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A few weeks ago my husband came home from the grocery store with something mind-blowing: it was a bag of carrots, but in technicolor. Mixed in with the usual orange sticks were yellow carrots, the color of potatoes, and others so deeply purple they were almost black. We cooked them, and I turned over to the dark side. Purple carrots have been around farmers' markets for a while now, but more recently they've gone mainstream. Pretty soon we might have a full-fledged food fad on our hands. So where did the plum-colored carrot come from, and why is it showing up in my grocery store all of a sudden? A colorful history purple carrot cross section While most of us in America have only ever seen orange carrots (at least until recently), the first cultivated carrots were purple and yellow. Carrots were domesticated in Afghanistan and spread to the eastern Mediterranean about a thousand years ago. They reached Europe and China in the 1300s. By the early 1500s, orange ca...

Vitamins seem like something you can’t have too much of. Like too much ice cream on a sticky summer day—sure, you can technically go overboard, but the limit is so high, and what’s the worst thing that happens anyway? And unlike ice cream, we know that vitamins help keep us healthy. But just like ice cream, vitamin D can have negative side effects when taken in large doses, the impacts can really sneak up on you, and obesity is a concern. Really. The tricky thing about “medicines” like vitamin D is that you don’t immediately overdose on them. If you take too much Tylenol, you end up in the hospital pretty fast. That giant vitamin capsule isn’t likely to land you in the ER tomorrow or even a month from now. But vitamin D, unlike many of the other vitamins you may be taking, is fat soluble. That means that if you take too much of it, you won’t just pee it out like you would a water soluble vitamin. Instead of being carried out in your body's wastewater, the vitamin wil...

Some people just don't like cats. That's okay. Some people don't like pizza. Or dogs. Or Harry Potter. But some cat-haters aren't satisfied with not owning cats themselves. They need to drag the rest of us down with them. The first thing you notice when you dig around in the seedy underworld of cat-bashing is that it's an old hobby. The haters have left their mark across poetry, literature, and art for centuries. "There's always going to be someone in a group who's going to stand up and say cats are aloof, manipulative little devils," says cat researcher John Bradshaw. In his 1922 cultural history of the domestic cat, The Tiger in the House, Carl Van Vechten notes, "One is permitted to assume an attitude of placid indifference in the matter of elephants, cockatoos, H.G. Wells, Sweden, roast beef, Puccini, and even Mormonism, but in the matter of cats it seems necessary to take a firm stand....Those who hate the cat hate him ...

Reports of drug-induced flashbacks have existed since the 1950s. Though the term "flashback" wasn't used specifically until 1969, as early as 1954 scientists noticed LSD users complaining of a reoccurrence of an LSD-like state long after the drug's effects should have worn off. The risk of a flashback has become a standard line in anti-drug messaging. Months or years after taking LSD, suddenly, the trip could come back without warning, and suddenly you would be floridly hallucinating again. An urban legend holds that molecules of LSD stay in the body, hiding in fat or in the spine, and can later be re-released. There are plenty of myths floating around about LSD use, though. So are flashbacks even real, or just another example of public health messaging exaggerating the risks of illicit drugs? A recent study published in PLOS ONE by Norwegian University of Science and Technology neuroscientist Teri Krebs found no association between using psychedeli...

THE MARTIAN Matt Damon as Mark Watney, an astronaut who becomes stranded on Mars. 20th Century Fox The day Ridley Scott called NASA was a great day for NASA. Scott, or Sir Ridley, or the dude who has directed several of the greatest sci-fi movies of all time, plus Thelma and Louise, was in the early stages of his newest movie, The Martian, based on the mega-popular novel by Andy Weir. The Martian is a deadly simple tale of an astronaut named Mark Watney (played by Matt Damon) trying to survive and eventually escape from Mars after being stranded there. But the most important fact about The Martian is not all of the extreme close ups on Matt Damon’s handsome astronaut mug (there are many!). It’s that The Martian is extremely recent science fiction. Its set in a version of the future that is not distant or fantastic, but familiar and possible. And the premise of the story is based on just the type of mission that NASA is planning. For this reason, above all others, NASA was...