【推荐2】For the Greek philosopher Celsus, red wine could be used to treat endless diseases, from tiredness to fever and coughs. But despite its convenient healing powers, the grape, he told his faithful readers, could bring about headaches. Now, researchers believe they have found the reason why red wine causes such headaches.

“We think we are finally on the right track toward explaining this old mystery,” said Morris Levin, the director of the Headache Center at the University of California, San Francisco. “The next step is to test it scientifically on people who develop these headaches.” Red wine headaches are different from hangover (宿醉) the morning after the night before. Rather than coming on after a long session, they can strike 30 minutes after drinking only one small glass.

The researchers ran lab tests on more than a dozen chemicals in red wine. One stood out. Quercetin (槲皮素), found almost only in red wine, turned out to be particularly effective at blocking the enzyme (酶) that breaks down alcohol. This could be key to solving the mystery. With the important enzyme suppressed, alcohol builds up in the bloodstream. At high levels, this causes headaches, red faces and sweating.

According to the researchers, when some people drink red wine with even small amounts of quercetin they can develop a headache. Why some are more affected than others is unclear. The team now hopes to find out the effects of red wines with different quercetin levels.

Grapes make quercetin in response to sunlight, so grapes grown in plenty of sunlight can have five times more quercetin than other reds. Processes like fining and ageing also affect quercetin levels. “It will be potentially very helpful for people who drink red wine to be able to choose wines less likely to cause headaches,” Levin said. “Also, winemakers may use our findings to reduce quercetin in their wines.”

【推荐1】The Feast of the Seven Fishes is an Italian-American tradition that dates back to an immigration (移民) wave in the 1900s. The Italian American tradition of the “Feast of the Seven Fishes” has appeared in movies and recently in the hit show The Bear. But talking of the origin, you’ll get many different answers. The Feast of the Seven Fishes is a dear tradition to many Italian Americans who enjoy at least seven different seafood dishes on Christmas Eve.

A vast majority of Italian immigrants to the United States were from rural Southern Italy at the turn of the 19th century. They came to America because there were jobs from building railroads to skyscrapers. Friends and families found success and brought their loved ones to the U.S. Some say fish was chosen for the Feast because it was plentiful for impoverished families in Southern Italy. Others say the sea represented Italian Americans’ connection between their old and new homes.

Writer and director Robert Tinnell made a comic in 2004 about his experience with the Feast of the Seven Fishes, which he later made into a 2019 movie. Growing up in North Central West Virginia, he fondly remembers his great grandmother organizing the Feast. After she died, his grandfather and other men in the family took over. That particular manly activity is something that the first Italian immigrants would have also performed out of necessity: men came to America first, without their wives and daughters.

However, knowledge about where to shop, when to prepare, how to cook, the history behind the meal and family traditions soon became the responsibility of mothers to pass down to their daughters, says Di Giovine, a professor at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. They are also likely the ones who have the final say in making changes to recipes. Over time, families often adjust the menu to make things easier, cheaper, more abundant, and more accommodating of dietary restrictions.

【推荐3】Young children are always watching-including when people swap spit through actions like food sharing. Such behavior helps babies infer who is in close relationships with one another, a study suggests.

Typically, people are more likely to engage in activities that can lead to an exchange of saliva (唾液), such as kissing or sharing an ice cream, with family members or close friends than with an acquaintance. So saliva sharing can be a marker of “thick relationships, “ or people with strong attachments, says MIT developmental psychologist Ashley Thomas.

To see if young children might use saliva sharing as a social cue for close bonds, Thomas and colleagues ran experiments of people engaging with puppets(木偶). When shown a puppet seemingly crying, kids of 8 months old were more likely to look at an adult who had previously shared saliva with the puppet than an adult who hadn’t, the team reports.

Scientists, of course, can’t know exactly babies’ thought. But tracking where they look offers hints. The team used where the kids looked first when a puppet showed distress as an indicator of their understanding of the relationship.

In some experiments, the team showed 8- to 10-month-olds or 16- to 18-month-olds videos of a woman sharing an orange slice with a puppet. A second video depicted another woman and the puppet playing with a ball. During a final video, which showed the puppet crying while seated between the two women, the kids’ eyes were more often drawn to the woman who had shared the orange.

The team saw similar results in another experiment. One woman stuck her finger in her mouth and then in one puppet’s mouth to share saliva. For the other, she touched only her forehead and then the puppet’s forehead. After the woman showed distress, kids spent more time looking at the puppet that had seemingly swapped saliva.

It’s unclear how the findings relate to children’s daily lives. Future studies could switch out actresses for family members to better understand the role saliva may play in distinguishing relationships. Other cues, such as hugging, may also play a role, Thomas says.