When I moved to New York and started a car-free travel blog in 2007, I was a recovering Los Angeles transplant, keen to ditch driving and atone for my environmental sins. I hiked the Appalachian Trail off the Metro-North train, surfed via the Queens-bound A subway and biked into the Hudson Valley from the Bronx’s…
Known as the world’s smelliest fruit, durians are also essential to the farming economy of Indonesia. Although repulsive to many Western noses — some compare the smell to rotting trash — durians command the highest unit price of any fruit in Indonesia, with an export value of more than $250 million in 2013. Hoping to…
Regular exercise throughout adulthood may protect our muscles against age-related loss and damage later, according to an interesting new study of lifelong athletes and their thighs. The study finds that active older men’s muscles resemble, at a cellular level, those of 25-year-olds and weather inflammatory damage much better than the muscles of sedentary older people.…
PIETRASANTA, Italy — Franco Cervietti carved his first full-size copy of Michelangelo’s “David” when he was 29. He would sculpt the 17-foot-tall masterpiece five more times over 60 years in his family’s Pietrasanta workshop, chiseling it in the same cloud-colored Carrara marble that Michelangelo selected from the quarries of this area, a stone first excavated…
A pair of glasses. Comfortable loafers. A white shirt. Many of us have smart wardrobe staples for a reason — practical multipurpose pieces that save time and energy when considering what to wear every day. What these pieces never need to be, however, is ordinary. Nor should they come at the sacrifice of individual style.…
A potato paucity is upon us, and French fry aficionados are worried. Multiple news headlines this week have warned of a “possible French fry shortage” this year after a weaker harvest for many potato farmers in the United States and Canada. But experts say French fry consumers probably shouldn’t worry too much, because producers of…
When Julien Carotenuto, a Parisian of Italian heritage, abandoned his retail career to pursue his dream of making fresh mozzarella for his hometown, the predictions were dire. “People told me, ‘you’re crazy,’” he recalled on a recent afternoon. “In Italy, everyone said that I would never pull it off. Even my friends and family said…
ImageAlisa Vitti, an alternative health and wellness guru, at Westerly Natural Market in Manhattan. She is a big proponent of eating fermented foods like kimchi and sauerkraut to help support your microbiome.Credit…Dolly Faibyshev for The New York Times A few months ago, in a conference room at the Yard, a co-working space in Manhattan, a…
More than a third part of marine mammal species are threatened in the ocean ecosystems worldwide. Populations of vaquita (Phocoena sinus), the Indo-Pacific finless porpoise (Neophocaena phocaenoides), or freshwater dolphins are at risk of extinction. In closer latitudes, the Mediterranean monk seal (Monachus monachus) and the North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis) are listed in…
Parkinson’s and multisystem atrophy (MSA) – both of them neurodegenerative diseases – are associated with the accumulation of alpha-synuclein proteins in the brain. Researchers at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) and the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry (MPI-BPC) have investigated the molecular makeup of these protein deposits finding structural diversity. Experts from…