Science News

It’s a cool November day near Bologna, Italy. We are strolling through the woods with truffle hunter Mirko Illice and his little dog, Clinto. Clinto runs back and forth among the oak trees sniffing the ground, pausing, then running again. Suddenly, he stops and begins to dig furiously with both paws. “Ah, he’s found an Italian white truffle,” Mirko explains. “He uses both paws only when he finds one of those.” Mirko gently pulls the excited dog from the spot and pushes through the soil with his fingers. He extracts a yellowish brown lump the size of a golf ball and sniffs it. “ Benissimo , Clinto,” Mirko intones. Though not the finest example of the species, Tuber magnatum --which grows only in northern Italy, Serbia and Croatia--Clinto’s find will fetch a nice price of about $50 at the Saturday market.

Throughout history, truffles have appeared on the menu and in folklore. The Pharaoh Khufu served them at his royal table. Bedouins, Kalahari Bushmen and Australian Aborigines have hunted them for countless generations in deserts. The Romans savored them and thought they were produced by thunder.

Like many people, rats are happy to gorge themselves on tasty, high-fat treats. Bacon, sausage, chocolate and even cheesecake quickly became favorites of laboratory rats that recently were given access to these human indulgences--so much so that the animals came to depend on high quantities to feel good, like drug users who need to up their intake to get high. [More]

Tuna steak. Tuna tartare. Toro , as the Japanese call it, or the fatty underbelly of the bluefin tuna served as sushi --a delicacy that became more common with the advent of cheap refrigeration in the 1960s. These are just some of the ways that humans consume one of the few warm-blooded fish.  

Unfortunately that love for bluefin tuna has led to overfishing , despite the fish's ability to swim as fast as 80 kilometers per hour. The Atlantic population of the giant fish that grows to an average of more than 360 kilograms has fallen by 90 percent. And the estimated global population is less than half what it was in 1970.