ConsumerLab.com found that catechin and caffeine levels can vary by more than 240% across green tea products, and some products contain significant amounts of lead in their tea leaves.

I haven’t had time to provide answers on the previous article, sorry about that. Busy with preparation for the International Symposium on Pterosaurs, this year being held in Rio. Purely for the sake of adding something new (TetZoo podcast followers will understand the motivation, I hope), here’s some recycled text from Tet Zoo ver 2 [...]

What do verbs mean? We'd like to know. For that reason, we just launched VerbCorner, a massive, crowd-sourced investigation into the meanings of verbs.  Why do we need this project? Why not just look up what verbs mean in a dictionary? While dictionaries are enormously useful (I think I own something like 15), they are far from perfect. For one thing, it's usually very easy to find counter-examples even for what seem like straight-forward definitions. Take the following: Bachelor: An […]

The paper by Desbonnet and colleagues* (open-access) asks some intriguing questions about how our gut bacteria - those trillions of passengers which we all carry in our deepest, darkest recesses - might have the propensity to affect the behavioural development of a mouse specifically focused on social development.Whilst to some people this might not sound like a particularly exciting finding, to others such a suggestion might potentially signal the start of a whole new way of looking at how our […]

The microbiome hits the big time  A piece by food writer/journalist Michael Pollan, "Some of My Best Friends Are Germs", was the cover story of the New York Times magazine on Sunday.  Pollan says the interest he developed in fermented foods while he was writing his latest book -- beer, kimchi, cheeses -- naturally led into an interest in the fermentation that goes on in our large intestines with the help of resident microbes, and this led him to think generally about the interaction […]