Scientists in the UK are seeking 150 women to eat chocolate every day for a year in the cause of medical research.
Women taking part in the study must eat one bar of chocolate a day. The trial, at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, eastern England, will test whether a natural compound found in cocoa, the main ingredient of chocolate, could cut the risk of heart disease among women with diabetes.
Qualified applicants will be post-menopausal and under 70 years of age.
In vitro meat: is it meat? PETA is set to announce on Monday a $1 million prize to the "first person to come up with a method to produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012." The decision caused a "near civil war" within the organization "since so many PETA members are repulsed by the thought of eating animal tissue, even if no animals are killed."
Wired covers a three-day meeting of the In Vitro Meat Consortium in Ås, Norway, detailing the possibility of test tube meat. Cheaper to produce and more environmentally friendly, in vitro meat production may arrive in grocery stores within 5 to 10 years:
"The general consensus is that minced meat or ground meat products -- sausage, chicken nuggets, hamburgers -- those are within technical reach. We have the technology to make those things at scale with existing technology."
A paper presented at the meeting concluded that, for the moment, the costs of cultured meat can’t come close yet to competing with, say, unsubsidized chicken. The paper noted the reality of the climb up the protein ladder as countries move out of poverty, with global meat consumption at about 270 million metric tons in 2007 and growing at about 4.7 million tons per year.
Of course not! But "under the right circumstances," hot water can freeze faster than cold. "Part of the reason appears to be that hotter water loses mass to evaporation, and because it has less mass, less energy is needed to freeze it." And that is what's known as the Mpemba Effect.
Don't flush just yet! The project drinkpeedrinkpeedrinkpee taking place at Eyebeam in New York City from March 13 to April 19 aims to raise awareness about the role your body (or more specifically, its waste) plays in the water system. To illustrate the potential for using properly treated urine—a sterile liquid—as a fertilizer for plants, Urine to Fertilizer DIY Kits will be available at the installation. How does the kit work?
Users will test their urine before the reaction. Then, they will add an enzyme, wait for their urine to hydrolyze, and then add Magnesium Chloride. A sediment will build up at the bottom of the jar. Using a filter, they will pour off and flush the liquid, leaving the fertilizer in the jar. They can add water and the seeds included in the kit to grow their own watercress hydroponically in the glass container used for the reaction.
For more information about treating urine to extract its nutrients, read this press release from EAWAG (Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology). [via Cool Hunting]
Today in 1879 pioneer nutritionist Elmer McCollum was born. "He isolated the growth-promoting factors now called vitamins A and B, distinguishing fat-soluble and water-soluble forms.... McCollum and biochemist-in-training Marguerite Davis gave the 'factors' letter names, because their structures had not yet been determined to give them proper chemical names."
Posted by Ed Levine, February 24, 2008 at 11:00 AM
The New York Times reports today that the first Korean astronaut will be bringing some of that nation's beloved kimchi into space with him. The Korean national dish, a powerful, extremely pungent fermented cabbage, is not exactly shelf- or space-stable, so finding a way to bring it safely into space required a costly and time-consuming effort:
Three top government research institutes spent millions of dollars and several years perfecting a version of kimchi that would not turn dangerous when exposed to cosmic rays or other forms of radiation and would not put off non-Korean astronauts with its pungency.
Initially, only a small amount of steaks, pork and dairy products derived from clones will become available in grocery stores. But over the next three to five years—after ranchers have time to clone their most prized animals and those clones are able to breed—the products will become routine on store shelves, industry executives said.
Cloned cattle, pigs, and goats are aces to eat, the agency said, but as for cloned sheep—well, there's not enough info regarding them or other species for the government to OK. So put down your knives and forks if you were waiting for cloned lamb, chickens, or—I don't know—squirrel.
After more than six years of wrestling with the question of whether meat and milk from them are safe to eat, the Food and Drug Administration is expected to declare as early as next week that they are....
While many consumer groups still oppose it, the FDA declaration that cloned animal products are safe would be a milestone for a small cadre of biotech companies that want to make a business out of producing copies of prize dairy cows and other farm animals—effectively taking the selective breeding practiced on farms for centuries to the cutting edge.
The great problem of selling meat in restaurants is that, as in dating, there is no way to guarantee that you’ll get someone (or someone’s aged carcass) that you really like. So an ideal solution is to find one that you know is great and clone it.
The results of a study conducted using 5,000 middle and high school students in Minneapolis in 1999 are not exactly counterintuitive. Children eat better when they're not alone. Girls eat more, which means they're less likely to develop eating disorders. Boys had fewer vegetables when they weren't eating with their parents,
If having the TV on succeeds in luring uncommunicative kids to the family table because the screen and the sound offer a distraction, the study says so be it.
Is super-sanitized food good for us in the long run or is it giving us weak digestive systems? Kent Sepkowitz of Slate magazine gives reasons "Why Americans should ingest more excrement."
No, you don't have to eat the stuff out of a bowl, but a pathogen or two won't kill you. Sepkowitz explains the current situation with our mostly squeaky clean food supply.
Our food is hosed and boiled and rinsed and detoxified and frozen and salted and preserved. Recently, we have begun to irradiate it, too—just in case. As a result, when our bodies encounter the occasional inevitable bug, they're unhappy. Our centuries-long program of winnowing out all the muck has turned us into sissies and withered the substantial part of the immune system mediated by our intestinal tract.
Instead of obsessing over killing all possibly harmful organisms in our food, Sepkowitz suggests that scientists should find out how much crap we can safely eat and how much we need to eat to stay healthy.
In the future, sidewalks won't be covered with black spots of ancient gum, nor will students hands unintentionally brush against hardened gum wads hidden underneath their seats. Chemists at the University of Bristol have invented a less sticky chewing gum called Clean Gum that can be simply removed with water. Professor Terence Cosgrove explains that by adding a special polymer, the typically hydrophobic gum becomes hydrophilic, allowing water to disintegrate the gum over time or to form a film around the gum, releasing it from whatever surface it would normally stick to. Taste tests have already proven Clean Gum, which is expected to be released commercially in 2008, to taste as good or better than conventional gum. It won't be long before Singaporeans are allowed to chew gum again. [via Candy Addict]
As an "integrative method" for assessing quality, they gave lab animals a choice of biscuits made from organic or conventional wheat. The rats ate significantly more of the former. The authors call this result remarkable, because they found the two wheats to be very similar in chemical composition and baking performance.
Recent studies conducted with humans have shown that we can less reliably (if at all) discern a difference in taste between organic and non-organic foods. Assuming the rats are right and organic foods are tastier, what's to account for it? One hypothesis is that the higher levels of phytochemicals are responsible.
Having struggled with a weight problem my entire life, I paid particular attention to the news that being fat may be a function of a germ-like phenomena passed around my rotund circle of friends. I used to blame my parents, may they rest in peace, for passing on their fat genes to me. Now it turns out my weight struggles aren't all their fault. The fat germ, as I'm calling it, turns out to be spread among friends, according to a just-published study.
The New York Times says:
If the new research is correct, it may say that something in the environment seeded what some call an obesity epidemic, making a few people gain weight. Then social networks let the obesity spread rapidly.
It may also mean that the way to avoid becoming fat is to avoid having fat friends.
Read on to find out which of my friends made me fat.
As a result, when Wysocki gave me my PROP test, I was actually quite pleased when I felt that nauseating wave of bitterness wash across my tongue. It seemed to indicate that I too might be a supertaster, which sounded like a nice credential for a wine writer. But extreme PROP sensitivity is just one part of the supertaster equation, and I was curious to find out how I measured up in the fungiform papillae department.
Sixteen women volunteers are being asked to eat cheese and tomato pizza and then drink Coca-Cola, Diet Coke, or mineral water to see what effect the drinks have on the way the body absorbs iron.
Dietary iron deficiency can be a factor in anemia.
Harold McGee looks at research on the five-second rule and formulates version 2.0: "If you drop a piece of food, pick it up quickly, take five seconds to recall that just a few bacteria can make you sick, then take a few more to think about where you dropped it and whether or not it’s worth eating."
I employ the five-second rule at my apartment and other people's houses, and for food that's fallen into my lap; everywhere else is pretty much a no-eat zone.
Four researchers from the UK's Leeds University spent more than a thousand hours testing 700 variations of bacon sandwiches using both a computer and 50 taste-testing volunteers, and they managed to come up with the formula for perfectly crisp bacon:
N = C + {fb(cm) . fb(tc)} + fb(Ts) + fc . ta
N = force in Newtons required to break the cooked
bacon.
fb = function of the bacon type.
fc = function of the condiment/filling effect.
Ts = serving temperature.
tc = cooking time.
ta = time or duration of application of condiment/
filling.
cm = cooking method.
C = Newtons required to break uncooked bacon.
Team leader Dr. Graham Clayton says, "We often think that it’s the taste and smell of bacon that consumers find most attractive. But our research proves that texture and sound is just, if not more, important."
For that I happily give him and his team my first-ever Serious Eats Hero of the Month Award. Congratulations to the Leeds U team, and may they always have perfectly crisp bacon! [via mental_floss]
A rose by any other name will still smell as sweet, so goes the cliche, but is a durian still a durian if it doesn't stink? Thomas Fuller of the New York Times: "To anyone who doesn’t like durian it smells like a bunch of dead cats,” said Bob Halliday, a food writer based in Bangkok. “But as you get to appreciate durian, the smell is not offensive at all. It’s attractive. It makes you drool like a mastiff.” Nevertheless, a Thai government scientist, who after three decades of research is one of the world’s leading durian experts, now says he has managed to excise its stink."
If you enjoyed the video of hand-pulled noodles to teach physics from the physicist Philip Morrison's 1987 PBS show The Ring of Truth: Atoms that I posted Wednesday, here's another from the same series—Julia Child isolating carbon.
If you like both noodles and science, you should get a kick out of this video from the physicist Philip Morrison's 1987 PBS show The Ring of Truth: Atoms, in which chef Mark Pi makes noodles to demonstrate the principle of halving:
After handpulling and folding the noodles just twelve times, Pi's created 4,096 strands so thin they're called dragon's beard noodles; Morrison points out that if Pi pulls and folds them another thirty times, the noodles would be so fine as to approach atomic thickness!
Steven Reinberg of the Washington Post reports that two new studies in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine say Americans are eating far less fruits and vegetables than they should. According to a John Hopkins study, 62 percent of participants didn't eat any fruit daily. 25 percent didn't eat any vegetables, and "only 11 percent of U.S. adults meet the guidelines for both fruits and vegetables." Perhaps more troubling, a second study from Queens College compared intakes of vegetables, potassium and calcium from 1971 to 1974 and 1999 to 2002, and found that the diets of blacks has not improved compared to those of whites, numbers "not explained by race differentials in income and education." As one of the researchers said, a serious public health concern because "a diet rich in fruits and vegetables is associated with a lower risk of obesity and certain chronic diseases, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes and some cancers."
"Ben & Jerry might help you get pregnant, but not in the usual way. A diet rich in ice cream and other high-fat dairy foods may lower the risk of one type of infertility, a study suggests. It sounds too good to be true and probably is, some doctors say. But the findings are bound to get attention because they are from the well-known Nurses Health Study at the Harvard School of Public Health and were published Wednesday in the European journal Human Reproduction."
Posted by Lia Bulaong, February 5, 2007 at 4:18 PM
Popcorn Popping in Slow Motion: "Check out this video of a popcorn kernel pop in slow motion being captured with a high speed camera. The explosion that makes it expand outwards is caused from a small amount of water inside the kernel that gets heated up until it expands." This is going to sound really silly until you watch the video, but: who knew popcorn was so beautiful?
Posted by Alaina Browne, January 12, 2007 at 10:25 AM
Science and food links from around the web!
Were chickpeas responsible for the rise of a human empire? Cultivated chickpeas had more than three times as much tryptophan as their wild cousins. Increased amounts of tryptophan in the diet can improve performance under stress and also promote ovulation, handy advantages when you're taking over the world.
MIT Technology Review's two-parter, "The Alchemist" (part 1, part 2) goes deep with Grant Achatz and Alinea:
The highest and most expensive forms of cooking have always involved the latest kitchen technology. But seldom has technology worked to bring food as far from what was considered normal as it does today. Cooks are straying into the preserves of the laboratory, appropriating equipment, processes, and ingredients that were formerly of interest only to biology researchers and industrial food manufacturers. Among American chefs, it's Achatz who has most successfully walked the balance beam between weird and appealing—probably because of his rigorous apprenticeship with [Thomas] Keller.
In vitro meat: is it meat? PETA is set to announce on Monday a 
The New York Times reports today that the first Korean astronaut will be 
Is super-sanitized food good for us in the long run or is it giving us weak digestive systems? Kent Sepkowitz of Slate magazine gives reasons 
Yes, if you are a rat. 
