When an apple is cut in half, the exposed surface quickly turns brown. Do the same thing to an orange, and nothing happens. The noted Hungarian biochemist Albert Szent-Gyorgyi was intrigued by this...
The internet is full of suggestions that Aspirin can be used to remove stains and get whiter whites. These sites don’t offer any mechanism of this bleaching of course, so I had to try it myself.
Hair naturally gets its colour from a pigment molecule called melanin. There are 2 types of melanin: eumelanin, which gives hair and skin a brown or black hue, and pheomelanin, which gives the red...
Remember when it wasn’t hard to determine if someone had been into the pistachio bowl? They’d be caught red-handed! That’s because until artificially coloured foods became a pariah, pistachio nuts,...
Yes some candies and other foods can be coloured with cochineal extract which is an approved food additive. Hernan Cortez was the first European to learn about this colourant when he became...
Next time you think of welcoming someone home by tying a yellow ribbon around an old oak tree, you might want to think again. According to a widely circulating report the yellow dye could leave a...
Much to the public’s dismay, the Mars and Murray Company stopped production of red M&Ms because of a health scare concerning Red Dye Number 2, which at the time was the most common red food...
At least in a manner of speaking. When Hernan Cortez came to America in 1518 he was intrigued by the beautifully coloured Aztec fabrics, particularly the stunning reds. He asked the natives about...