The flavors of fire: How does heat make food taste good?
Sure, cooking our food can make it safer to eat and more digestible. But let's be honest. We mainly cook to create something we enjoy—something delicious.
Sure, cooking our food can make it safer to eat and more digestible. But let's be honest. We mainly cook to create something we enjoy—something delicious.
Biochemistry
Apr 8, 2024
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A team of archaeologists affiliated with several institutions in Chile reports evidence that early settlers on the island of Rapa Nui sailed to South America, interacted with people living there and then returned. In their ...
In a breakthrough for the snack food industry, a team of scientists led by Michigan State University professors Jiming Jiang and David Douches has discovered a key mechanism behind the darkening and potential health concerns ...
Molecular & Computational biology
Feb 21, 2024
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86
While expanding nuclear energy production would provide carbon-free power and can help countries around the world meet their climate goals, nuclear energy could also come with some inherent risk. Radioactive pollution damages ...
Plants & Animals
Feb 21, 2024
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North Carolina State University researchers used text analytics on both historic and modern writing to reveal more information about the effects and spread of the plant pathogen—now known as Phytophthora infestans—that ...
Plants & Animals
Feb 15, 2024
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As the home of beloved snack companies like Martin's Potato Chips, Utz and Snyder's of Hanover, Pennsylvania values its potatoes. Tasty tubers across the state may face the threat of newly identified pathogen strains, though, ...
Cell & Microbiology
Jan 18, 2024
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Scientists at the USDA's Agricultural Research Service (ARS) use innovative technology to study the lifecycle of potatoes (including development, production, and postharvest storage), ensuring a high-quality supply year-round ...
Plants & Animals
Jan 10, 2024
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Photosynthesis is the starting point for almost every food chain, sustaining most life on Earth. You would be forgiven, then, for thinking nature has perfected the art of turning sunlight into sugar. But that isn't exactly ...
Biotechnology
Jan 4, 2024
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Imagine blasting off on a multiyear voyage to Mars, fueled by a diet of bland, prepackaged meals. As space agencies plan for longer missions, they're grappling with the challenge of how to feed people best. Now, researchers ...
Space Exploration
Jan 2, 2024
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130
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) play a crucial role in plant gene regulation, with their biogenesis involving complex processes. Fine-tuning miRNAs is a powerful biotechnology strategy that can improve plant performance in the field, ...
Biotechnology
Dec 21, 2023
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The potato is a starchy, tuberous crop from the perennial Solanum tuberosum of the Solanaceae family (also known as the nightshades). The word potato may refer to the plant itself as well as the edible tuber. In the region of the Andes, there are some other closely related cultivated potato species. Potatoes were first introduced outside the Andes region four centuries ago, and have become an integral part of much of the world's cuisine. It is the world's fourth-largest food crop, following rice, wheat, and maize. Long-term storage of potatoes requires specialised care in cold warehouses.
Wild potato species occur throughout the Americas, from the United States to Uruguay. The potato was originally believed to have been domesticated independently in multiple locations, but later genetic testing of the wide variety of cultivars and wild species proved a single origin for potatoes in the area of present-day southern Peru (from a species in the Solanum brevicaule complex), where they were domesticated 7,000–10,000 years ago. Following centuries of selective breeding, there are now over a thousand different types of potatoes. Of these subspecies, a variety that at one point grew in the Chiloé Archipelago (the potato's south-central Chilean sub-center of origin) left its germplasm on over 99% of the cultivated potatoes worldwide.
Following the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire, the Spanish introduced the potato to Europe in the second half of the 16th century. The staple was subsequently conveyed by European mariners to territories and ports throughout the world. The potato was slow to be adopted by distrustful European farmers, but soon enough it became an important food staple and field crop that played a major role in the European 19th century population boom. However, lack of genetic diversity, due to the very limited number of varieties initially introduced, left the crop vulnerable to disease. In 1845, a plant disease known as late blight, caused by the fungus-like oomycete Phytophthora infestans, spread rapidly through the poorer communities of western Ireland, resulting in the crop failures that led to the Great Irish Famine. Nonetheless, thousands of varieties persist in the Andes, where over 100 cultivars might be found in a single valley, and a dozen or more might be maintained by a single agricultural household.
The annual diet of an average global citizen in the first decade of the 21st century included about 33 kg (73 lb) of potato. However, the local importance of potato is extremely variable and rapidly changing. It remains an essential crop in Europe (especially eastern and central Europe), where per capita production is still the highest in the world, but the most rapid expansion over the past few decades has occurred in southern and eastern Asia. China is now the world's largest potato-producing country, and nearly a third of the world's potatoes are harvested in China and India.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA