Related Articles
Piperine
You twist a pepper mill and think "flavor." Nineteenth-century chemist Hans Christian Ørsted saw something else: a crystalline alkaloid inside pepper that...
L-Histidine
In 1896, chemists first pulled a curious amino acid from animal tissue. They named it histidine—"tissue-born"—and for decades it blended into the background of...
Taurine
You crack an energy drink and brace for a jolt. Hidden beneath the caffeine and fizz is taurine—the molecule that, paradoxically, tends to quiet nerves, steady...
Beta-Alanine
You swallow the scoop and, within minutes, your skin prickles. The odd thing about beta-alanine is that you can feel it today—but its real work shows up weeks...
Creatine
A French chemist boiled beef in the 1830s and pulled out a crystal he named after κρέας—meat. Nearly two centuries later, the same molecule is helping...