Mr. Bosland claims to have broken the two million Scoville mark in February 2012 with his Trinidad Moruga Scorpion. That is the same strength as police-grade pepper spray — a substance no sensible person would let travel through his digestive tract. Mr. Bosland hasn’t yet submitted paperwork to Guinness for the official record, and his claim really burns up Mr. de Wit, who insists his pepper is still the hottest. Only chemical chromatography that measures several samples for their average level of capsaicin, the chemical that gives peppers their bite, can establish a record claim. But Mr. Scott, one of the few people on Earth who has tasted both varieties, says the Moruga Scorpion is clearly hotter.
I used to grow habaneros on the patio (and I still have a container of dried ones, years old, to spice up a chili), but I hadn’t realized that they were now growing peppers in the mega-Scoville range.
Another blow to the mindless thermodynamic theory, and hope for a breakthrough:
Slimming bacteria work their magic in either of two ways, studies of gut microbiota show. They seem to raise metabolism, allowing people to burn off a 630-calorie chocolate chip muffin more easily.
They also extract fewer calories from the muffin in the first place. In contrast, fattening bacteria wrest every last calorie from food.
Transferring slimming bacteria into obese people might be one way to give them the benefits of weight-loss surgery without an operation. It might also be possible to devise a menu that encourages the proliferation of slimming bacteria and reduces the population of fattening bacteria.
I’ve always been thin, regardless of what I ate (though as I got older, I did put on a few pounds, which came back off when I went paleo), and have never felt particularly virtuous about it. I don’t have much patience for thin people who lecture fat ones about their caloric intake. People do have different metabolisms, and what you eat can affect it, but the “diet and exercise” nazis don’t want to believe it.
I would belatedly point out that Justine Musk is a more-than-admirable person in her own right, independently of her prior relationships, and my apologies for any implication otherwise.
The administration could fix it, or at least ameliorate it, but it would take some leadership from the president and attorney general, something that’s been in short supply.
As the emailer who sent me the link notes, “I understand the need for an ITAR review, however, what we have so far is a blanket ban, with no prescription in place for when and how this issue will be resolved. In the meantime NASA’s vast archive of technical information, so vital to the commercial and private sector has vanished in a single day.”
So where in the days of sequester is NASA going to find the funds to review the data and get it back on line? Just more ITAR madness that has cost the US space industry billions over the past decade and a half.