131–140 of 173 posts
Recently went through first aid training and the instructor claimed putting honey on wounds would help them heal faster. (Sample size 1) I tried it on myself and a wound that was stubborn about healing was better very quickly.
Medical grade honey: https://www.uclahealth.org/news/article/medical-grade-honey-...
I’d be curious to see if similar principles could be applied to non food preservation. Nature’s solutions often scale better than synthetic ones, especially when stability over long timeframes is needed.
Imagine a honey-inspired environment for stabilizing sensitive compounds or preserving biological samples without refrigeration
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But the same holds for my sugar jar.
Are you all barbarians? Nothing but clean spoons go in my sugar jar, and I rarely dip out honey with anything but its own dipper - which never touches food. Reginald, bring me my fainting couch, stat!
[I'm kind of being whimsical here but c'mon - get a squeeze bottle of honey if you can't handle keeping the jar clean plz]
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Managing moisture levels is probably the #1 way to control microbial activity. You see the exact same idea in HVAC - if you can keep the relative humidity below 50%, mold growth becomes nearly impossible. In laundry care, the dryer does all of the sanitizing action. Etc.
Why is it relative humidity that matters here instead of absolute humidity?
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…
The Gwern link is just a PDF copy of an article from a 1975 issue of "Bee World": https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0005772X.1975.11... I can't speak to the journal's rigor in the 1970s, but they seem like a more reliable source than any other mentioned in this discussion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Feeding honey to newborn babies is a common practice in India. Sometimes it's their first ever food.
Yeah, and their infant mortality is on par with Sub-Saharan Africa. "The second most common prelacteal feed is honey, a delicious natural sweetener. Numerous studies [29,30] have shown that the ingestion of honey under one year of age is linked with infant botulism, a disease that results in a blockade of voluntary motor and autonomic functions. Apart from this, other prelacteal feeds get contaminated due to unhygien…
This mind-blowing statistic stays in my head:
"Diarrhoea is a leading killer of children, accounting for approximately 9 per cent of all deaths among children under age 5 worldwide in 2021. This translates to over 1,200 young children dying each day" - https://data.unicef.org/topic/child-health/diarrhoeal-diseas...
Almost one per minute.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We waited until our kid was four, just to be safe, but it's was also honey from our own bees, so I somehow felt it less safe. Kid went full Winnie-the-Pooh on the jar.
"OK, sister bees, now remember: this season we'll be feeding the hu-man's child, so wipe your feet before entering the hive, and if you feel the sniffles coming on, Don't Make Honey!"
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…
> 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. By definition, the desert "niche" IS filled. It has as much life as it can support. That doesn't mean wall-to-wall forest; you wouldn't expect to find that covering a field of barely weathered granite, either. All life on Earth uses water to tr…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. By definition, the desert "niche" IS filled. It has as much life as it can support. That doesn't mean wall-to-wall forest; you wouldn't expect to find that covering a field of barely weathered granite, either. All life on Earth uses water to tr…
How do you know that that "It has as much life as it can support"? What would an unfilled niche look like?
a populated biome has an active +- exchange of resources between participants that facilitates the need for competition due to resource bounds. (the rain forest, most of the biological world)
a sterile biome has no known properties of life, and no known participants. The participants that are there struggle to exist or are in some form of stasis to survive the condition. (a brand-new sealed blood vacuum vial.)
as for 'as much as it can support', i'm unaware of how to determine an optimal maxima for biological growth independent of species or environment. Maybe some exotic sphere-packing type idea might work with a reward function for 'resources' ? I don't know.