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Following the “five-second rule” isn’t the only way you’re doing yourself a disservice.

You’ve probably heard the “5-second rule,” the notion that if you pick up dropped food quickly, it remains germ-free. Actually, a high school student busted this myth in 2003, with a simple study involving gummy bears and cookies.

When Jillian Clarke put these foods on floor tiles infected with E. coli bacteria for five seconds, then analyzed the food for bacteria, she found that in all cases, the food was contaminated, putting anyone who ate it at risk for a nasty case of food poisoning. The teen’s research was honored by the Annals of Improbable Research with the 2004 Ig Nobel Prize in public health, the New York Times reports.

Read more: 5 Food Myths, Busted

Save time and water when cooking pasta with this simple tip that doesn’t use a pot.

Instead of boiling corn, one trick adds a great caramelized flavor to roasted cobs.

Cook Corn
Instead of boiling corn on the cob, dot it with a little butter, salt, and black pepper. Place on a baking sheet and roast (350 degrees) until tender. Caramelize a little honey in a sauté pan and, when the corn comes out, brush with the honey.

Read more: How to Cook Everything a Little Better

Failure to preheat your cooking surfaces is one of the most common habits you need to avoid.

Have you ever done this? You find an awesome recipe with a beautiful picture. You get all the ingredients, put in a ton of effort to get the perfect result—and then it just doesn’t turn out right. You check the ingredient list twice, you reread the steps and you can’t figure out where you went wrong.

Before I went to culinary school and cooked every day for my job as Associate Food Editor at EatingWell Magazine, this used to happen to me a lot—what I thought was a perfect execution ended up with a flawed result. Now I know there are a few pitfalls that you have to avoid while cooking.

Read more: 4 bad cooking habits you should break

Tech star turned chef Nathan Myhrvold’s $625 work puts cooking rules to the scientific test.

Here’s the recipe for the most astonishing cookbook of our time: Take one multimillionaire computer genius, a team of 36 researchers, chefs and editors and a laboratory specially built for cooking experiments. After nearly four years of obsessive research, assemble 2,400 pages of results into a 47-pound, six-volume collection that costs $625 and requires four pounds of ink to print.

To call inventor Nathan Myhrvold’s “Modernist Cuisine: The Art & Science of Cooking,” on sale next month, a “cookbook” is akin to calling James Joyce’s “Ulysses” “a story.” The book is a large-scale investigation into the math, science and physics behind cooking tasks from making juicy and crisp beer-can chicken to coating a foie-gras bonbon in sour cherry gel. There is precedent in this genre—science writer Harold McGee has published popular books explaining kitchen science, and chefs Thomas Keller and Ferran Adrià have written about sous vide and other techniques of avant-garde gastronomy—but nothing reaches the scope and magnitude of Mr. Myhrvold’s book. While it will likely appeal to professional chefs, within its pages are insights that even the humblest home cooks can use to improve their meals. The book puts traditional cooking wisdom under scientific scrutiny, destroying old assumptions and creating new cooking approaches.

Read more: The Game-Changing Cookbook

When the temperature is hot and the humidity is high, the last thing you want to do is heat up your kitchen. These easy no-cook recipes will keep your house cool and satisfy your appetite for the taste of summer.

Read more here: No Cook Recipes

When it’s 90 degrees outside, the last thing you want to do is fire up your oven. Even if the air conditioning is blasting, it still seems wrong to waste energy cooling down the kitchen in the summer. Thankfully, there are plenty of healthy, delicious meals you can put together without preheating the oven, turning on a burner, or even standing over a flaming outdoor grill in the sweltering heat. Here are ten of my favorite “no-cook” dinners to keep you feeling cool all season long:

Read more here: 10 No-Cook Dinners To Beat The Summer Heat