#26: The hidden dark matter of our food; NASA’s new search for life on Mars; smallpox in the American civil war

What’s in our food? By now you’d think we’d have a pretty firm handle on that question, but it turns out we don’t know the half of it.

In the pod this week are New Scientist journalists Rowan Hooper, Valerie Jamieson and Graham Lawton. They discuss what’s been called nutritional dark matter: the massive void in our understanding of the biochemicals that make up the food we eat. Our standard guidelines neglect to take into account thousands of molecules and compounds, which might explain why nutritional recommendations tend to flip-flop: chocolate and red wine is good for us one week, and vilified the next.

The team also visits Mars as NASA prepares to send a rover called Perseverance on a new life-finding mission, and they explore how a form of vaccination was being used as far back as the 18th century, later adopted by soldiers in the US civil war, in the fight against smallpox. They also celebrate DNA, as a quadruple-stranded form of the molecule has been discovered for the first time in healthy human cells, and herald a polystyrene-eating beetle which may help solve our plastic waste crisis.

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