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The chemical secrets that help keep honey fresh for so long

bbc.com

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Re: The chemical secrets that help keep honey fresh for so long

#111

Post by loudmax »

b00ty4breakfast wrote: post #100
grues-dinner wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something that I think about sometimes. Life on Earth has had billions of years and expanded to fill so many niches, but they're nearly all damp niches. Nothing has ever really managed to really thrive in deserts. Sure, there are a few cacti, succulents, a bit of scrub, a few palms and rodents and a few birds that eke out an existence. But really it's mostly barren, compared to temperate or tropical climates…

If there were an evolutionary advantage for more things to being in an arid region over being in a place with abundant, easily accessible water, I reckon the niche would have been filled. the natural world isn't really "interested", for lack of a better term, in maximal efficiency outside the context of following the path of least resistance in any given domain. Lightning might strike your chimney even tho there's a…

There is plenty of natural selection pressure on not being eaten. If a mold or something could evolve to live off of a dry atmosphere plus sunlight and whatever minerals it can eek out of rocks, it could blanket millions of square kilometers of desert. Presumably other living things would find it hard to digest because its protein and chemical structures are so different. Nature is constantly finding weird little niches at the edge of sustainability. Waterless deserts should present an enormous opportunity for something to fill, but it hasn't happened.

Re: The chemical secrets that help keep honey fresh for so long

#112

Post by bookofjoe »

felbane wrote: post #110
barrenko wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May be unrelated, but it's also kinda funny how to cut / process / shape stone and rock you need a crap load of water, all the drills and saws for stone are wet in a way.

You can cut and shape rock with chisels. Isn't the water used primarily for dust control in powered stone drills/saws?

And, WAY back in the day, other rocks.

>The models estimated that Oldowan stone tools originated 2.617-2.644 million years ago, 36,000 to 63,000 years earlier than current evidence. The Acheulean’s origin was pushed back further by at least 55,000 years to 1.815-1.823 million years ago.

https://www.kent.ac.uk/news/science/28246/the-worlds-earlies...

>Statistical inference of earlier origins for the first flaked stone technologies

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...

Re: The chemical secrets that help keep honey fresh for so long

#113

Post by horsawlarway »

felbane wrote: post #110
barrenko wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May be unrelated, but it's also kinda funny how to cut / process / shape stone and rock you need a crap load of water, all the drills and saws for stone are wet in a way.

You can cut and shape rock with chisels. Isn't the water used primarily for dust control in powered stone drills/saws?

Cooling, lubrication, debris removal and dust control. Mostly in that order.

But yeah, you're completely right about the chisel. Hammer and chisel is how we've processed rocks for most of history (all the way back to flint knapping).

Wet processing for tile/stone is really only about 100 years old, since we didn't have a usable cutting abrasive until diamond blades came around in the late 1800s.

---

All that aside, the problem with a hammer & chisel is that it's hard to be precise. It's not impossible, but it's definitely a skill requiring mastery.

If we expand the scope a little and include ceramics - then yes, we did need quite a bit of water.

Brick, Clay, Cement, etc - they were all good alternatives to chiseling stone to get a very hard, stone-like material in a very specific shape, and they all require good amounts of water.

Re: The chemical secrets that help keep honey fresh for so long

#114

Post by bookofjoe »

loudmax wrote: post #111
b00ty4breakfast wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there were an evolutionary advantage for more things to being in an arid region over being in a place with abundant, easily accessible water, I reckon the niche would have been filled. the natural world isn't really "interested", for lack of a better term, in maximal efficiency outside the context of following the path of least resistance in any given domain. Lightning might strike your chimney even tho there's a…

There is plenty of natural selection pressure on not being eaten. If a mold or something could evolve to live off of a dry atmosphere plus sunlight and whatever minerals it can eek out of rocks, it could blanket millions of square kilometers of desert. Presumably other living things would find it hard to digest because its protein and chemical structures are so different. Nature is constantly finding weird little nic…

Except in science fiction (so far); see, for example, "Dragon's Egg," Robert L. Forward's superb 1980 novel of life on a neutron star with surface gravity 67 billion times that of Earth:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Egg

Re: The chemical secrets that help keep honey fresh for so long

#115

Post by boilerupnc »

highfrequency wrote: post #96
grues-dinner wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something that I think about sometimes. Life on Earth has had billions of years and expanded to fill so many niches, but they're nearly all damp niches. Nothing has ever really managed to really thrive in deserts. Sure, there are a few cacti, succulents, a bit of scrub, a few palms and rodents and a few birds that eke out an existence. But really it's mostly barren, compared to temperate or tropical climates…

More counterintuitively: why hasn't any major bacteria evolved to feast on lipids like oils? Much denser source of energy than desert dirt.

Related good read[0] - “I contain Multitudes”

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27213168-i-contain-multi...

Re: The chemical secrets that help keep honey fresh for so long

#116

Post by mhb »

LandR wrote: post #65
tekla wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bloom isn't spoilage.

Is it eatable though ? ANytime I've had chocolate that has the white stuff I've binned it. Even if it isn't spoiled, doesn't it taste bad ?

No. It doesn't taste bad, but the texture might not be as good.

Re: The chemical secrets that help keep honey fresh for so long

#117

Post by grues-dinner »

felbane wrote: post #110
barrenko wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May be unrelated, but it's also kinda funny how to cut / process / shape stone and rock you need a crap load of water, all the drills and saws for stone are wet in a way.

You can cut and shape rock with chisels. Isn't the water used primarily for dust control in powered stone drills/saws?

These days, with high-power cutting tools also for cooling. If you have a 50 HP saw, that energy has to go somewhere, and it doesn't all go into the dust and get carried away. If carbide blades get too hot, the solder melts and the brazed inserts fall out, and for steel, carbide and diamonds, the hotter they get the softer they get and and the faster the tool wears.

And other than the cost of the tools, there is one thing harder to drill than a rock, and that's a rock with the previous drill bit's carbide insert stuck at the bottom of the hole!

Re: The chemical secrets that help keep honey fresh for so long

#118

Post by bookofjoe »

kragen wrote: post #14
jagged-chisel wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point is that the article is conveying too much of the wrong kind of details.

vlovich123 may be correct that I am giving the BBC too much credit in general. But I don't think I'm especially well-informed; I'd never heard of methylglyoxal before looking this up in Wikipedia. I agree that its focus is somewhat wrong. I don't think that the backgrounder on the importance of food preservation is completely without value. It's just that it's already fairly well known that food rots and why. My larg…

>I think it's fine to have lots of the wrong kind of details, but it's not fine to omit the right ones.

Who decides which are "wrong" and which are "right?"

Re: The chemical secrets that help keep honey fresh for so long

#119

Post by mr_toad »

pyman wrote: post #82
filterfish wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Millions of years!

The fact that they navigate by memorising visual landmarks like trees, buildings, and flowers to recognise familiar routes is unbelievable

I think the most interesting thing about them is that they can communicate the location of flowers to other bees.

Re: The chemical secrets that help keep honey fresh for so long

#120

Post by bookofjoe »

gerdesj wrote: post #24
kragen wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I edited "millennia" into "centuries" in my comment above because the Wikipedia article claimed those claims didn't pan out: > (However, no edible honey has been found in Egyptian tombs; all such cases have been proven to be other substances or only chemical traces.[29]) ...but the citation is from 01975. The Smithsonian page is a great link! It mentions that the pH of honey is 3–4.5 (another crucial fact omitted fro…

I'm so sorry but I can't help myself: 01975 is the dialling code for somewhere in Aberdeenshire! WP: "(However, no edible honey has been found in Egyptian tombs; all such cases have been proven to be other substances or only chemical traces.[29])" [29] is https://gwern.net/doc/history/1975-leek.pdf - this does not look like a peer reviewed paper. They do look to be reputable and they refute some rubbish documented ca…

gwern FTW!
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