2025 5+6

Discover how regenerative agriculture is transforming cocoa farming in tropical regions. Learn how brands like Ferrero are adopting agroforestry to restore ecosystems, support farmers, and boost sustainability.

Peppermint candy has roots in ancient medicine, with the earliest record of this use going all the way back to the Egyptian civilization of 1000 B.C.

Want to cut calories without feeling deprived? New research suggests the answer might already be sitting in your spice rack.

Le livre "Botanique olfactive" écrit par Giulio Giorgi, ingénieur agronome, écologue et paysagiste concepteur, explore l'importance de l'odorat dans notre pe

What this means for us, if anything, is still unclear

As cocoa prices soar, legacy brands and startups are rethinking chocolate. Discover how Hershey, Celeste Bio and Voyage Foods are tackling supply chain volatility with cell-based and cocoa-free innovations.

They're the least filling food ever.

After several years of uncertainty, EFSA has ruled that styrene, commonly found in food contact materials, isn't toxic. This is a significant ruling for food safety.

The 'food as medicine' movement is gaining momentum, with new research highlighting how bioactive compounds in fruits and plants may help prevent diseases like cancer and UTIs. Discover how scientists in Brazil and Germany are unlocking the healing potential of pectins and phytochemicals.

Cats know who you are and they're probably judging you.

Rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis), the aromatic herb native to the Mediterranean, has long been treasured in kitchens around the world.

Rapeseed oil, a major global vegetable oil with an annual production of 15.4 million metric tons, is valued for its aroma, notably the pickle attribut…

Mycotoxin patulin poses serious threats to human health by contaminating food and food products; biological detoxification of patulin by using enzymes is a promising method, and the key is an effective enzyme. Here, a thermostable patulin-degrading lipase, AhEst from Acetomicrobium hydrogeniformans, is identified and characterized. It retains over 50% residual activity after heat treatment at 85 °C for 120 min, and its thermostability is the highest of known patulin-degrading enzymes. It converts patulin efficiently to a new low-toxicity product 2-(2-hydroxy-4-oxodihydro-2H-pyran-3(4H) -ylidene) acetic acid, different from the previously reported hydrolysis product. Structural modeling analysis reveals AhEst’s catalytic triad and patulin hydrolysis mechanism. Variant AhEstE49A with higher catalytic efficiency is obtained by protein engineering on the substrate entrance tunnel; it can remove patulin in commercial apple juice at low enzyme load. The study of AhEst adds to the knowledge of patulin enzymatic degradation and provides a candidate for patulin biodetoxification in the food industry.

Controversial additive may be in as many as 11,000 US products and could lead to diabetes and obesity

A team of chemists at the University of Cambridge has developed a powerful new method for adding single carbon atoms to molecules more easily, offering a simple one-step approach that could accelerate drug discovery and the design of complex chemical products.

A significant portion of candy in the U.S. is produced domestically, but we also secure sweet treats from the likes of Ecuador, Canada, Mexico, and beyond.

During World War II, Hershey's created the Hershey Tropical Bar - a candy bar specifically designed not for flavor, but for sustaining soldiers in the Pacific.

New research has found that those who consume a diverse range of foods rich in flavonoids, such as tea, berries, dark chocolate, and apples, could lower their risk of developing serious health conditions and have the potential to live longer.

Educators are horrified as their students become hopelessly dependent on AI models that do their thinking for them.

Discover the hottest coffee trends from around the world.

Berbere spice is a key component of many East African dishes. But is it really as spicy as the name suggests, and what are its exact ingredients?

The more things change when it comes to people and weird food trends, the more they stay the same. Here are the 12 most bizarre food trends of all time.

You say tomato, I say… bleurgh. How is it that we can have such different experiences of the same foods? Taste and flavour: What are they and how do they work? We meet some of the top flavour scientists working today, including the researcher who discovered that there are 'supertasters' among us.

This study investigates structure-odor threshold relationships of aroma compounds using integrated S-curve analysis, molecular docking, and dynamics s…

Understanding stimulus intensity processing is fundamental in sensory science, yet this question remains largely unexplored in human olfaction. We investigated how the human olfactory bulb (OB) and piriform cortex (PC) process odor concentration versus subjective perceived intensity. We demonstrate that OB-PC network oscillatory dynamics are predominantly driven by perceived intensity, not physical concentration. The OB initially processes and communicates perceived intensity to the PC via early gamma-band oscillations (bottom-up feedback). The PC then refines and sends this percept back to the OB via later beta-band oscillations (top-down feedback), updating the OB's gamma activity for subsequent odorants. Critically, analyses of phase-amplitude coupling and beta burst activity demonstrate that transient beta patterns from the PC update OB gamma activity, providing the OB with an updated internal representation of the odor percept. These results reveal an oscillatory mechanism by which the olfactory system maintains perceptual constancy and adaptability despite fluctuations in environmental odor concentrations. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, KAW 2018.0152 European Research Council, https://ror.org/0472cxd90, 101118977 Swedish Research Council, 2024-01605

This research delves into olfaction, a sensory modality that remains complex and inadequately understood. We aim to fill in two gaps in recent studies that attempted to use machine learning and deep learning approaches to predict human smell perception. The first one is that molecules are usually represented with molecular fingerprints, mass spectra, and vibrational spectra; however, the influence of the selected representation method on predictive performance is inadequately documented in direct comparative studies. To fill this gap, we assembled a large novel dataset of 2606 molecules with three kinds of features: mass spectra (MS), vibrational spectra (VS) and molecular fingerprint features (FP). We evaluated their performance using four different multi-label classification models. The second objective is to address an inherent challenge in odor classification multi-label datasets (MLD)—the issue of class imbalance by random resampling techniques and an explainable, cost-sensitive multilayer perceptron model (CSMLP). Experimental results suggest significantly better performance of the molecular fingerprint-based features compared with mass and vibrational spectra with the micro-averaged F1 evaluation metric. The proposed resampling techniques and cost-sensitive model outperform the results of previous studies. We also report the predictive performance of multimodal features obtained by fusing the three mentioned features. This comprehensive and systematic study compares the predictive performance for odor classification of different features and utilises a multifaceted approach to deal with data imbalance. Our explainable model sheds further light on features and odour relations. The results hold the potential to guide the development of the electric nose and our dataset will be made publicly available.

You can spot a bar of Modica Chocolate by its coarse look, brittle bite, and the feeling of sugar crystals on your tongue.