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5,300 years ago, a man who we now call Ötzi died crossing the Alps of northern Italy. In a pouch found on his mummified remains, he carried the mushrooms amadou and a birch polypore to help him survive the crossing … not that they did him much good. Mushrooms have long been recognized by a wide range of peoples and cultures, not only for their culinary properties, but also as powerful medicines. Indigenous peoples of North America have long used puffball mushrooms as wound healers. In ancient China, some mushrooms were so prized, particularly the reishi fungi, they were forbidden...

Forty billion: that’s the estimated number of single-use coffee pods that end up in landfills every year. It’s a staggering amount of plastic waste; if the pods were placed end-to-end, that’s enough to wrap around the Earth 11 times. This massive global problem is what has driven the team at NEXE Innovations to develop a more sustainable, guilt-free way to start off your morning. “We wanted to create a compostable pod to tackle this problem – and make sure the coffee still tasted great,” said Dr. Zac Hudson, Chief Science Officer at NEXE Innovations and one of the brains behind...

MCT stands for medium-chain triglycerides, which is a mouthful, but the science is pretty straightforward. Triglycerides are just a fancy word for fats and they have two main functions in the body: they are either stored as body fat for later use or burned as energy.  MCT’s differ from their cousins, SCTs (short-chain triglycerides) and LCTs (long-chain triglycerides) in the number of carbon atoms in their fatty acid chains. Now stay with me — this is important because the longer the fatty acid chain, the harder it is for your body to digest. This means that MCTs are usually used...

Composting is as old as, well, dirt. Compost was known to the Greeks and Romans and there are plenty of references to the cultivation of the soil in the Bible. Composting has come a long way since then, but the idea that natural processes can provide sustainable solutions to modern problems is a lesson that still rings true, especially today. Every year, over 40 billion petroleum-based single-serve coffee pods end up in landfills around the world, where they take over a thousand years to break down. Many plastics depend on UV and infrared light from the sun to break them...