How many crocuses do you need to collect to get a kilogram of saffron? Detailed answer

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How many crocuses do you need to collect to get a kilogram of saffron? Detailed answer

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How many crocuses do you need to collect to get a kilogram of saffron?

From 85 to 000. That is why even today the retail price of a pound of high-quality Spanish saffron "mancha" is three thousand seven hundred and fifty (140) pounds sterling.

On the island of Crete, on the remains of the frescoes of the ancient Minoan palaces (1600 BC), you can see the image of the collection of saffron. Alexander the Great washed his hair with saffron to give it a pleasant orange sheen. Shampoo, I must say, is not cheap: in those days, saffron was reputed to be as rare as diamonds, and cost more than gold.

In medieval Nuremberg, as well as during the reign of Henry VIII in England, "debossing" saffron by mixing with something else was punishable by death. The guilty were burned at the stake or buried alive along with their criminal goods.

The town of Saffron-Walden, located in Essex, near Cambridge, got its name from the precious spice (in English saffron - saffron.): Once there was the center of the English saffron trade. The legend says that it all started with a stolen saffron seed bulb, which a pilgrim from the Middle East brought here in the XNUMXth century, hiding a wanderer in his staff. Until then, the town was called just one word - Walden.

Only the introduction of such products as tea, coffee, chocolate and vanilla gradually led to a decline in the cultivation of crocuses, although in Italy, France and Spain saffron remained the most important agricultural crop for quite a long time.

The word "saffron" comes from the Arabic asfar, which means "yellow".

Author: John Lloyd, John Mitchinson

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Evening coffee knocks down the biological clock 01.10.2015

We drink coffee to wake up sleep, but the effect can be much deeper and longer lasting - researchers from the University of Colorado at Boulder found that coffee affects circadian rhythms so that our internal clock no longer coincides with natural time.

Caffeine (recall that it is contained not only in coffee, but also in tea, cocoa, cola and some other products) binds to the adenosine receptors of brain neurons. Adenosine is not only part of DNA as one of the "letters" of the genetic code, it is also involved in the transmission of a wide variety of signals that affect metabolism and physiology. In particular, it is believed that it suppresses the processes of excitation in the brain, so that its replacement with caffeine leads to stimulation of brain activity. But the stimulating effect of caffeine is not the only effect, and its effect on circadian rhythms was discovered some time ago in experiments with algae and fruit flies. However, this has not yet been tested in humans.

An experiment by Kenneth Wright and his colleagues was as follows: several volunteers were given caffeine tablets corresponding to a double espresso three hours before they usually went to bed. Then saliva was taken from them every half an hour to assess the level of the hormone melatonin, which is responsible for drowsiness: it accumulates in the dark, signaling that it's time to sleep, and is considered one of the most important regulators of the circadian rhythm. It turned out, as the authors of the work in Science Translational Medicine write, "double espresso" in tablets three hours before bedtime delayed the dynamics of melatonin by 40 minutes. That is, when a person went to bed, his body believed that something could be done for another 40 minutes.

The situation was similar when a person was forced to sit all three hours in bright light, as if all this time it had been a sunny noon. Light is the main regulator of biological rhythms, and melatonin levels, as has been said, directly depend on whether it is dark or light around us, so it is not surprising that in people who were in the light, melatonin levels were delayed by as much as 85 minutes. If inappropriate lighting and caffeine were combined, there was no additional delay in the biological clock - most likely due to the fact that the light set the maximum shift of the hands, and caffeine could not add anything here.

Human osteosarcoma cells were used to understand the molecular mechanism of circadian delay. Previously, it was possible to show that caffeine has exactly the same effect on them, delaying daily fluctuations in the activity of genes involved in controlling the circadian rhythm. Now, with the help of osteosarcoma cells, researchers have found that the stimulatory effect of caffeine and its ability to interfere with the biological clock relies on somewhat different molecular mechanisms: stimulation depends on adenosine A1 receptors, and clock shift depends on similar, but still different, A2 receptors. .

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