Not into sports drinks or protein bars? Reaching for one of these isn’t essential when you’re trying to get in shape. (In fact, they can be packed with so much sugar that they’re not even good choices unless you’re tackling an especially tough or lengthy workout.) When it comes to fueling up before and after you exercise, there are some beneficial—and somewhat surprising—choices that you likely already have in your cabinet or fridge. Read on for six foods and drinks that research has proven are awesome options for staying energized when you hit the gym and to help your body bounce back quickly afterward.

1. GREENS

There’s no end to the kale craze in sight—and now research suggests that it can help you work out harder, too. Eating leafy greens like kale and spinach regularly can help improve your muscle fibers, which in turn can boost your athletic performance—especially during high-intensity exercise, like sprint intervals, and if you’re exercising in a low-oxygen condition, like at high altitude, according to a new Belgian study. Researchers say the greens contain nitrate, which benefits fast-oxidative muscle fibers.

2. WATERMELON JUICE

Leave the Gatorade on the shelf and reach for refreshing watermelon juice before you get sweaty: Sipping on the sweet juice an hour before exercise relieved people’s muscle soreness, says a study published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. Researchers say the fruit contains antioxidants and can increase muscle protein.

3. FAST FOOD

Leaving the gym and heading for the drive-thru could be a surprisingly good way to help your body recover post-workout. Yes, you read that right: Eating fast food is just as good at restoring glycogen (your muscles’ go-to source of energy) after you work out as traditional options like sports drinks and protein bars, found a recent study published in the International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism. Of course, load up on large fries with a cheeseburger and you can quickly overdo it on calories—so sticking to small servings may be your best bet.

4. CHOCOLATE

Permission to eat chocolate every day, granted. Nibbling on a couple squares of dark chocolate daily can improve exercisers’ endurance, according to a 2015 study. Researchers from Kingston University in London say the dark chocolate has similar benefits to beetroot juice and aids athletic performance by helping to dilate blood vessels and deliver more oxygen to muscles.

5. CEREAL

If you don’t have a protein bar on hand after exercising, reaching for a serving of cereal with non-fat milk can do the trick. Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin found that eating whole-grain cereal with milk is just as effective for promoting recovery after a lengthy workout. A bowl of the breakfast staple provides carbs, which help replenish your muscles’ stores of glycogen, plus protein for muscle repair.

6. COFFEE

It’s widely known that caffeine can give you a little athletic jolt, and it turns out coffee is an especially good form to get it pre-workout. Downing a couple mugs of coffee before you hit the running trail or gym can help you go longer, according to a recent study published in the International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism. Researchers from the University of Georgia found that when exercisers consumed between 3 and 7 milligrams of caffeine from coffee per kilogram of body weight, their endurance performance increased by about 24 percent. A cup generally contains between 75mg and 150mg of caffeine, so you should feel a boost if you down one before your workout.

All images courtesy of iStock.

If you’re like 62 percent of Americans, you get the bulk of your news from social media. Facebook has done a great job at getting your attention, but when it comes to filtering out fiction from fact they haven’t been so successful. Headlines like “Pope Francis Shocks the World, Endorses Donald Trump” and “Britain Threatens to Invade Switzerland Over Toblerone Shape Row” (both of which are flat-out false) pop up alongside stories from respectable news sources. What’s worse, fake stories can rack up thousands of likes and shares, making it difficult for readers to spot a hoax when it’s in front of them.

Programmer Daniel Sieradski has taken this problem into his own hands by creating a Chrome extension called the “B.S. Detector,” Mashable reports. After installing the plug-in, Facebook users will see a red warning appear over any posts that lead back to dubious sources. The outlets Sieradski has flagged include fake news sites, satire sites, and untrustworthy sources from all political leanings.

The extension isn’t a perfect B.S. filter—it detects the sites, not the content of the articles themselves, and is only limited to the sources Sieradski programmed into the code. But it’s a good start for Facebook users looking to navigate their feed with a more skeptical eye. Facebook is just now beginning to crack down on false content, announcing recently that fake news sites were banned from using their advertising network. Still, experts remain pessimistic about the company taking more drastic action against the problem anytime soon.

In the meantime, there are plenty of steps web users can take to avoid getting duped. When reading an article, keep an eye out for things like detailed author biographies, citations and references, and original reporting to judge whether the piece is legitimate. Fake-sounding author names and headlines that seem too outrageous to be true are possible indicators that a story is a hoax. If you still aren’t sure if what you just read should be taken at face value, do a quick Google search to see if other outlets have covered it. If it’s nowhere else to be seen, there’s likely a reason for that.

[h/t Mashable]

Despite being a bladder-shattering 23.5 ounces, cans of AriZona iced tea have never wavered from the 99-cent price point introduced shortly after the drink debuted in 1992. It’s even printed on the label as a way of warding off sugar-water price gouging by retailers.

The fact that AriZona has been able to resist inflation for nearly a quarter-century is impressive. The fact that the cans usually wind up being cheaper than smaller soft drinks is also impressive, until you begin to realize how strange it is that a vat of iced tea and its accompanying ingredients somehow manages to be less expensive than plain water.

In a recent interview with Thrillist, AriZona chief marketing officer and co-owner Spencer Vultaggio shed some light on this convenience store mystery.

Unlike water titans Coke (which distributes Dasani), Evian, or Fiji, AriZona has virtually no advertising dollars invested in their teas. “We feel like it’s more important to spend money on something that our customer really cares about, instead of buying billboards or putting our cans in the hands of some celebrity for a few minutes,” Vultaggio said.

Even with a frugal approach to ads, AriZona still has to deal with rising production costs. To help resist increasing prices to compensate, the company has pursued alternative manufacturing methods, using 40 percent less aluminum in cans and having enough factories dotting the country to make transportation more efficient. Bottled water, in contrast, is sometimes sourced from abroad, making for exorbitant shipping costs.

In the end, it’s not the iced tea that’s more economical than the water; it’s that the container it comes in is simply cheaper to produce and transport. And while AriZona isn’t above charging a premium for fancier drinks—like a tea brewed with oak chips that sells for twice the price—their branding depends heavily on those familiar rows of 99-cent cans and the loyal consumers who keep reaching for them.

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In 2010, scientists started exploring the Abanda cave system in Gabon after getting a tip about something strange living there: crocodiles. And not just any crocodiles. Orange crocodiles.

Crocodiles will sometimes use caves as temporary refuges during droughts, but the dwarf crocodiles (Osteolaemus tetraspis) in the Abanda caves seemed to have taken up permanent residence there. When we wrote about the expedition a few years ago, the researchers didn’t know much about the cave crocs. They knew they were there, they knew they were weird, and they knew some of them had turned orange. The scientists, led by biologist Matthew Shirley, have since gone back into the caves to study the animals. Their new paper, published in African Journal of Ecology, overturns some of their early ideas about the Abanda crocodiles, showing that life in the caves has been good to them, and offers a new explanation for their strange colors.

After seeing the crocodiles for themselves, the team began surveying the caves and capturing crocodiles by hand, taking their measurements and determining their sex. To see what the reptiles were eating, they used a method called the hose-Heimlich technique, which is exactly what it sounds like. While one scientist flushed a croc’s stomach with an improvised stomach pump, another grabbed the animal and squeezed its belly, expelling the water and the stomach contents through the animal’s mouth. They did the same with a group of crocodiles living aboveground at streams in the forest around the caves.

While the forest crocs barfed up freshwater crabs, shrimp, crayfish, and a variety of insects, the cave crocodiles were eating cave crickets and bats—and little else. The difference in diets, the researchers say, suggests that cave crocodiles don’t hunt or feed aboveground and likely have very little contact with their neighbors. The animals have to come out of the caves to breed and lay their eggs because there aren’t any suitable places to build nests in there, but they apparently don’t spend much time on the surface. They’re not entirely trapped in the caves, as the researchers once thought, but they’re still very isolated.

Even with all that time spent in the caves, the Abanda crocs don’t appear to be changing in response to life underground. Despite some physical and genetic differences between them and the forest crocs, the researchers say that the cave crocodiles “showed no signs of physical adaptation, or repercussion, of living in a hypogean environment”—such as the reduced pigmentation or smaller eyes often found in other cave-dwelling animals. The only notable physical change the team thinks is connected to their lifestyle is the crocs’ orange skin. They initially thought that the color change might have been an adaption to living in darkness or caused by their diet. But they now have a different—and grosser—idea.

With thousands of bats hanging from the cave ceilings, the floor has become covered in a caustic mixture of water and bat waste. “We hypothesize that the orange coloration in large adults is caused by ‘bleaching’ of the skin after what is presumably years of inundation in bat guano,” the researchers say. In some cases, they found, the guano isn’t just bleaching the crocs’ skin and changing its color, but eroding it to the point where the scientists could clearly see the animals’ skulls peeking out through the skin.

Those don’t sound like the best living conditions, but the caves offer plenty to make up for it. After taking all the animals’ measurements, the researchers found that the cave crocodiles were in better physical condition than any of the crocs living aboveground. The team thinks this is because the cave crocs’ prey—bats and crickets—is abundant (numbering in the tens of thousands), easy to catch, and available year-round. Furthermore, the caves provide a stable microclimate and protection from the elements. The researchers also found more crocodiles in the caves than they did in the surrounding forest, where the animals are vulnerable to logging and bushmeat hunting, leading them to think that the caves also provide some safety from humans. Living in guano may have its costs, but at the end of the day, it’s not easy being green.

The future may be star-shaped—the future of medication, anyway. Scientists have created a pill that can unfurl and stay in the stomach, releasing malaria medication for weeks. The researchers, who published a report on their progress in the journal Science Translational Medicine, say the same delivery method could someday be used for almost any drug.

Malaria affects more than 200 million people each year. While treatment is available, it must be taken every day for several weeks. Many of the people affected by malaria live in remote or impoverished areas, which can make it extremely difficult for them to get and take their drugs on time. And if the treatment isn’t completed, the parasite will stick around. It’s not that the drug doesn’t work; it’s that people often can’t and don’t take it. Non-adherence—or failing to take a prescription exactly as prescribed, for as long as prescribed—is a major problem worldwide.

But a very exciting alternative is on the horizon. An interdisciplinary team of engineers and doctors invented a futuristic drug-delivery method: a time-release capsule packed with weeks’ worth of treatment.

The capsule is, well, capsule-shaped when swallowed, but it expands into a star or snowflake shape as it makes its way through the digestive tract. Once it’s fully expanded, it stays put, delivering carefully calibrated doses of medication until it breaks down as the joints connecting the arms to the core dissolve and the arms break off. These smaller pieces then pass safely through the digestive tract.

To test their creation, the research team loaded their capsule with a malaria drug called ivermectin and gave it to infected pigs. The pill worked beautifully; not only did it not hurt the pigs or prevent them from eating, but it also successfully released the ivermectin for 10 days.

The team then devised a mathematical model to see how long-acting ivermectin might work in humans. Their results showed that adding the new capsule to other standard treatments significantly increased the likelihood of eliminating malaria in a given population.

The new capsule could improve not only medicine but also medical science and drug testing, says Shiyi Zhang, co-lead author and a postdoctoral researcher at MIT during the study. “It may help doctors and the pharma industry to better evaluate the efficacy of certain drugs, because currently a lot of patients in clinical trials have serious medication adherence problems that will mislead the clinical studies,” he said in a statement.

Co-senior author Robert Langer of MIT believes his team’s technology has potential for all kinds of drugs and diseases. “Until now, oral drugs would almost never last for more than a day,” Langer says. “This really opens the door to ultra-long-lasting oral systems, which could have an effect on all kinds of diseases, such as Alzheimer’s or mental health disorders. There are a lot of exciting things this could someday enable.”