Author: Jawdah Hannad Basara

Recently, as I was reaching for the well-known green bottle in a grocery store aisle, the price tag stopped me cold. Not a specialty deli. Not a hand-labeled flask with an imported artisan brand. A simple, own-label liter of olive oil that costs about the same as a good bottle of Rioja. Although the term “liquid gold” has been used for a few years, it is beginning to feel more like a warning than a clever observation. The figures underlying that sticker shock are really startling. From about $1,313 per metric ton in December 2020 to over $9,000 by August…

For some time now, the checkout receipt has been quietly narrating a tale. The price of a can of full-sugar cola has increased. You may or may not have noticed that the orange fizzy drinks that used to pile up in your trolley became slightly smaller or somewhat less sweet, and that’s exactly the point. Governments relying on the sugar tax reasoned that everyone would benefit if they could alter the contents of the can without altering their purchasing patterns. To some extent, it was successful. A 29% decrease in sugar content per 100 milliliters in branded soft drinks is…

Something feels different when you walk down the snack section of any large American grocery store these days. There are still the Doritos. The Coca-Cola cooler at the end of the row is humming softly, as is the Nestlé section. However, younger consumers are passing them by with their phones aimed at ingredient lists and their headphones. Not in a rush. purposefully. It took time for Gen Z to break away from traditional food brands, and there isn’t really a single factor at play. Artificial dyes that regulators are currently rushing to outlaw, unclear corporate political ties, sustainability claims that…

These days, if you stroll through any good supermarket, you’ll see that things have subtly changed. The “vegan chicken breast” that was consistently found on the fourth shelf for many years is now called something much more ethereal. Your microwave popcorn bag’s packaging has a slightly different appearance. The small ketchup sachet at the café counter might soon be borrowed. These changes didn’t come with much fanfare. Seldom do they. What’s taking place is a series of regulatory rulings from Brussels that collectively represent the biggest revision to European food regulations in a generation. The EU’s 2026 food ban is…

Around midnight, someone puts their phone face down on the nightstand in a typical apartment and decides not to pick it up until the next morning. It was a conscious decision rather than the result of a notification blackout or a dead battery. More and more people are framing that insignificant act—which is hardly dramatic on its own—as a kind of resistance. The “dopamine detox,” as the internet has come to refer to it, has evolved from a specialized productivity trick into something akin to a cultural phenomenon. But the issue is with the name itself. Dopamine is not a…

Most people are familiar with a certain type of morning: the alarm goes off, the phone is already glowing, and breakfast just doesn’t happen between getting dressed and finding the car keys. In the moment, it seems harmless enough. However, scientists studying how the body maintains itself during extended fasting states, including those in NASA’s human performance divisions, have been constructing a picture that is more difficult to ignore. The effects of missing breakfast on your body are more than just a small annoyance. There is a cascade. When you open your eyes, the night’s fast continues. Your body is…

The intersection of medical science and the space industry is experiencing something subtly remarkable, but it receives far too little attention. While the attention-grabbing aspects of space tourism typically center on rockets, billionaires, and tickets that are more expensive than most people’s homes, the research that goes along with all of that spectacle is yielding results that may eventually be relevant to those who are never within ten thousand miles of a launch pad. According to a recent study from the UCF College of Medicine, the liver ages more quickly when a person travels to space. On its own, that…

The fact that a man in Utah spent three years and about a thousand dollars replicating a beer that ancient Egyptians drank before the Iron Age really got underway is truly bizarre. Odd, but not unexpected. It’s difficult not to want to know what was in the glass once you learn about a 3,500-year-old medical scroll that serves as a brewing guide. The scroll in question is the Ebers Papyrus, which dates to approximately 1550 BC and is among the best-preserved medical texts from ancient Egypt. You can learn something about the everyday dangers of living along the Nile from…

Years later, researchers are still troubled by a detail from the NASA Twins Study. After spending 340 days on the International Space Station, Scott Kelly returned looking, for the most part, older. His microbiome appeared different, his telomeres had moved, and his gene expression had altered. Then, back on Earth, it mostly reversed over several months. It turned out that the body possessed some sort of memory. That was both fascinating and subtly unsettling to scientists. In ways that feel genuinely significant, what has transpired since then builds on that unease. Human blood stem cells were sent into space on…

No one could have predicted that Yuri Gagarin’s unglamorous act of squeezing a tube of beef and liver paste into his mouth somewhere above the Earth in 1961 would eventually inspire a café aesthetic in Chelsea. And yet here we are. Enter any of the more recent grab-and-go restaurants that are currently opening throughout London, and you’ll find something that feels strangely familiar in terms of its accuracy, portability, and almost clinical focus on protein and function. It appears more like a mission briefing than a bistro. No one at Atis or Blank Street will give you a silver tube…