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Do you like garlic? Of course you do, and now you can enjoy everyone’s favorite ingredient without having to worry about garlic breath as a University of Queensland collaboration is trying to make black garlic happen.Black garlic was first developed in regions of Eastern Asia, and it’s created by aging garlic in controlled humidity.“Black garlic is raw, white garlic bulbs that’ve been slowly roasted at a low temperature and high humidity for weeks,” explained Professor Susanne Schmidt who is collaborating with Empathy Herbal through UQ’s Agri-Food Innovation Alliance Kickstarter Grant program, in a statement.“This process causes what’s called a Maillard reaction, where the taste profile is transformed from that typical garlic flavor to something sweeter and more snackable – while preserving positive health benefits.”Black garlic can be eaten as it comes, or infused in an oil.Image credit: ©Empathy HerbalNot only does it come with the perk of not giving you garlic breath, but it also carries health benefits thanks to the way it’s prepared and eaten (and we love a curiously colored "superfood" - remember the purple tomatoes?).“White garlic isn’t particularly suitable for eating raw, which is critical from a health perspective, as its health benefits quickly diminish when crushed and heated,” continued Schmidt.“Previous studies suggest that black garlic can have numerous health benefits – it improves gut microbiome and immune system function, has anti-inflammatory and antioxidant benefits, and assists managing cholesterol, vascular health, blood sugar and even weight."It’s hoped that black garlic can reduce food waste as the tonnes of garlic that are rejected annually can be transformed into this black superfood, creating a healthy food that’s also good for the planet.As well as looking really cool, black garlic comes with its own texture and unique taste, compared to gummy candy by IFLScience’s managing editor Katy Evans. And as for the taste? “Peeled black garlic cloves are soft, sweet, sticky, and utterly delicious – it’s basically a healthy lolly, when crafted correctly.” said Director of Empathy Herbal, Jim Hancock in a statement.A healthy lolly? We’ll have some of that.

Whether you like the idea or absolutely loathe it, some believe that a “meat tax” is almost inevitable in the near future. While it’s sure to anger die-hard carnivores with libertarian leanings, there’s decent evidence that suggests a levy of high-emission foods could have many benefits for the planet, people, and animals – although it'll come at a cost.It’s indisputable that animal farming is a major factor that drives climate change. It’s estimated that livestock production contributes 11–17 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. While red meat can be part of a healthy diet, it’s also linked to a higher risk of heart disease and cancer.A meat tax is a proposed levy on the consumption of meat products, intended to reduce meat consumption due to these concerns. The idea of taxing certain items to change society’s behavior is nothing new. Countries often imposed higher taxes on harmful goods like alcohol and tobacco to deter consumers from buying them. Some regions have also started experimenting with sugar taxes in a bid to reduce obesity, with reasonable success.In March 2015, the Californian city of Berkeley introduced a substantial tax on sugar-sweetened beverages – a first of its kind in the US. A before-and-after study showed that, compared to predicted sales in the absence of the tax, sales of sugary drinks in Berkeley fell by 9.6 percent within a year, while sales in other areas with no tax rose by 6.9 percent. It’s too soon to tell whether this will have a meaningful impact on the city’s health, but the tax nailed its initial objective.         Research suggests a meat tax could have this kind of positive impact. A study in 2018 found that a meat tax could potentially prevent more than 220,000 deaths globally and save more than $40 billion in healthcare costs.On the environmental side of the argument, studies have also found that putting a carbon tax on foods that have a high carbon footprint, such as meat, could prevent up to 1.1 billion tons (1 billion metric tonnes) of carbon emissions each year.Several European countries have started toying with the idea of a meat tax, such as Denmark, Sweden, and Germany. However, the issue is likely to face a fair deal of backlash. Big business and livestock farmers, obviously, will not be thrilled with the plan. Indeed, there's evidence that a heavy tax on meat could cost the economy significantly.Many also oppose the tax on ideological grounds, arguing it infringes on their consumer rights and freedom of choice. Another frequently raised criticism is that it will impact low-income families who already struggle with rising food costs. However, research has indicated it is possible to design a meat tax system that doesn’t burden the less economically privileged. Concerns about the climate are unlikely to sway mass opinion either. A study in Germany has suggested that the public believes animal welfare concerns are a more persuasive justification for introducing meat taxes compared to environmental issues. Nevertheless, others have found that the taxation of meat to tackle climate change and improve global health is far less unpalatable than politicians think (or claim to think). On a global scale, the researchers found that many were unaware of meat’s impact on the planet. As long as policymakers communicated this effectively, the opposition would be minimal. “The idea that interventions like this are too politically sensitive and too difficult to implement is unjustified. Our focus groups show people expect governments to lead action on issues that are for the global good. Our research indicates any backlash to unpopular policies would likely be short-lived as long as the rationale for action was strong,” Laura Wellesley, lead author of the study and a senior research fellow in the Environment and Society Centre at Chatham House, told The Guardian.“We are not in any way advocating for global vegetarianism. We can see massive changes [to emissions] from just converging around healthy levels of meat eating,” she added.

It’s honestly no surprise that the first people to see platypuses thought they were fake; they look like someone woke up one day and decided to bung together a bizarre-looking mishmash of a duck, beaver, and otter. Take a peek inside a platypus, however, and they get even stranger – they don’t have a stomach.Stomachs are a long-standing feature in vertebrate history, thought to have evolved for the first time in the form of gastric glands around 450 million years ago. But just because something’s been about for a long time doesn’t mean it has to stay.Many vertebrates have ditched the organ, including the platypus, but also its fellow monotremes the echidnas and an estimated 20 to 27 percent of teleosts, a group that contains the vast majority of fish species. The platypus in particular is a great example of how the loss of such a feature usually goes hand in hand with the loss of the genes associated with it – which makes it very difficult to get it back.A study from 2008 revealed that many of the key genes associated with stomach function had either become inactivated, or completely disappeared from the platypus genome (the entirety of an organism’s genetic information).It marked an interesting addition to what scientists knew about vertebrate evolution. “All of these genes are highly conserved in vertebrates, reflecting a unique pattern of evolution in the platypus genome not previously seen in other mammalian genomes,” the authors wrote.But were platypuses alone? After all, it’s not a guarantee that creatures who’ve lost a feature will also lose the genes linked to it. The cave-dwelling form of the Mexican tetra, for example, doesn’t have eyes, but it does still have the genes for developing them – they’ve just been silenced.For the many animals who’ve lost a stomach, however, a team of scientists found that the associated genes have in fact been scrapped.Filipe Castro and colleagues compared the genomes of 14 vertebrate species, including humans, mice, and zebrafish, to test their hypothesis that getting rid of the stomach through evolution is correlated with the loss of key gastric genes.In doing so, they discovered that those without stomachs were all missing the genes encoding the gastric proton pump; this is the enzyme that acidifies the contents of the stomach and is often targeted in alleviating symptoms of acid reflux conditions in humans.The genes encoding a class of enzymes that are released by stomach cells help to break down proteins, known as pepsinogens, were also missing – except in pufferfish and platypuses. They’d kept just one of the genes, but it didn’t have a stomach-related function.Why did they lose them? The researchers theorize it could be down to dietary or environmental changes that meant they no longer had a need for the genes and so, in the course of evolution, gradually disappeared.Regardless of why a stomachless animal lost the organ in the first place, since the related genes have been lost, it’s unlikely that they’ll ever get a stomach back. That’s because of a rule within evolutionary biology known as Dollo’s law, which treats evolution like a one-way street: once a complex trait is lost, it cannot be regained.At least, most of the time – frogs certainly had other ideas.

According to the latest figures, there are more than 5.5 million people in the US who have more than a million dollars to hand. That sounds like a big number, until you realize it equates to about 1.65 percent of the population – or to put it another way, fewer than one in every 60 people.Meanwhile, something like 12 times as many people are sitting here with zero emergency savings to their name. Two thirds would struggle to pay for a single month of unexpected joblessness. Hardly surprising, then, that more than half of Americans want more savings to their name than they have. But saving a million dollars? That’s basically impossible for most of us. Right?Well, actually, it can be easier than you may think.What is compound interest?There’s a reason we as a society moved away from storing our money in caches under the floorboards and towards storing it in banks: the interest. Interest, if you didn’t know, is basically a fee paid by a borrower – in this case, the bank, who uses your money to make various investments and loans elsewhere – to a lender – you. It’s the price, if you like, of borrowing money.There are two types of interest: simple, and compound. The first, as the name suggests, is pretty straightforward – it’s basically, “lend me $100 now, and I’ll give you $10 back on top for every year I keep it.” Three years later, and you owe $130.But the other kind – compound interest – is much more fun. And if you know how to harness it, it can snowball into millions.No, seriously – and for proof, look no further than Benjamin Franklin. He bequeathed £1,000 in his will each to the cities of Philadelphia and Boston, directing that it should be used to fund loans at five percent interest for 100 years. At this point, 75 percent of the principal should be taken out and used to fund public works, while the rest remained invested for another century. Thanks to the power of compound interest, after the 200 years were up, that initial two grand was worth some $6.5 million altogether – not bad for a one-time deposit.So how does it work? Well, compound interest is, put simply, interest on interest. To use the example from before, it’s like saying “lend me $100 now, and I’ll give you 10 percent on whatever I owe you for every year I keep it.” This time, at the end of year one, you owe $110; at the end of year two, you owe $121 – because ten percent of 110 is 11; and at the end of year three, you owe $132.10.It may not be by much in this example, but as you can see, compound interest offers a better reward than simple. In fact, it’s exponentially better – a term that we’re using literally, here, since the equation for simple interest looks like this:Image Credit: IFLScienceAnd the equation for compound interest looks like this:Image Credit: IFLScienceBoth of these expressions grow without limit as time goes on – but with compound interest, it grows much quicker. Case in point: that $100 borrowed with 10 percent simple interest? After 100 years, it’ll be worth $1,100. With 10 percent compound interest, it’ll be worth $1.4 million.How to work out compound interestWe’ve already seen the simple equation for compound interest: you take your initial investment and multiply it by one plus the interest rate all to the power of the length of time it’s invested.So, say you deposit $100 into a savings account that offers four percent interest. After 10 years, you should expect to have:Image Credit: IFLScienceOr should you? In fact, with most accounts, interest isn’t calculated at the end of each year, but daily – or, less often, monthly or quarterly. That makes a little bit of a difference in your favor:Image Credit: IFLScienceNow, you may have noticed that we’ve been dealing with some pretty unrealistic scenarios so far. For example, if you’re opening a savings account, it’s unlikely that you intend to deposit $100 and then forget about it for a century. So how does the situation change if you save regularly?It actually makes a pretty big difference. Math-wise, a little jiggery-pokery reveals the formula we’re dealing with:Image Credit: IFLScienceAnd because these things are always easier to understand with an example, let’s say you deposit $100 into that four percent interest account, compounded daily, and you continue to deposit another $1 every month. In that case, after 10 years, you should expect to have:Image Credit: IFLScienceIt’s not that much to squirrel away each month – heck, it’s the kind of amount you could find in spare change down the back of the sofa – but as you can see, it adds up. And it’s this effect that is behind all those websites promising that by saving some seemingly trifling amount each day, you could make a million – but just how accurate are those claims?How to become a millionaire on five bucks a daySo, let’s say you’re 25 years old, and you want to have a million dollars saved by age 65. How much do you need to put away to reach your goal?Well, it depends on who you ask. According to the Motley Fool, you need to save $6.19 every day. Financial adviser David Bach is more optimistic: in his book Smart Couples Finish Rich he reckoned you’d only need a daily saving of $3.57 to get the same result. Bankrate’s calculator suggests a daily saving of around $13.29 to make a million by age 65, while CNBC puts the necessary amount at around $8 per day with certain investments "aggressive investments". So what’s the right figure – and why is there such a wide range of answers?In fact, a big part of the discrepancy between the suggested savings amounts will come down to the interest rate. Motley Fool assumes a 10 percent average annual return, while Bach was working with a slightly higher – and, frankly, a little optimistic – 12 percent. Bankrate’s figure is the highest because it assumes the lowest interest rate, seven percent; CNBC was assuming nine.If they all sound very high to you, don’t worry: for investments, they’re actually not that unrealistic. While savings accounts generally offer much lower rates, stock market returns have averaged at just under 10 percent between 1992 and 2021 –  just over 7 percent if you account for inflation. Now, of course, the returns on stock investments can and do fluctuate wildly, both up and down, so those figures are only good as a long-term indicator – but since we’re talking about a 40-year span here, we can let it slide.Okay, so let’s take 10 percent as our interest rate. Now, using our formula from before, we can reverse-engineer the amount needed every day to reach a million in 40 years.The answer: about $5.33 per day – more than Bach suggested, but less than the other estimates. Indeed, slotting those figures into the SEC’s compound interest calculator does reveal that stashing $5.33 per day – with interest compounded monthly or daily – should net you more than a million over 40 years. Result!So what were those other figures about?It’s a fair question: if the math works out like that, then what’s with all the other answers out there? Well, there are a few things we’ve assumed in our calculations that are worth noting.First of all, it bears repeating: the stock market is a gamble. For our calculations, we assumed a 10 percent return every year – that simply is not realistic. And we’re not talking like, one year it might be nine percent, the next 11; in the decade between 2012 and 2021, the stock market spent eight years generating returns of more than 12 percent, with two of those – 2013 and 2019 – generating returns of more than 30 percent. That’s a far cry from the average, and that kind of effect will change the amount of interest you receive.Secondly, we’ve assumed daily compounding – not a given. And of course, there are things like taxes and inflation to take into account. We’ve assumed none of that, but unfortunately, they’re famously unavoidable.So, how much should you save to become a millionaire by retirement? Perhaps not as much as you thought – but possibly more than you hoped. Oh – and of course, if you’re older than 25, you’ll want to up the amount you’re saving considerably: if you’re 35, you’ll need to stash away about $14.36 a day to compound a million by retirement; if you’re 45, that jumps up to a fairly whopping $42.87.The key, therefore, is saving early – but not necessarily saving a lot. And – like Benjamin Franklin – trusting in the math.

The metal alloys used today in everything from smartphones to spaceships are simply the latest outputs of a metallurgic tradition that stretches all the way back to the Bronze Age, when the first metal mixtures were created. These days, metal mining and processing is a massive industry, yet the first humans to get their hands on these shiny materials did so using little more than stone tools and basic campfires.Initially, the only metals available to our prehistoric ancestors were those that occurred in their native forms, meaning they could be found as actual nuggets and weren’t mixed up with other elements in rocks. As such, they didn’t have to be extracted, but could be obtained through panning in rivers or basic digging.  The earliest known copper artifacts are around 8,000 years old, while items made of gold start appearing in the archaeological record a couple of millennia later. At this point in history, the technology required to extract terrestrial iron was still way off, although the ancient Egyptians did manage to produce several objects from meteoritic iron, which could be hammered into blades such as that found in the tomb of Tutankhamun.Things really picked up around 5,000 years ago when humans moved out of the Stone Age and into the Copper Age, largely thanks to the advent of smelting. This process involved heating copper ores in stone or ceramic crucibles in order to separate the metal from its impurities.Though there’s no record of how this was first achieved, it’s likely that some ancient visionary came up with the idea of blowing air through hollow sticks in order to increase the temperature of a furnace so that the molten metal could be released. Unbeknownst to this primordial smith, the carbon in the wood would also have reacted with oxygen in the ore, converting it to carbon dioxide and freeing the copper to which it was bound.By all accounts, copper was an okay metal to work with and enabled the creation of new tools and weapons that were much better than their stone predecessors. Crucially, it hardened when hammered, and could even be melted down and cast in molds to produce standardized objects.However, copper could be massively improved by mixing it with tin, creating an alloy called bronze. Not only was this metallic blend harder than pure copper when hammered, but it also melted at a much lower temperature, making the casting process far easier.The widespread use of this mixture from around 3000 BCE marked the start of the Bronze Age - a period that saw the creation of numerous different alloys as people experimented with adding zinc and other metals to bronze. This process has never really stopped, and continues to give rise to new alloys with a whole range of futuristic uses.Just as these modern alloys help to propel us further into the Space Age, the technological advances of the Bronze Age facilitated the expansion of the ancient world’s most powerful civilizations. Yet the iconic era eventually came to an end once people figured out how to smelt iron from rocks, producing an even more useful material and ushering in the Iron Age.At first, the ancient hearths used in the production of iron could not reach high enough temperatures to actually melt the metal. The first blacksmiths therefore had to make do with wrought iron, which was obtained by separating it from the slag that resulted from the smelting process.However, it’s thought that some time around 300 BCE, Chinese metalworkers invented a bellows that could be used to create fires hot enough to melt iron. Funnily enough, iron is actually not as hard as bronze and the items made from this metal were typically of a lower quality than their alloyed predecessors. However, iron was much cheaper to produce than bronze – largely because it is so much more abundant than tin – and was later used to create steel, becoming one of the most essential materials of the modern age.