Start: 95.4 Last week: 87.4 This week: ??.?
Wednesday 6 December: Away in the land of the super-size portion, where a side salad could feed a family of four (rabbits) for a week, and it is a good thing I don't have a set of scales to scare me. There is just so much food, so readily accessible tha...

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Sitting on a long flight from Paris to DC, watching a Tedtalk by Helen Fisher. She's a professor of anthropology at Rutgers University, and she has been studying love in its various guises; lust, romantic love and attachment ("so that you can stand living with someone"). A fine talk it was, which...

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Start: 95.4 Last week: 87.9 This week: 87.4
Tuesday 28 November: Damn this accursed plateau.

There's a clear metaphor at the heart of Wasabi: Jean Reno sucks great gobbets of the aforementioned cruciferous paste from his fingertips and evinces no emotion, no stimulation, whatsoever. He's that hard. Or, alternatively, this wasabi is entirely without heat. Take your pick. One thing’s for...

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Scientists in the US and Israel have discovered a gene that can boost the protein, iron and zinc levels of modern wheats. It is present in wild emmer wheat (Triticum turgidum ssp. dicoccoides) but somewhere along the way to modern bread and pasta wheats became non-functional. Inserting the gene into modern wheat -- by normal breeding, they hasten to say, not genetic engineering -- raises the protein and minerals by about 10 to 15 per cent. Modern wheat does have genes that are similar to the “wild” gene, which has been called Gpc-B1 for its effect on grain protein content. Blocking the activity of those genes in modern wheats causes the plants to live longer, but depresses the amounts of protein, iron and zinc even further.

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