There are many tips or techniques that are strongly recommended for cooking, but it's hard to know which are evidence based and which are just passed along because that's what people always do.

Which are the tips that need more evidence?

Here are two that I struggle with, about stainless steel pans:

1. Water drop test / leidenfrost

People say that if you get your pan hot enough to get the leidenfrost effect and then add the oil you'll have less problems with sticking. My problem with this is that it means the pan gets very very hot - much hotter than it needs to be for most uses. My other problem is they all say "Look, I'll cook eggs and they won't stick" and those videos either have a ton of cuts, or the eggs stick and you can see the person pushing with a spatula to get rid of the stick, or their "scrambled eggs" is really a chopped omelette.

2. Heat the pan before adding oil. I don't understand this. Again, people say it helps prevent sticking, but they use some argument about "pores" which just feels hokey. I add cold oil to a cold pan and bring it up to temperature before adding food so the pan and oil are both at the right temperature, and food sticks and then releases, because that's how stainless pans work.

I'm aware I could be completely wrong here and that there may be a good evidence base for these, but they don't seem to work based on how I cook.

I went to university for computer science up until the pandemic started. It was great. I remember working on so many projects that were basic but a lot of fun and others that were a lot more complex but still fun and rewarding. For example, one of the staples of beginner projects is Conway's Game of Life. I remember building that in HTML, CSS, and Java Script. One of my other favorite projects was a website for alum to visit to see alumni news and events, and also to lookup other alum.

What were your favorite projects when learning to code?

When talking about climate, the ice age is mentioned a lot. Sometimes it is said that "the last ice age" ended roughly 10,000 years ago, and sometimes we are still said to be living in an ice age. So which one is correct? Technically both are correct. This is due to a complexity in terminology.

The broader climate state of Earth is divided into two categories: Icehouse Earth and Greenhouse Earth (Maslin, 2014). The state when there are continental glaciers (those that cover continents, separate from glaciers seen on mountains) at any point on Earth is called the Icehouse Earth, and the state when they do not exist is called the Greenhouse Earth. Approximately 80% of the last 500 million years has been spent as a Greenhouse Earth (Spicer and Corfield, 1992). During the icehouse state of the Earth, there are glacial and interglacial periods. The glacial period occurs when the glaciers at the poles move towards the lower latitudes of Earth, that is, towards the equator. The interglacial period is the time when glaciers remain at the poles.

Both the Icehouse Earth state and the glacial period are called Ice Age, but this is misleading. The last so-called “ice age” occurred 11,700 years ago (Clark et al., 2016). This event refers to the glacial period seen on Earth. However, the Earth is still in an "ice age" because it is still in the Icehouse Earth state. Even though it is currently in the interglacial warming period, this warming is approximately 15 times faster due to climate change (Clark et al., 2016). As the anthropogenic global warming gets stronger, the rate of warming will also increase.

The glacial periods seen in the last 500,000 years can be seen in this picture. Source for the picture is here.

The cycle of glacial and interglacial periods is clearly visible. One of the main factors that caused the emergence of Icehouse Earth states and glacial periods is the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It ended and started the ages by greatly changing the conditions on Earth (Maslin, 2014).

In conclusion, we are currently living in an ice age and also not. The reason for this is that the word ice age refers to two different phenomena. Therefore, it would be more useful to use the terms Icehouse Earth and glacial period instead of ice age. However, how this will be translated into everyday language remains a challenge.

Sources

• Clark, P., Shakun, J., Marcott, S. et al. (2016). Consequences of twenty-first-century policy for multi-millennial climate and sea-level change. Nature Clim Change 6, 360–369.
• Maslin, M. (2014). Climate change: a very short introduction. OUP Oxford.
• Spicer, R. A. & Corfield, R. M. (1992). A review of terrestrial and marine climates in the Cretaceous with implications for modelling the ‘Greenhouse Earth’. Geological Magazine, 129(2), 169-180 pp.