| Any person clearly knows what a nut is: a firm nutshell with edible contents. We all know: Circassian walnuts, pine nuts, hazelnuts, almonds, peanuts, pistachios, chestnuts, Mexican nuts, cashews and pecan nuts. But, from the botanical point of view, only two on the entire list are real nuts, the cashew and hazelnuts (hazel) and yes, pine nuts with great difficulty. All other things on the list are not real nuts.
Formally speaking, nuts are the fruits of some plants (predominantly trees), as a rule, with a kernel and a firm shell. The leaves of the so called acorn cups can be present near the fruit, but there should be no pulp or other covers. A more exact definition and group of plants, fruits of which are called nuts, depends on the point of view from which the question is considered.
Two definitions exist in botany:
* Nut (fruit type; lat. nux) - a dry one-seeded indehiscent syncarpous bottom fruit with a ligneous seed vessel (for example, for a hazel), inside which only a single free lying seed is present. An example of such a fruit is the hazelnut or filbert;
* Nut - a representative of the family of nuts (Juglandaceae), sometimes narrow, as in the type of nuts forming the family (Juglans, for example, walnuts) and sometimes vast, as in the representative of the group of Fagales, to which the family of nuts belong. Thus, the fruits of the plants of a nut's family is not a nut in the first instance, it is usually a stone fruit (more exactly, a bottom stone fruit), which along with a seed in it, is incorrectly called a nut.
Other "nuts" from the botanical point of view are artificial nuts or incorrectly named as nuts.
In culinary and usually in life, any edible fruits, consisting of a shell (hard or soft) and a free kernel are called nuts. In agriculture, plants with such fruits are called nut plant cultures. Also nuts in a botanical sense, pine nut, coconut and others (see below) belong apart from the nuts in a botanical sense.
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This Sunday, there was the world's first commercial airline flight powered with bio-fuel made from nuts.
The Virgin Atlantic jumbo jet flight was from London to Amsterdam, and Virgin founder Richard Branson said that the flight represents a breakthrough for the whole airline industry.
