Latest news with #FuzzyLogicScienceShow
The Advertiser
21-05-2025
- Science
- The Advertiser
Ask Fuzzy: What happens when you cook meat?
It's thought that, between 2.6 and 2.5 million years ago, our distant human ancestors were subsisting mostly on fruits, leaves, seeds, flowers and tubers. Then, when the Earth became significantly hotter and drier, forests were replaced by great grasslands. Nutritious plants became scarce, forcing hominins to find new sources of energy. Meanwhile the growing number of grazing herbivores across the savanna grasslands meant there was also more meat. Evidence uncovered by archaeologists reveals cut marks from crude stone tools in the bones of large herbivores 2.5 million years ago. Without sophisticated tools they wouldn't have been capable hunters, but there were sabre-toothed cats. Even if those were efficient killers, they were probably also messy eaters, leaving enough meat for hominin scavenging. The earliest evidence of widespread human meat-eating coincides with the emergence of Homo habilis, the "handyman" of early humans. At a 2 million-year-old site in Kenya, flaked stone blades and hammers were found near piles of bone fragments. Butcher marks show that Homo habilis used their crude stone tools to strip flesh off a carcass and crack open bones to get at the marrow. That meat would literally have been a tough transition because, even though they had stronger jaws and larger teeth, they were not adapted to eating raw meat. Their mouths and guts were designed more for grinding and digesting plants. MORE ASK FUZZY: Something that they (in fact, all life) had to deal with is that you have to spend energy to get energy. Cooking changes this balance by making it easier to extract nutrients. The earliest clear evidence of cooking dates back roughly 800,000 years ago, although it could have begun sooner. This has been crucial to human evolution because our brains are far larger than that of other primates and three times the size of our distant ancestors, Australopithecus. Those big brains are expensive, consuming 20 per cent of our body's total energy. That's far more than other mammals, whose brains only use about 4 per cent of their energy. Cooking also has reduced the need for a long digestive tract and, over hundreds of thousands of years, the human gut has shrunk. This makes cooking another one of those apparently ordinary technologies that have been integral to the rise of humans and, ultimately, to civilisation. The Fuzzy Logic Science Show is at 11am Sundays on 2xx 98.3FM. Send your questions to AskFuzzy@ Podcast: It's thought that, between 2.6 and 2.5 million years ago, our distant human ancestors were subsisting mostly on fruits, leaves, seeds, flowers and tubers. Then, when the Earth became significantly hotter and drier, forests were replaced by great grasslands. Nutritious plants became scarce, forcing hominins to find new sources of energy. Meanwhile the growing number of grazing herbivores across the savanna grasslands meant there was also more meat. Evidence uncovered by archaeologists reveals cut marks from crude stone tools in the bones of large herbivores 2.5 million years ago. Without sophisticated tools they wouldn't have been capable hunters, but there were sabre-toothed cats. Even if those were efficient killers, they were probably also messy eaters, leaving enough meat for hominin scavenging. The earliest evidence of widespread human meat-eating coincides with the emergence of Homo habilis, the "handyman" of early humans. At a 2 million-year-old site in Kenya, flaked stone blades and hammers were found near piles of bone fragments. Butcher marks show that Homo habilis used their crude stone tools to strip flesh off a carcass and crack open bones to get at the marrow. That meat would literally have been a tough transition because, even though they had stronger jaws and larger teeth, they were not adapted to eating raw meat. Their mouths and guts were designed more for grinding and digesting plants. MORE ASK FUZZY: Something that they (in fact, all life) had to deal with is that you have to spend energy to get energy. Cooking changes this balance by making it easier to extract nutrients. The earliest clear evidence of cooking dates back roughly 800,000 years ago, although it could have begun sooner. This has been crucial to human evolution because our brains are far larger than that of other primates and three times the size of our distant ancestors, Australopithecus. Those big brains are expensive, consuming 20 per cent of our body's total energy. That's far more than other mammals, whose brains only use about 4 per cent of their energy. Cooking also has reduced the need for a long digestive tract and, over hundreds of thousands of years, the human gut has shrunk. This makes cooking another one of those apparently ordinary technologies that have been integral to the rise of humans and, ultimately, to civilisation. The Fuzzy Logic Science Show is at 11am Sundays on 2xx 98.3FM. Send your questions to AskFuzzy@ Podcast: It's thought that, between 2.6 and 2.5 million years ago, our distant human ancestors were subsisting mostly on fruits, leaves, seeds, flowers and tubers. Then, when the Earth became significantly hotter and drier, forests were replaced by great grasslands. Nutritious plants became scarce, forcing hominins to find new sources of energy. Meanwhile the growing number of grazing herbivores across the savanna grasslands meant there was also more meat. Evidence uncovered by archaeologists reveals cut marks from crude stone tools in the bones of large herbivores 2.5 million years ago. Without sophisticated tools they wouldn't have been capable hunters, but there were sabre-toothed cats. Even if those were efficient killers, they were probably also messy eaters, leaving enough meat for hominin scavenging. The earliest evidence of widespread human meat-eating coincides with the emergence of Homo habilis, the "handyman" of early humans. At a 2 million-year-old site in Kenya, flaked stone blades and hammers were found near piles of bone fragments. Butcher marks show that Homo habilis used their crude stone tools to strip flesh off a carcass and crack open bones to get at the marrow. That meat would literally have been a tough transition because, even though they had stronger jaws and larger teeth, they were not adapted to eating raw meat. Their mouths and guts were designed more for grinding and digesting plants. MORE ASK FUZZY: Something that they (in fact, all life) had to deal with is that you have to spend energy to get energy. Cooking changes this balance by making it easier to extract nutrients. The earliest clear evidence of cooking dates back roughly 800,000 years ago, although it could have begun sooner. This has been crucial to human evolution because our brains are far larger than that of other primates and three times the size of our distant ancestors, Australopithecus. Those big brains are expensive, consuming 20 per cent of our body's total energy. That's far more than other mammals, whose brains only use about 4 per cent of their energy. Cooking also has reduced the need for a long digestive tract and, over hundreds of thousands of years, the human gut has shrunk. This makes cooking another one of those apparently ordinary technologies that have been integral to the rise of humans and, ultimately, to civilisation. The Fuzzy Logic Science Show is at 11am Sundays on 2xx 98.3FM. Send your questions to AskFuzzy@ Podcast: It's thought that, between 2.6 and 2.5 million years ago, our distant human ancestors were subsisting mostly on fruits, leaves, seeds, flowers and tubers. Then, when the Earth became significantly hotter and drier, forests were replaced by great grasslands. Nutritious plants became scarce, forcing hominins to find new sources of energy. Meanwhile the growing number of grazing herbivores across the savanna grasslands meant there was also more meat. Evidence uncovered by archaeologists reveals cut marks from crude stone tools in the bones of large herbivores 2.5 million years ago. Without sophisticated tools they wouldn't have been capable hunters, but there were sabre-toothed cats. Even if those were efficient killers, they were probably also messy eaters, leaving enough meat for hominin scavenging. The earliest evidence of widespread human meat-eating coincides with the emergence of Homo habilis, the "handyman" of early humans. At a 2 million-year-old site in Kenya, flaked stone blades and hammers were found near piles of bone fragments. Butcher marks show that Homo habilis used their crude stone tools to strip flesh off a carcass and crack open bones to get at the marrow. That meat would literally have been a tough transition because, even though they had stronger jaws and larger teeth, they were not adapted to eating raw meat. Their mouths and guts were designed more for grinding and digesting plants. MORE ASK FUZZY: Something that they (in fact, all life) had to deal with is that you have to spend energy to get energy. Cooking changes this balance by making it easier to extract nutrients. The earliest clear evidence of cooking dates back roughly 800,000 years ago, although it could have begun sooner. This has been crucial to human evolution because our brains are far larger than that of other primates and three times the size of our distant ancestors, Australopithecus. Those big brains are expensive, consuming 20 per cent of our body's total energy. That's far more than other mammals, whose brains only use about 4 per cent of their energy. Cooking also has reduced the need for a long digestive tract and, over hundreds of thousands of years, the human gut has shrunk. This makes cooking another one of those apparently ordinary technologies that have been integral to the rise of humans and, ultimately, to civilisation. The Fuzzy Logic Science Show is at 11am Sundays on 2xx 98.3FM. Send your questions to AskFuzzy@ Podcast:
The Advertiser
14-05-2025
- Science
- The Advertiser
Ask Fuzzy: How does an induction cooker work?
You can usually tell whether a device is inefficient by the amount of wasted heat. An obvious example is the internal combustion engine which burns more than half its fuel doing nothing more than getting hot. The best that most cars can manage is about 20-40 per cent efficiency. That means 60-80 per cent is wasted. Great if you want to cook sausages, but it doesn't you get anywhere. Televisions, computers and power charges all get warm to varying degrees and, in each case, that means wasted energy. Then there are kitchen stoves such as gas and those with old-style heater elements. They certainly get hot but, as with cars, much of that goes into heating itself and the air around it without doing any useful work. A good indicator that induction cooktops are highly efficient (about 84 per cent) is that the "hot plates" are often cool enough to touch (carefully) shortly after they finish cooking. The history of electromagnetic induction goes back to 1820 when Danish physicist Hans Christian Oersted discovered that an electric current generates a magnetic field. Then in 1821 English physicist Michael Faraday made a primitive electric motor by placing a magnet near a piece of wire. When he fed an electric current into the wire, it generated a magnetic field, pushing itself away from the permanent magnet. In 1831, he flipped the idea around by rotating a coil of wire through a magnetic field to induce an electric current, thus inventing the electricity generator. MORE ASK FUZZY: Now we see induction used in electric toothbrushes cradles and wireless phone chargers. As the name implies, induction stoves work on the same principle. An alternating current running through the tightly wound metal coil inside a cooking zone induces a high-frequency alternating magnetic field. That produces whirling electrical currents inside the pan. The repeated magnetising and demagnetising (magnetic hysteresis) turns it into a heater. The beauty of this is that it heats the pan directly instead of an element and the air around it. If there's no pan on the cooking zone, the cooking zone stays cold. Although your home power supply alternates at 50Hz, an induction cooktop is 20-40kHz, which is 500 to 1000 times faster. That offers a couple of advantages. One is that being above the range of hearing, stops any annoying buzzing. The other is that it prevents your pots from dancing around on the cooktop. The Fuzzy Logic Science Show is at 11am Sundays on 2xx 98.3FM. Send your questions to AskFuzzy@ Podcast: You can usually tell whether a device is inefficient by the amount of wasted heat. An obvious example is the internal combustion engine which burns more than half its fuel doing nothing more than getting hot. The best that most cars can manage is about 20-40 per cent efficiency. That means 60-80 per cent is wasted. Great if you want to cook sausages, but it doesn't you get anywhere. Televisions, computers and power charges all get warm to varying degrees and, in each case, that means wasted energy. Then there are kitchen stoves such as gas and those with old-style heater elements. They certainly get hot but, as with cars, much of that goes into heating itself and the air around it without doing any useful work. A good indicator that induction cooktops are highly efficient (about 84 per cent) is that the "hot plates" are often cool enough to touch (carefully) shortly after they finish cooking. The history of electromagnetic induction goes back to 1820 when Danish physicist Hans Christian Oersted discovered that an electric current generates a magnetic field. Then in 1821 English physicist Michael Faraday made a primitive electric motor by placing a magnet near a piece of wire. When he fed an electric current into the wire, it generated a magnetic field, pushing itself away from the permanent magnet. In 1831, he flipped the idea around by rotating a coil of wire through a magnetic field to induce an electric current, thus inventing the electricity generator. MORE ASK FUZZY: Now we see induction used in electric toothbrushes cradles and wireless phone chargers. As the name implies, induction stoves work on the same principle. An alternating current running through the tightly wound metal coil inside a cooking zone induces a high-frequency alternating magnetic field. That produces whirling electrical currents inside the pan. The repeated magnetising and demagnetising (magnetic hysteresis) turns it into a heater. The beauty of this is that it heats the pan directly instead of an element and the air around it. If there's no pan on the cooking zone, the cooking zone stays cold. Although your home power supply alternates at 50Hz, an induction cooktop is 20-40kHz, which is 500 to 1000 times faster. That offers a couple of advantages. One is that being above the range of hearing, stops any annoying buzzing. The other is that it prevents your pots from dancing around on the cooktop. The Fuzzy Logic Science Show is at 11am Sundays on 2xx 98.3FM. Send your questions to AskFuzzy@ Podcast: You can usually tell whether a device is inefficient by the amount of wasted heat. An obvious example is the internal combustion engine which burns more than half its fuel doing nothing more than getting hot. The best that most cars can manage is about 20-40 per cent efficiency. That means 60-80 per cent is wasted. Great if you want to cook sausages, but it doesn't you get anywhere. Televisions, computers and power charges all get warm to varying degrees and, in each case, that means wasted energy. Then there are kitchen stoves such as gas and those with old-style heater elements. They certainly get hot but, as with cars, much of that goes into heating itself and the air around it without doing any useful work. A good indicator that induction cooktops are highly efficient (about 84 per cent) is that the "hot plates" are often cool enough to touch (carefully) shortly after they finish cooking. The history of electromagnetic induction goes back to 1820 when Danish physicist Hans Christian Oersted discovered that an electric current generates a magnetic field. Then in 1821 English physicist Michael Faraday made a primitive electric motor by placing a magnet near a piece of wire. When he fed an electric current into the wire, it generated a magnetic field, pushing itself away from the permanent magnet. In 1831, he flipped the idea around by rotating a coil of wire through a magnetic field to induce an electric current, thus inventing the electricity generator. MORE ASK FUZZY: Now we see induction used in electric toothbrushes cradles and wireless phone chargers. As the name implies, induction stoves work on the same principle. An alternating current running through the tightly wound metal coil inside a cooking zone induces a high-frequency alternating magnetic field. That produces whirling electrical currents inside the pan. The repeated magnetising and demagnetising (magnetic hysteresis) turns it into a heater. The beauty of this is that it heats the pan directly instead of an element and the air around it. If there's no pan on the cooking zone, the cooking zone stays cold. Although your home power supply alternates at 50Hz, an induction cooktop is 20-40kHz, which is 500 to 1000 times faster. That offers a couple of advantages. One is that being above the range of hearing, stops any annoying buzzing. The other is that it prevents your pots from dancing around on the cooktop. The Fuzzy Logic Science Show is at 11am Sundays on 2xx 98.3FM. Send your questions to AskFuzzy@ Podcast: You can usually tell whether a device is inefficient by the amount of wasted heat. An obvious example is the internal combustion engine which burns more than half its fuel doing nothing more than getting hot. The best that most cars can manage is about 20-40 per cent efficiency. That means 60-80 per cent is wasted. Great if you want to cook sausages, but it doesn't you get anywhere. Televisions, computers and power charges all get warm to varying degrees and, in each case, that means wasted energy. Then there are kitchen stoves such as gas and those with old-style heater elements. They certainly get hot but, as with cars, much of that goes into heating itself and the air around it without doing any useful work. A good indicator that induction cooktops are highly efficient (about 84 per cent) is that the "hot plates" are often cool enough to touch (carefully) shortly after they finish cooking. The history of electromagnetic induction goes back to 1820 when Danish physicist Hans Christian Oersted discovered that an electric current generates a magnetic field. Then in 1821 English physicist Michael Faraday made a primitive electric motor by placing a magnet near a piece of wire. When he fed an electric current into the wire, it generated a magnetic field, pushing itself away from the permanent magnet. In 1831, he flipped the idea around by rotating a coil of wire through a magnetic field to induce an electric current, thus inventing the electricity generator. MORE ASK FUZZY: Now we see induction used in electric toothbrushes cradles and wireless phone chargers. As the name implies, induction stoves work on the same principle. An alternating current running through the tightly wound metal coil inside a cooking zone induces a high-frequency alternating magnetic field. That produces whirling electrical currents inside the pan. The repeated magnetising and demagnetising (magnetic hysteresis) turns it into a heater. The beauty of this is that it heats the pan directly instead of an element and the air around it. If there's no pan on the cooking zone, the cooking zone stays cold. Although your home power supply alternates at 50Hz, an induction cooktop is 20-40kHz, which is 500 to 1000 times faster. That offers a couple of advantages. One is that being above the range of hearing, stops any annoying buzzing. The other is that it prevents your pots from dancing around on the cooktop. The Fuzzy Logic Science Show is at 11am Sundays on 2xx 98.3FM. Send your questions to AskFuzzy@ Podcast:
