When it comes to those last globs of ketchup inevitably stuck to every bottle of Heinz, most people either violently shake the container in hopes of eking out another drop or two, or perform the "secret" trick: smacking the "57" logo on the bottle’s neck. But not MIT PhD candidate Dave Smith. He and a team of mechanical engineers and nano-technologists at the Varanasi Research Group have been held up in an MIT lab for the last two months addressing this common dining problem.
The result? LiquiGlide, a "super slippery" coating made up of nontoxic materials that can be applied to all sorts of food packaging [MORE]
The Physics of Spilled Coffee
Scientists face many obstacles on the path to greater knowledge. But new research suggests how to avoid one of the more common pitfalls: spilled coffee.
"I cannot say for sure if coffee spilling has been detrimental to scientific research to any significant extent," says study author Rouslan Krechetnikov, a mechanical engineer at the University of California, Santa Barbara. "But it can certainly be disruptive for a train of thought."
Krechetnikov and his graduate student Hans Mayer decided to investigate coffee spilling at a fluid dynamics conference last year when they watched overburdened participants trying to carry their drinks to and fro. They quickly realized that the physics wasn't simple. Aside from the mechanics of human walking, which depends on a person's age, health, and gender, there is the highly involved science of liquid sloshing, which depends on a complex interplay of accelerations, torques, and forces.
{Let's not forget the physical characteristics of the fluid e.g. temperature and viscosity. Perhaps there are produce development applications for convenience beverages designed to be consumed on the go!}
Is 'pink slime' being unfairly demonised?
"Pink slime" may be off the menu for many US school children after the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), which provides a fifth of school meals in the US through its National School Lunch Program, yielded to a petition demanding the withdrawal of the meat product from the school menu.
However, the beef industry, the company that makes the product and campaigners against food contamination have fiercely defended the safety and value of the product, officially called "lean finely textured beef" (LFTB).
So what's going on? What is "pink slime", and is it being unfairly demonised? [MORE]
What Does Sweetness Sound Like?
Charles Spence is multisensory researcher in London, who has been messing around with how sounds modify flavor. “We’ve shown that if you take something with competing flavors, something like bacon-and-egg ice cream, we were able to change people’s perception of the dominant flavor—is it bacon, or egg?—simply by playing sizzling bacon sounds or farmyard chicken noises.”
This might sound crazy, but the otherworldly ice cream makes one thing clear: The sound of food matters. So does the sound of the packaging and the atmospheric sounds we hear when we’re eating. We’re all synesthesiates when we sit down to dinner. [MORE]
Avalanche research aids search for tastier ice cream
Avalanche experts are helping to study how ice cream's structure changes when it is stored in a household freezer.
Samples of ice cream have been scanned with an X-ray machine more typically used to study the ice crystals which are key to avalanche formation.
Nestle is hoping to reveal the exact conditions under which ice crystals merge and grow.
When the crystals get big enough they change the texture of ice cream and alter how it feels when it is eaten.
The study of ice crystal formation has been carried out with the help of scientists at the Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research in Davos, Switzerland. [MORE]
Vegetarian Cutlet: New Method to Prepare a Meat Substitute
ScienceDaily (Mar. 6, 2012) — It looks like a cutlet, it's juicy and fibrous like a cutlet, and it even chews with the consistency of a real cutlet -- but the ingredients are 100 percent vegetable. Researchers are using a new method to prepare a meat substitute that not only tastes good, but is also environmentally sustainable.
Meat production is complicated, costly and not eco-friendly: fatted animals have to consume five to eight kilos of grain just to generate one kilogram of meat. It would be simpler and more sustainable if one were to make cutlets out of seed -- without the detour through the animal's body. Impossible? Not entirely...{MORE}
The rise and fall of white bread
We learned to hate the processed loaves not just because of health -- but because of class, status and race
Whole wheat bread “signifies the sophistication of your
palate, your appreciation for texture and variety…. The grainier you like it, the more refined your sensibilities. The darker it is, the greater your chance for enlightenment.” Industrial white bread has completed its two-hundred-year trajectory from modern marvel to low-class item. As the spokeswoman for a food industry–affiliated nonprofit nutrition policy organization concluded, “It used to be, ‘Oh, you poor thing, you have that nasty brown bread.’ … Now it’s, ‘Oh, you poor thing. You have that nasty white bread.’ ” [MORE]
Slimy soy, decomposed shark, and maggot cheese
Food is a marvelous window through which to examine the multifaceted emotion of disgust. Food is a great passion, but it can also inspire terrible repulsion. Strangely, as with almost all facets of disgust, it is in our nature to be attracted to this repulsion. Who, uninitiated to the actual foodstuff, isn't at least a little curious about tasting some soft and stinky hákarl or a wormy morsel of casu marzu?
What human beings find disgusting varies greatly not just from place to place but across time. It cannot be separated from what the object of our repulsion means to us. [MORE ]
Penn State's creamery: From the cow to the cone
Penn State ice cream from the Creamery! It's a tradition for generations of Penn Staters and their guests. But there's more than meets the eye, or the mouth, for that matter. Every cone of "Peachy Paterno" or cup of "Death by Chocolate" begins with cream provided by cows at Penn State's dairy barns only a mile north of the creamery store. [Video]
The Physics of Wine Swirling
Meet the new flavor of wine: fruity with a hint of fluid dynamics. Oenophiles have long gotten the best out of their reds by giving their glasses a swirl before sipping. A new study has revealed the physics behind that sloshing, showing that three factors may determine whether your merlot arcs smoothly or starts to splash.
Twirling a wineglass gently creates smooth arcs in the liquid that then circle, coating the sides of the glass. The gesture isn't just for appearances, says study co-author Martino Reclari, who studies fluid dynamics at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. Scientists and enthusiasts alike have long known that the swirling motion mixes oxygen into a red, enhancing its flavor. [MORE]
