Posts tagged ‘banana’
Bananas Emit Antimatter Almost Every 75 Minutes
By Chad Upton
Potassium-40 is a fairly unstable isotope, although the half life is nearly a billion years.
Because bananas have so much of this isotope, there is enough decay to generate one positron (approximately) every 75 minutes.
A positron is basically the opposite of an electron. It has the same mass as an electron, but a positive charge instead of a negative one. It is the electron’s antimatter doppelgänger.
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photo: keepon (cc)
sources: tertiarysource.net, wikipedia (positron, gamma ray)
The Banana Plant is an Herb
By Kaye Nemec
We’ve learned about the importance of fruits and veggies on the food pyramid since grade school. We’ve learned that carrots, peas and broccoli are vegetables and apples, pears and strawberries are fruits.
But most of us probably haven’t learned that the banana plant is an herb or that tomatoes, avocadoes, string beans, squash, eggplant, green pepper, okra, green beans, cucumbers and corn kernels are fruits.
Merriam-Webster defines an herb as “a seed-producing annual, biennial, or perennial that does not develop persistent woody tissue but dies down at the end of a growing season.”
Banana plants do not have the typical wood trunk that supports a tree. Its leaves twist and turn around each other to form a stem that can be 12 inches thick and can grow up to 40 feet tall. At the end of each harvest the plants die completely and grow again the next season. The bananas produced by the plant are the fruit of the herb.
A fruit is defined in the botanical world as the part of the plant that bears the seed – therefore putting tomatoes, cucumbers, avocados, green peppers and more in the fruit category.
In the legal world, however, vegetables as we know them remain as is – all fruit classifications thrown aside. In the 19th century the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that fruits and vegetables were to be classified according to how they are commonly consumed.
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Photo: Spacemonster
Sources: Merriam-Webster, OChef, Live Science, MyPyramid.gov
How to Accelerate and Slow Banana Ripening
I love bananas.
They are a nearly perfect fruit. They taste great. They’re fairly inexpensive. They have their own protective skin and they contain many nutrients such as: vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B9, C, Calcium, Iron, Magnesium, Phosphorus, Potassium and Zinc.
But, if I had to register a complaint about bananas, it would be their shelf life. Keeping them perfectly ripe is a fine art — one worth mastering.
The first trick is something my wife, Kristen, taught me: don’t buy all your bananas from the same bunch! Pick a couple green ones and a couple that are ripe/near ripe. Then you have some you can eat right away and others that will be ripe when you’re ready for them.
The interesting part is that those two bunches are likely the same age. You assume the less ripe ones are newer, but the food distributors control ripeness. They have large, air tight banana ripening vaults that give them very precise control over banana ripening. They’re usually divided into multiple sections, so bananas can be kept at different stages of ripeness. If they’re selling a lot of bananas, they can accelerate the ripening so they will be ripe when they arrive at the store. If sales are slow, they can slow ripening to avoid waste.
How do they do that? (more…)
Why Do People Eat Organic Food?
I have always enjoyed visiting my grandparents, something I probably didn’t and still don’t do often enough.
I have a lot of great memories from those times and spending time in my grandmother’s vegetable garden is one of my favorites. She had a huge backyard, almost half of it was a garden.
I didn’t actually like vegetables back then, but she had a secret raspberry patch. It was tucked away in the back of the garden, behind the shed. I’m not sure if she was trying to hide it, or just keep it separate from the main garden — raspberry plants are locally invasive, they can take over your entire garden if not pruned.
I could spend the whole day eating raspberries, fresh off the bush.
Some days, I did.
It was nature’s 7-11, a store full of squishy red candy, at the right height and the right price for a child.
I wouldn’t dare say they were “free” since there was a price to pay — raspberry bushes are very prickly. There are thornless cultivars available now, but it worked out OK. The thorns slow you down enough to swallow one raspberry before you pick the next. I’m sure that’s why nature put the pricks there. (more…)
Stringless Banana Peeling
You’ve probably peeled hundreds of bananas in your lifetime. But, have you ever peeled one and not left any strings behind? Next time, try peeling a banana like a pro… try peeling like a monkey. Watch the video.
PS – This is not me; however, I am concerned for this man’s safety since he has band aids in the kitchen.
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