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Mention watermelon and people immediately think of sweet, juicy, crimson-colored fruit. But watermelons didn't start that way, notes Angela R. Davis of the U.S. Agricultural Research Service. Wild watermelons in their native Africa are white fleshed, the size of softballs, and "hard like softballs," she notes. Bitter and anything but sweet, watermelons hardly started as dessert.

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I'm a serious tea drinker. I'll down it hot or cold, plain or with lemon. Like most Americans, however, I don't regularly add milk. But when my colleague David Lindley, an editor here at Science News, was growing up, his family certainly did.

Being a Brit, David comes from a culture that holds considerable reverence for this brew and might be accused of being fussy about its preparation...

Without skimping on portions, rats eating diets including oolong tea gain less weight than those dining teafree, a new study finds. The tea apparently impairs the body's ability to absorb fat.

The finding supports a weight-control strategy—oolong consumption—advocated by practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine, note Lauren E. Budd and her colleagues at the University of California...

A controversial nutritional test of a chemically modified fat suggests that the substance may be more harmful, at least in its potential to cause diabetes, than is a trans fat–rich, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil.

Many food producers are phasing out partially hydrogenated oils, which contain harmful trans fats. For certain products such as baker's shortening and margarine, some...