Science! It inspires wonder! It solves mysteries, and creates new ones! It is world-changing, mind-blowing, earth-is-definitely-round-proving stuff! And today, it has made plain what mouths have known for centuries: pizza just tastes really damn good when it comes out of a wood-fired brick oven.

It’s possible to make whiskey taste as though it’s been aged for years without actually aging it for years, and it does not require possession of a TARDIS.

You should eat cake for breakfast, according to science. The level of insulin in the body fluctuates throughout the day, but is typically highest in the morning. That means any sugary stuffed housed in the early hours is more likely to be converted into fuel, rather than stored as fat, which is what happens when…

Hangar 1 Vodka makes a vodka called Fog Point. It is made from fog water.

Good morning. Here is some fish news.

This is the story of a very hungry caterpillar, a very clever “zombie-maker” wasp, and a plant that makes defensive smells. It’s all real science.

Scientists in the United Kingdom have developed a blood test to identify peanut allergies, an advance that could eliminate testing that requires one to eat peanuts in order to detect allergies to peanuts—so basically, you’d get bloodwork done rather than mowing on a peanut and waiting to see if you approach death.…

A new report from JAMA Ophthalmology suggests that you’d be better off reading JAMA Opthamology after housing some dark chocolate. Everyday Health reports that researchers, including lead study author Jeff Rabin, have found that eating both dark and milk chocolate can positively affect your vision in the short term.

Inside Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute, researchers have been hard at work developing stuff that will—to use a phrase common among members of the scientific community—blow your goddamn mind. The gifted minds of the Morphing Matter Lab have put their advanced educations and superior…

If you, like me, enjoy stories about science that blow your mind just a little, or if you, like me, love sweet potatoes and also love shrimp, today is a good day for you. We at The Takeout stumbled across two delightful, food-adjacent stories that knocked our socks off. They also made us hungry.

A fresh-baked loaf of bread is one of life’s great pleasures. The soft interior is open and airy, each bite yielding with just a touch of resistance. The exterior is all crust, a crisp and crackly delight contrasting in both texture and flavor. This balance is fleeting, though. Straight from the oven it’s at its best,…

Those fries you picked up last night on the way home from the bar hit the spot—golden, crispy outsides and fluffy, soft insides. But the leftovers heaped in a pile on your kitchen table this morning? Soggy, damp, sad, and destined for the trash bin.

Who would’ve thought something that came out of the faucet could be packaged so sexily? Grocery stores have whole aisles dedicated to the stuff. Advertisements whisk us away to tropical waterfalls and pristine frozen icescapes. Now, even ritzy restaurants offer to guide us through the options with help from dedicated “…

We think of onions as harmless root vegetables, but they’re actually clever bulbed bombs ready to defend themselves against all would-be consumers. They quietly lie waiting in farmer’s fields and grocery bins, but spring to action when a hungry critter bares its teeth or the chef’s blade comes down. The attack is a…

Right now, in the back of your freezer, there’s a bag of peas you opened two years ago or a couple chicken breasts hastily wrapped the last time there was a sale. Fuzzy with frost, stuck together, and zapped of flavor, those passed-over packages are dying the same slow freezer burn death of countless forgotten foods…

Announce at a party that you’re going to open a bottle of Champagne and people will turn their heads. Announce you plan to do it with a sword, and crowds will surely gather.

If you’ve ever traveled abroad, you might have been shocked by the way other countries treat their eggs: left-out on counters and sold unrefrigerated at stores and markets. We Americans keep our eggs cold—and are taught to fear eggs that have come to room temperature—so why hasn’t the rest of the world died from a…

Have you ever turned over a slice of roast beef and caught that glimmer? A hint of rainbow iridescence that’s a little otherworldly for what’s an otherwise run-of-the-mill cold cut? Even when fresh, some sliced meats give off a metallic sheen that can give you pause. But what you’re seeing is the common optical…

At a young age, we learned the golden rule of America’s favorite convenience appliance: never put metal in the microwave. But why? What would happen? Will it really burn the whole house down like Mom says?

Before early humans began to domesticate plants for food, they foraged the wild for fruits, roots, and nuts. Through this process of discovery, it’s likely that one of our ancestors stumbled upon an almond tree and, despite finding the first few bites to be bitter, chowed down a handful of seeds. He then promptly died.