Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World

by Mark Miodownik

Chocolate also contains cannabinoids, which are the chemicals responsible for the high experienced from smoking dope. But again the percentages are tiny, and when blind taste studies were carried out to analyze chocolate cravings, researchers found little evidence that any of these chemicals were linked to feelings of craving.

Some say that eating chocolate is better than kissing, and scientists have dutifully tested this hypothesis by carrying out a set of experiments. In 2007, a team led by Dr. David Lewis recruited pairs of passionate lovers, whose brain activity and heart rate were monitored first while they kissed each other and then while they ate chocolate (separately). The researchers found that although kissing set the heart pounding, the effect did not last as long as when the participants ate chocolate. The study also showed that when the chocolate started melting, all regions of the brain received a boost far more intense and longer lasting than the brain activity measured while kissing. Although this is just a single study, it does give credibility to the hypothesis that for many the sensory experience of eating chocolate is better than kissing.

Like an enigmatic party guest, you just want to be near them, even if you can’t think of anything to say.

The disdain for glass in the East lasted all the way up until the nineteenth century. Before then, the Japanese and Chinese relied on paper for the windows of their buildings, a material that worked perfectly well but resulted in a different kind of architecture. The lack of glass technology in the East meant that, despite their technical sophistication, they never invented the telescope nor the microscope, and had access to neither until Western missionaries introduced them. Whether it was the lack of these two crucial optical instruments that prevented the Chinese from capitalizing on their technological superiority and instigating a scientific revolution, as happened in the West in the seventeenth century, is impossible to say. What is certain, though, is that without a telescope you can’t see that Jupiter has moons, or that Pluto exists, or make the astronomical measurements that underpin our modern understanding of the universe. Similarly, without the microscope, it is impossible to see cells such as bacteria and to study systematically the microscopic world, which was essential to the development of medicine and engineering.

Ignoring a fundamental technology held them back. How many other fundamentals are left unexplored?

Aging is the cellular equivalent of playing telephone: each generation of cells does not quite regenerate the structure it inherited and so mistakes and imperfections creep in.

If in the future we can use stem cells to heal and grow new body parts, why not save younger stem cells like we do with eggs and sperm?