UCLA scholar, culinary historian champions foraged foods in new book
Today, delicacies like capers, arugula and fennel are at home at Dean & Deluca, Whole Foods and fancy restaurants, but they haven’t always lived the high life.
These and other darlings of the foodie set started out as peasants’ fodder, foraged from rocky outcroppings, empty fields and roadsides, according to a new book by a UCLA professor.
Luigi Ballerini revisits this distant past in “A Feast of Weeds: A Literary Guide to Foraging and Cooking Wild Edible Plants” (University of California Press), which celebrates the foraged foods that are currently enjoying a renaissance in Italy and elsewhere. (more…)
What is really important for women in bed? Not only men but also scientists have been looking for an answer to this question. There is a multitude of different opinions from both sexes. The authors of a new book, famous Americanneuroscientists, argue that the mechanism ofthe sexual desire in women and men differs greatly.
In a recent U.S. book called A Billion Wicked Thoughts, famous scientists, neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam argue that the female brain is much more complex than that of a male when it comes to the choice of a sexual partner. For their findings, they used statistical data from billions of queries related to sex from Dogpile search engine that combines search results from Google, Yahoo! and Bing, their own experience in sexuality and psychology, as well as the latest scientific evidence about differences in brain activity in men and women. (more…)
Close up of a cute baby 7-month old panda cub in the Wolong Nature Reserve in Sichuan, China. Image credit: Sheila Lau. Source: Wikipedia
Finally some good news on the environment, on ecology and on the Giant Panda: a revolutionary new technique developed by the PR China’s Chengdu breeding center seems certain to assure that greater numbers of this endangered species can be raised in thereby save it from extinction.
Just 1,600 Giant Pandas live in the wild, in 40 government-controlled panda reserves in the People’s Republic of China. The new breeding program has raised the number of animals bred in captivity to 300, while just this year 19 cubs have been born after artificial insemination programs in China’s two main breeding centers.
Breeding Giant Pandas in captivity is no easy task. They have the strangest gestation period which can range from eleven weeks to eleven months, they appear not to be sexually aroused by being held in captivity, females are on heat for 72 hours a year and are fertile during a 12 to 24-hour window inside that period. The small size of the male penis also means the mating position has to be exactly right, and this is not always possible in captivity. (more…)
