23 articles from SATURDAY 25.7.2020

Cooking eased my exile and became my homage to the lives of immigrants

Preparing food helped me reconcile my old and new world. Now my restaurant produces a beautiful mongrel cuisine‘Now you better behave and don’t cry!” was the warning from my mother, shot with a stern look to show she was deadly serious. We disembarked from the aircraft at Heathrow. It was a dark and dank day. Cold rain spat at us as we walked across the tarmac into the immigration hall. In...

How the lowly mushroom is becoming a nutritional star

Mushrooms are often considered only for their culinary use because they are packed with flavor-enhancers and have gourmet appeal. That is probably why they are the second most popular pizza topping, next to pepperoni.In the past, food scientists like me often praised mushrooms as healthy because of what they don’t contribute to the diet; they contain no cholesterol and gluten and are low in fat,...

The UK's app failure sums up our fatally flawed coronavirus response | John Naughton

Thanks to dithering and ineptitude, we may never have contact tracing on our smartphonesCoronavirus – latest updatesSee all our coronavirus coverageI’ve just been looking at the coronavirus death toll in various countries as tallied on the Johns Hopkins University Covid-19 tracker. At the time I checked, the UK had 45,407 deaths, Poland had 1,642, Ireland had 1,753, New Zealand had 1,555 and...

I Lived in a Dome in Hawaii to Simulate Life on Mars

It was the crew’s first night, we had just arrived, we were settling in. Kim Binsted, principle investigator on the HI-SEAS project, was preparing to leave for four months, nervous, I think, about launching this Mars mission, a project whose actualization was so uncertain throughout the buildup—NASA nearly pulled funding, there were delays in the construction of the habitat—that at times it...