The chemical secrets that help keep honey fresh for so long

Yep, and you end up with silage if it's stored anaerobically.

Different desert plants use similar ideas, the Aussie outback for example blooms for about a month after a given flood, reproduces, then dies out near completely except around the occasional waterhole.

By definition, the desert "niche" IS filled. It has as much life as it can support. That doesn't mean wall-to-wall forest; you wouldn't expect to find that covering a field of barely weathered granite, either.

All life on Earth uses water to transport chemicals and ions across its cells. Period. It's one immutable requirement of life on Earth.

I wonder if there's some general mathematical description one could form of the biomass per acre versus water content of the "surface soil". The oceans provide the extreme, but even then there are "biodeserts" far from land where there are insufficient nutrients (organic chemicals, probably) to keep even algae going.

The idea being that you pair multiple decoders with each encoder, and multiple encoders with each decoder (randomly sample if large populations). The selective pressure is a feedback loop between the encoder and decoder populations that requires the members to produce and interpret the latent vector as well as possible. In theory, this creates a form of generalization pressure wherein the encoders and decoders must perform well with a wide range of possible up/down stream states. I think with large enough populations, this could be robust to premature convergence and overfitting.

Similarly one should not put honey to too hot tea if one wants the benefits instead of just sugar.

I'll bet only the imported Chinese honey is pasteurized on the supermarket shelf. Most of that goes to industrial use anyway.

> Infantile botulism is extremely rare. There are an estimated 100 cases per year in the U.S., among approximately 4 million children in the age range under 1. That’s a risk of 1 in 40,000. This is somewhat less likely than the chance of visiting the ER for a blanket-related injury in a given year (yes, I looked that up, and I do think it’s a good comparison).

> ... In an estimated 20% of cases — that’s about 20 cases a year — honey is one of the exposures. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the botulism actually came from honey; it’s just that because we know the spores can live in honey … it seems possible.

> At best, this suggests that by avoiding honey, you could lower the risk of infantile botulism from 1 in 40,000 to 1 in 50,000.

I think you're making a novel semantic difference, which is irrelevant to anyone puking their guts out from botulism.

And OP evidently knows a lot about honey :)

> (However, no edible honey has been found in Egyptian tombs; all such cases have been proven to be other substances or only chemical traces.[29])

...but the citation is from 01975.

The Smithsonian page is a great link! It mentions that the pH of honey is 3–4.5 (another crucial fact omitted from the BBC article) and mentions the peroxide, but not the methylglyoxal.

The Smithsonian article contains this link:

> Modern archeologists, excavating ancient Egyptian tombs, have often found something unexpected amongst the tombs’ artifacts: pots of honey, thousands of years old, and yet still preserved

which goes to a Google Books page I can't see (perhaps because I'm in Argentina) of a book from 02006 that is apparently about beekeeping, not archaeology, called "Letters from the Hive", published by Random House Children's Books.

The copy of the book that I've been able to get does talk extensively about the uses of honey in ancient Egypt, but, unless I missed it, doesn't mention pots of honey being found in tombs at all.

Even if so, it's unclear whether the book would have evidence posterior to Wikipedia's 01975 citation; it isn't the kind of book that cites its sources.

Different solutes have different DRHs, but there are many of them whose affinity for water is so strong that their DRH is so low that under normal circumstances they never completely dry out. Some of them are commonly used as desiccants, such as lye, calcium chloride, and magnesium chloride. In general, mixing solutes tends to impede crystallization, so more heterogeneous mixtures like honey tend to have lower DRH than more homogeneous mixtures like pure sucrose.

(This is an engineering reason to add something like lemon juice when you make simple syrup: the citrate hydrolyzes some of the sucrose into glucose and fructose, greatly impeding crystallization and greatly improving your chances of having a pourable syrup when you want to use it next month.)

Under many circumstances, honey will eventually absorb enough water from the air by this mechanism to permit the growth of yeasts and bacteria. But it takes a remarkably long time.

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† The DRH does vary with temperature, but in most cases only slightly over the human-survivable range, so you can say "CaCl₂ has a DRH of about 40%" and be correct enough for many purposes.

It does seem plausible that some wines might last longer than honey.