By Randy Mosher
Published January 2007, Volume 27, Number 6
The holidays are upon us, the pilsners and margarita mix are put away and the search is on for something truly festive. Holiday ales are nice, and so is a nip of something spirituous, like a well-aged rum. But nice as these are, they don’t have the drama of something rich and creamy, topped with a billowing cloud of whipped cream and dusted with the musky joy of nutmeg. It’s gotta be that last culinary survivor of jolly old England, eggnog.
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The Magic of Yeast
By Julie Johnson Bradford
Published March 2003, Volume 24, Number 1
If yeast didn’t exist, Douglas Adams would have had to invent it.
Among a host of imaginary species, the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy created the babelfish, a creature that feeds on the soundwaves of one language and excretes the soundwaves of a different language. The interplanetary traveler slips a tiny babelfish into his ear—Adams wrote science fiction, after all—and can instantly understand any spoken language in the universe. The babelfish is “so mindbogglingly useful” that it triggers an intergalactic theological debate.
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