphenyls, or “PCBs” since the fire at St. Basil-Le Grand in 1988, but we sure are hearing a lot now. There are two angles to the illegally stored PCB...
Science is as a quest for knowledge. Sometimes it ends with a clear-cut result, often not. The Earth goes around the sun. Water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen. The speed of light is 299,792,458...
If you watched the news, read newspapers or surfed the web recently you will have been inundated with pictures of bacon and headlines describing it as carcinogenic. That’s because the International...
I get asked a lot of questions. One of the hardest ones to answer is what question I get asked the most often. Although I can’t say that I keep exact stats, my feeling is that queries about...
I don’t think I would want to work in a rubber processing plant. Too many nitrosamines in the air, and it’s better not to inhale them. Nitrosamines after all are known carcinogens, first identified...
