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Right now, my favorite sweets are Puerto Rican aji dulce - cachucha. It's a chinense variety, but with no heat. Its the key ingredient to making authentic Puerto Rican sofrito.

I'd say its a n unreasonable assumption; you're absolutely right that you didn't overlook any amazing scientific data. No citations given is the first citation that the article just might be full of fertilizer. The fact that worms aren't insects lnor have they ever been), is a sign they're...

I see what you did there.

Alkaloid production is itself a complex, polygenic trait. Its a sum of multiple functions. It;s entirely possible (and not at all improbably) to see a non-monomodal distribution of alkaloid content from pod-to-pod on a single plant. This is a perennial problem in natural products bioengineering...

No quant analysis is 100% accurate. The best you can reasonably hope for is demonstrated, documented accuracy within reasonable acceptance limits, which is a key part of method validation. To the best of my knowledge, they didn't follow a validated protocol, but then again, that would make this...

I guess I'll play the role of optimist for once. The interesting thing here is that it isn't so easy to answer the seemingly straightforward question "what is the hottest pepper in the world?". It's the inherently tricky thing with handling the superlatives for biologicals, isn't it? Sure, the...

Full disclosure: I'm developing the "Bulgarian Kumquat Tarantula Castrator III". As the name suggests, it's a strain I've been developing from the Chuck Norris phenotype, and yes, its tastes like cinnamon toast. Instead of capsaicin, its actually full of irukandji box jellyfish, and shoots...

Dude, you know those are totally the same variety as PPJ384 and PPJ588, right? I met this guy at the bus station. He's developed 6000 varieties of peppers, and has spent 50 years developing a pepper that weeps droplets of oleoresin that is pure capsaicin. He's also a nuclear scientist, a...

I really want to thank you, mrz1988, for a really interesting topic -- anything that gets people thinking critically about analytical data is a great thing. As soon as I read about a measurement of 2 million SHU's, my spidey senses started tingling that there were a few details missing. It...

Thanks for the vote of confidence. :) I'm putting some things in place to do some chromatography testing this growing season, but I don't think there's a need for it here. The zany stories about vast, ultra-secret R&D pepper development projects, chemists doing genetic testing to prove peppers...

Method validation is a process by which you demonstrate the ability of your test method to perform to a set of agreed upon acceptance criteria. You do this by successfully executing a validation protocol, which sets out specific acceptance criteria. For quantitative methods like this one, it...

Does anybody else here think the drama in this thread is reminiscent of the movie, "Best in Show", with chili peppers replacing Yorkshire terriers?

Wow, where in East Africa did all these lovely things come from?

For the record, agar is not the same as sodium polacrylate (the stuff in diapers.) I'mvery interested in how this turns out.

Incidentally, for anybody interested, Wilbur L. Scoville's famous method just turned 100 years old this month. Somebody earlier asked for a copy, and here it is. It's written with an enjoyable, old-timey feel to it. The varieties of peppers are equally old-timey sounding: "Japan chilliess"...

In terms of analysis, the rich vein of HPLC hasn't been mined to exhaustion here. Moreover, there's zero evidence that (fill-in-the-blank) will address the problem better. All we have here is the contention that HPLC is "unreliable", when there's no experimental details given, and no definition...

'Gold Medal' is my personal fav, with 'Japanese Black Trifele' as a close second.

You're absolutely right. The way things stand, it's pretty subjective.

Exactly. I don't care if it's "directly connected" with the Pope -- if you don't have a validation report showing that you know how to make the method work, and you know when it's appropriate, and where it's limitations rest, then it's "exploratory" at best. :) Yes, there are papers reporting...

In my hometown of St. Paul, there is a tremendous demographic shift going on. Minnesota has a substantial population of Scandinavian Americans, but in the last 30 years, there has been a major influx of Southeast Asians -- in particular, Cambodians, Laotians and Hmong people. What used to be...