Exponimela - Curiosità

Out of Curiosity

An apple a day keeps the doctor away! That's because:
• Apples contain vitamin C and improve our immune system
• They prevent heart diseases
• They contain a lot of sugar but they are low-calorie food. When you feel like eating something sweet you can eat an apple and be sure you won't put on weight
• They help to prevent breast cancer
• They help to avoid tooth decay: apple juice can kill up to 80% of bacteriums which are the causes of caries
• They protect us from cerebral pathologies like Alzhaimer and Parkinson's disease
• They are good for our lungs. If you eat five apples a week you'll have fewer breathing problems

Apples belong to the family of Rosacee. The apple-tree comes from central Asia and it dates back to the New Stone Age.
From a scientific point of view apples are false fruits which don't open spontaneously from the seed.
A European eats about 20 kilos of apples a year, while an American only eats 9 kilos a year.
China is the major world producer of apples.

Apples have various symbolical meanings in tradition and folklore all over the world:
• The ancient Greeks thought that throwing an apple was a declaration of love and considered that fruit a symbol of fertility.
• In Christian tradition, the apple is the symbol of temptation, it is the forbidden fruit. In Latin "malum" means both apple and evil
• In many myths apples represent the point of fusion between the earth and the sky
• In Baltic mythology apples are the symbol of the sunset
• In Scandinavian mythology apples are the food of the gods
• In some traditions, the apple that Adam and Eve ate in the Eden, got stuck in Adam’s throat: the name 'Adam’s apple' seems to come from there
• Jews eat slices of apples dipped into honey to wish prosperity for the new year
• In Russia, apples are put on the graves of dead people
• Apple-trees in bloom are a symbol of love.

In 2010 an Italian company announced they had decoded the genome of golden delicious (the popular yellow apple) which has 57,000 genes, more than those that compose the human genome, which are “only” 30,000.

From Swiss fields comes a natural remedy that can invert the process of ageing: an apple that could even be able to help with hair regrowth.
This is what Swiss researcher Daniel Schmid claims in his study published in the 'Journal of Applied Sciences' in which he states that the secret to keep young is in the plant stem cells of the fruit.
The apple he refers to is part of the rare tree family called Spatlauber Uttwiler and it has caught researchers’ attention because it can be kept intact for months.
That fruit is said to contain an active ingredient that could stop epidermal cells' ageing, prolong a cell’s life and start hair regrowth.
“Uttwiler apple extract could have a real anti-age action” says Schmid, who thinks that a skin lotion that contains plant stem cells could cancel wrinkles and make skin look younger.

The expression “Big Apple” is used to refer to the city of New York.
There are two explanations for that.
According to some people, in 1909, in the book “The Wayfarer in New York”, Edward S. Martin compared the State of New York to an apple-tree with the roots in the valley of the Mississipi and the fruit in New York.
According to some other people, in the 1920s, when jazz musicians played in public places in Manhattan they received a big red apple as a pay and they started to call Manhattan 'the big apple'.

Apple Records is the music label founded by The Beatles in London.
Its symbol was a green apple like a Granny Smith.
There was a legal battle between Apple Records and Apple Computers, in which the green apple of the Fab Four opposed the bitten apple of Cupertino.

The first logo of Steve Jobs' company was a picture of Newton under an apple-tree, but it was quite difficult to have it reproduced on a calculator and it was only applied to Apple I.

The bitten apple with the colours of the rainbow in reverse order goes back to 1977 and was designed by Rob Janoff for his employer who was Jobs' friend.
The bite represented knowledge (in the Bible an apple-tree is the tree of knowledge) and at the same time it recalled information technology since 'bite' is read like 'byte'.