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Over the past few years, brewers outside Sake’s native country have started to produce their own versions of the classic Japanese rice wine. We had a few questions.

Sah-key or sah-kay? Sah-kay.

What is sake made from? Water, rice, koji (mould that helps break up the starch and allows it to become glucose) and yeast. The balance of these ingredients creates different flavours. In its final form, sake is about 80 per cent water. Historically, brewing locations were selected for their natural supply of “good” water, a mystical quality known only by taste. Eventually it was discovered to be caused by potassium, magnesium and phosphoric acid, which promote fermentation. Favourable composition can now be achieved by filtering.

Unlike table rice, brown brewing rice has a large starch component concentrated in the centre of the grain. It’s surrounded by the bran, which contains proteins, fats and amino acids. Large machines with vertically pivoted rollers scrape away layer after layer to expose the starch, which can then be converted to fermentable sugars.

THE WORLD WOULD be a far more exciting place if they did. Alas, exploding cars are largely a product of what we might call Hollywood physics – the same body of natural law responsible for such phenomena as airborne strafing runs that invariably miss their comparatively slow-moving targets, industrial-style glass skylights that break the fall of those who routinely plunge through them and 50-year-old actresses with 19-year-old figures. So, no: cars virtually never explode in the manner depicted on screen, unless someone tooling along in a nitroglycerine-powered sedan festooned with dynamite has a notably bad day.

It may surprise you to learn that liquid petrol won’t explode – in fact, it won’t even burn. Petrol vapour will burn and, if compressed, can explode (that’s what powers your car, after all), but it would be a freak accident indeed that resulted in the precise set of circumstances required to produce a genuine, Cineplex-grade, popcorn-rattling ka-boom. Garden-variety car fires are not altogether uncommon, says Peter Leiss, an automotive engineer and certified vehicle fire investigator. He adds that whereas fuel vapour ignited by a spark can produce a fireball that a layman might mistake for an explosion, “actual explosions like we see in the movies where the hood or parts of the car go flying up into the sky – that’s very, very rare.”

Gram for gram, what’s the most fattening, or caloric, food?

Want to get fat? Eat fat. Shocker, right? Pure fat packs a truly waist-expanding wallop – some 37 kj per gram. That’s more than double the payload delivered by protein or carbohydrates.

Of course, “pure fat” is not an item you’ll see on a lot of menus (“Excellent choice, sir. Will that be the cup or the bowl?”), nor is your local supermarket likely to stock it, though it might be fun to ask. The most fat-laden foodstuffs you’re likely to encounter routinely in the real world are oils and nuts. Your typical oils – olive, canola, peanut, sesame, etc – contain about 500 kilojoules per tablespoon. Nuts, meanwhile, tend to be more than 50 per cent fat and will therefore, unless consumed in moderation, make you 100 per cent fat. Macadamias, at 30,5 kilojoules an ounce, are the worst offenders, followed by pecans at 29,8 and pine nuts at 28,1.

Don’t despair, however. Oils and nuts may be fatty, but, like, say, John Candy, many have appealing features, too. Registered dietitian and Boston University nutrition professor Joan Salge Blake cites olive oil, nuts and avocados as three fatty foods that deliver beneficial nutrients along with their caloric freight. More problematic, perhaps, are your butters, creams, Alfredo sauces, etc, which may taste good, but will bulk you up like nobody’s business. Bone marrow, of all things, is another notable caloric catastrophe, but we suspect most folks will find it pretty easy to resist.

What was the longest operation ever?

Well, you see, there was this really fat guy whose car exploded…

Actually, the longest surgery on record occurred in 2001 and lasted more than four straight days – 103 hours to be exact. A team of 20 doctors at Singapore General Hospital worked in shifts to separate Ganga and Jamuna Shrestha, 11-month-old twins conjoined at the head. Not only did the girls share a cranial cavity, their brains were partially fused. Typically such separation procedures might take 30 hours – still an eternity in surgical terms – but once under way, doctors discovered that the girls’ brains were even more tightly enmeshed than expected. “When we were planning the surgery, we did not expect it to last so long,” says Dr Keith Goh, who led the operation. “During the course of the surgery, we found that the two brains were so closely adherent to each other that we had to individually coagulate, separate and divide the blood vessels that were going between the two brains and all the brain tissue that was adherent.” He’s talking about hundreds of tiny blood vessels, each of which had to be traced and identified as belonging to one or the other of the girls. Moreover, the girls’ brains were not merely connected, they were wrapped around each other like a helix, adding to the complexity. And in the end, each twin’s skull needed to be refashioned, using a blend of bone material and Gore-tex fibres.

The surgery was facilitated by computerimaging technology that allowed surgeons to create 3D scans of the sisters’ brains and to rehearse in advance. As a side note, neurosurgeon and sometime US presidential aspirant Ben Carson, a pioneer in the field, served as an advisor to the team.

Most important, perhaps, the operation was a success: though Ganga contracted meningitis seven years later and passed away, Jamuna is now 15, alert and well and can talk, sing and attend school. PM