Discoblog » Food, Nutrition, & More Food

Hearty Penguin Steaks: the Old-School Explorers’ Salve for Scurvy

Sarah Zhang — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 16:12:34 +0000

An Emperor penguin being skinned on board the Endurance.

Imagine you’re in Antarctica. It’s cold. You’re cold. Your joints ache, old wounds are reopening to ooze pus, and your teeth loosen, threatening to fall out one or two at a time. What do you feel like eating? How about ”a piece of beef, odiferous cod fish and a canvas-backed duck roasted together in a pot, with blood and cod-liver oil for sauce?”

If this sounds delicious, then your stomach serves you well. That’s how famous polar explorer Frederick Cook described the taste of penguin meat, and that is how you cure yourself of scurvy in Antarctica when fresh vegetables are nowhere to be found. Fresh meat—lightly cooked or raw—contains vitamin C, whose deficiency causes scurvy and the delightful symptoms described above.

Unfortunately for turn-of-the-century Antarctic explorers, most expedition leaders were not as enlightened as Cook and many a man succumbed to scurvy. Unfortunately for Antarctica’s penguins, they were also easy prey for the men who did eat them. “Long lines of curious penguins marched across the ice and right into camp, which almost always meant death as dog food, human food, or fuel for the boiler. A stew ...

Chocolate Science #539: Taking a Walk Makes You Eat Less Chocolate

Veronique Greenwood — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 21:42:50 +0000

It should come as no surprise that scientists have spent many hours contemplating new tortures for the chocolate-addicted. After all, how else will science know how much, say, boredom, will affect chocolate intake? Or stress? Or watching a psychologist unwrap a chocolate bar? These are the important things, people.

The latest edition of this research addresses a question close to many a cubicle drone’s heart: will exercise reduce the amount of chocolate you eat while at work? Even brief exercise gives the same kind of mood boost that chocolate consumption does, and researchers were interested in seeing whether 15 minutes’ walk would change how much chocolate people working on a computer ate from a nearby bowl. They had 78 people who were confirmed chocolate cravers abstain from chocolate for 2 days (that’s the torturous part), then brought them into the lab to either sit quietly for 15 minutes or walk briskly on a treadmill. They then took them to a desk, casually said that the subjects could help themselves to the chocolates, and had them complete tasks of various levels of difficulty.

This is the part where you lean in a little closer, because it turned out that ...

6 Servings of Thanksgiving Science: Ideal Turkey Diet, Black Friday Sales Tricks, Turkey-Phobia…

Valerie Ross — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 13:17:23 +0000

It’s almost Thanksgiving here the US. Before you tuck into your stuffing, pumpkin pie, and cranberry sauce, save a little room for a big helping of science. Here are a few of our favorite Thanksgiving science stories from around the Internet, detailing the research behind fattening turkeys, giving thanks, post-holiday shopping, and more:

Discovery News takes a look at what turkeys have for dinner before becoming dinner. Typical feed pellets are made of, among other things, “soybean meal, animal by-products, [and] distillers’ grains.” But a professor at the University of Missouri has developed ”the Missouri Ideal Turkey Diet,” carefully designed turkey food that costs 8 to 10 percent less than typical feed pellets while packing the same nutritional punch. Yum. As you think about what you’re thankful for this year, the New York Times offers one more thing to add to your list: the very act of giving thanks is good for you. Even a little bit of gratitude, scientists have found, makes people happier and healthier. If you’re thankful for health and happiness already, you’ve got the start of a nice little feedback cycle there. And if you’re not feeling particularly grateful, as ...

The Typewriter That Will Mix You a Drink After a Long Day At the Keyboard

Veronique Greenwood — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 18:46:53 +0000

Making a living as a writer is tough, but if you can drink your words, everything will start looking up. A maker going by the handle Morskoiboy has built a typewriter with syringes for keys that does just that: each syringe sucks up a different fluid for each letter, runs the fluid through a microfluidic-style screen to display the letter, then drains the fluid, which can be any booze or mixer you like, into a glass.

He gives a detailed explanation of how it works on his blog, but here’s the crux: When you push down on a key/syringe, a fluid—let’s say absinthe for A—is drawn up from a bottle. It’s then pumped into several thin plastic tubes, the number of which varies according to the shape of the letter (more on that in the next paragraph), and is routed to the screen.

The screen basically works like the display on your digital alarm clock. It has fourteen different compartments on it that, when just the right arrangements are filled with fluid, can display any letter. To use the example of a digital clock, lighting up the six sections around the edge of the display gives you a “0″. Lighting up ...

Augmented Reality: Koreans Grocery Shop While Waiting For the Subway

Veronique Greenwood — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 19:34:44 +0000

For those of us for whom multitasking is a high art, a South Korean retail experiment combining grocery shopping with commuting looks like a godsend.

In a bid to boost online sales, grocery retailer Tesco covered the walls of a Korean subway station with photos of its merchandise arranged on store shelves. Each item was endowed with a QR code, those black-and-white squares recognized by smartphones, and commuters on their way in to work could snap pictures of the codes with phones to fill a virtual shopping cart. They paid for their items via an app, and the food was delivered to their homes after they got home from work.

No after-work grocery shopping crush, no squeaky-wheeled carts, no post-apocalyptic check-out lines. Just a little less time devoted to playing Angry Birds on the platform.

In terms of technology, nothing here is new: QR codes have been around since the 90s and began to appear on ads soon after the advent of smartphones, and grocery shopping online with services like Peapod is old (fifteen-year-old) news. But this appears to be the first time the two have been combined.

It’s certainly a more constructive use for QR codes ...

Why Can’t We Can’t Stop Snacking? Maybe Because of Pot-Like Chemicals

Joseph Castro — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 18:55:24 +0000

Have you ever eaten a single potato chip or French fry that sent you spiraling into nearly uncontrollable gluttony? Scientists are now saying that these sober binges are actually quite similar to pot smokers’ notorious bouts of the munchies: fatty foods cause your body to release marijuana-like chemicals called endocannabinoids, and this likely compels you to continue stuffing your face.

In a study to be published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Daniele Piomelli and his colleagues at UC Irvine investigated the connection between fat intake in rats and their production of endocannabinoids, natural compounds similar to THC, the main active ingredient in marijuana. They allowed the rats to sip on several types of drinks, including ones high in sugar, protein, or fat, and monitored the rats’ endocannabinoid levels.

The researchers learned that the high-fat drinks sparked the release of endocannabinoids, but the sugar and protein beverages did not. When a rat tasted a fatty drink, signals traveled from the rat’s tongue to its brain. The vagus nerve bundle in the brain then routed the message to produce endocannabinoids down to the rat’s gut. The researchers believe ...

Sexy Ad Campaign Targeting Monkeys Makes A Splash

Veronique Greenwood — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 17:21:17 +0000

“Advertising for monkeys” is just too good a phrase to pass up.

Even since ads created for a study investigating whether monkeys respond to billboards debuted at the Cannes Lions ad conference, the headlines have been flowing freely. We learn Yale primatologist Laurie Santos and two ad executives came up with the idea at last year’s TED, after Santos gave a talk on her experiments showing that monkeys that learn to use money are as irrational about it as we are.

Ad firm Proton has now developed two billboards to hang outside capuchin monkeys’ enclosures, and the researchers plan to see whether they will prefer one kind of food, or “brand,” over another when it is shown in close proximity to some titillating photos, including a “graphic shot” of a female monkey exposing her genitals and a shot of the troop’s alpha male with the food.

Once the monkeys have been exposed to the ads for brand A, scientists will see whether they show a preference for it over brand B, which won’t be supported with a campaign. In essence, they’ll investigate whether sex sells for monkeys. Brand A will be ...

To Keep to Your Diet, Pretend You’re Constantly Breaking It

Veronique Greenwood — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 18:26:10 +0000

Is this milkshake better than yours?

Congratulating yourself on that calorie-conscious salad might just make you feel hungrier, scientists are now finding—better to close your eyes, take a bite, and pretend you’re eating ice cream.

We’ve already heard in recent years that eating imaginary M&Ms or cheese cubes can give you some of the satiety of the real thing: In a 2010 paper, researchers found that contrary to popular belief, imagining eating such foods in vivid detail actually made subjects eat fewer M&Ms, cheese chunks, and so on. Now, scientists have found that if you believe a shake is low in calories, you’ll feel less satisfied than people who think the shake was an indulgence, even when you’re both drinking the same shake. What gives?

The team (from Yale’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity) told subjects that a 380-calorie shake had either an indulgent 620 calories or a prudent 140 calories. Then they checked to see what effect that had on subjects’ blood levels of ghrelin, a hormone that triggers hunger and is high before meals and low after. They found that ghrelin didn’t subside afterwards in people who thought they ...

Weight-Loss Supplement Has Teensy Potential Side Effect: You Might Get Mad Cow Disease!

Valerie Ross — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 20:44:13 +0000

Human Chorionic Gonadotropin (hGC), a hormone produced during pregnancy, is isolated from the urine of pregnant women and used to treat infertility. Since the 1950s, however, it’s also been used as a weight-loss aid—and still is, even though there’s no solid evidence showing it works.

But taking hCG could be worse than just ineffective: A new study shows that doses of the hormone can transmit prions, the misfolded proteins that cause mad cow disease and its human equivalent, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, an invariably fatal form of dementia that riddles the brain with holes (photo).

That’s right: There’s a potential risk of contracting deadly, brain-destroying illness by injecting yourself with proteins taken from other people’s urine—and you won’t even lose weight.

The New York Times lamely wrote earlier this month that hCG as a weight-loss regimen “has fans and skeptics”—but Travis Saunders at Obesity Panacea says that spreading mad cow is just one more reason to avoid “the most thoroughly debunked weight loss gimmick in medical history.”

No prion diseases have been transmitted through urine yet, the authors of the study say, but it is theoretically possible. And even ...

Fondling Swan-Butts For Science

Patrick Morgan — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 14:08:33 +0000

Picture yourself as one of England’s majestic Bewick’s swans, about to take off on your annual long-distance flight to Arctic Russia, when out of nowhere a scientist grabs you and methodically gropes and measures your butt. It’s all for your own good: Researchers are hurriedly sizing up as many round rumps as they can lay their hands on, in a bid to understand what’s wiping out their population.

Smaller than the more common mute swans, which stay in Britain yearlong, Bewick’s swan has seen its population in Europe decline from 29,000 to 21,000 between 1995 and 2005, and researchers at UK’s Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (WWT) in Slimbridge, Gloucestershire, are willing to fondle the birds to save them.

They’re sizing up swans to test whether changes in the their habitat are to blame for their decline: The size of swan keesters indicated whether they have enough fat to survive their over-2,000-mile journey. Basically, if the birds are plump, then that rules out the possibility that they aren’t getting enough food, and opens the playing field for other culprits, such as power line collisions, lead poisoning, and hunting.For those of you without ...

Mentos Is to Diet Coke as Coffee Filter Is to Guinness?!

Jennifer Welsh — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 13:36:57 +0000

The SATs might have made you hate analogy problems, but this one sure is tasty.

That clangy thing taking up space in the bottom of your Guinness or Tetley’s can might soon be done away with and replaced by a coffee filter.

The ball inside the Guinness can, called a widget, contains a pocket of nitrogen gas held under pressure. When some lucky person opens the can, the pressure is released and the gas shoots out into the beer through a small hole and creates the foam.

You may now be thinking, Wait a minute—most beers seem to have plenty of gas bubbles even without some fancy widget. The thing is that Guinness and similar brews need the widget because nitrogen bubbles are smaller than those filled with carbon dioxide, the bubbling gas in other fizzy drinks. The small nitrogen bubbles make Guinness’ foam deliciously thick and creamy, but it’s harder to get the gas to come out of solution. The widget forces lots of excess nitrogen into the beer, setting off a well-timed bubble eruption.

But the widget is not the only way to send nitrogen bubbles cascading upward. In normal ...

New “Gastric Pacemaker” Aims to Zap People Into Weight Loss

Jennifer Welsh — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 13:23:59 +0000

Not many people would be excited about getting shocks to their vagus nerve, but a new electronic device implanted into the abdomen does just that in an effort to keep appetites in check.

The tiny device, called abiliti and made by Intrapace, attaches to the vagus nerve, which sends status updates about the body’s organs to the brain. The pacemaker then hacks the nervous system’s normal communication, according to the company’s website:

The abiliti system is designed to support these good habits by making the patient feel full sooner when eating. The abiliti system may also help in keeping them satisfied longer and helping them to eat less frequently.

Intrapace reports that the 65 study participants in the initial trials have lost on average 22 percent of their body weight; the biggest loser dropped 38 percent. (These results haven’t been published or peer-reviewed.)

The device is billed as an alternative to more invasive weight-loss procedures, like stomach bypasses or gastric bands, and may have fewer side effects. It is implanted into the abdomen, where it floats around near the stomach, connected to nerves by electrodes through which it senses how extended ...

3D Printer Plays With Its Food…and Makes A Miniature Space Shuttle

Patrick Morgan — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 22:44:41 +0000

Most people outgrow the days of carving rivulets in mashed potato mountains or castles out of seasoned squash—but scientists aren’t “most people.” One ragtag team of researchers and culinary experts are harnessing the power of 3-D food printers to bring the science of playing-with-your-food to new levels, such as outer space.

In a project called fab@home, Cornell’s Computational Synthesis Laboratory and the French Culinary Institute have made a giant leap for mankind by fashioning a miniature space shuttle made of pureed scallops and cheese.

So what does it take to create such intricate food sculptures? Cornell graduate research student Jeffrey Lipton told CBC News:

“The process is pretty simple … Just as … your 2D printer puts droplets of ink onto a page to create an image, this draws lines of material on top of each other to create a 3D object.”

It’s the same technology as rapid prototyping machines, except you’re switching in food pastes for plastics and metal. Precisely-positioned nozzles squirt out edible creations of virtually every flavor, and so far, the lab has tackled various foodstuffs, including cheese, chocolate, hummus, and turkey.

But interesting shapes and ...

UK Shuts Down Breast-Milk Ice Cream, But Is It Safe to Eat?

Patrick Morgan — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 19:51:07 +0000

Rocky road. Vanilla fudge ripple. Pralines and cream. The hardest decision in the life of some ice cream enthusiasts is choosing a flavor. Government officials, though, have made that choice a little bit easier after they stormed a London ice cream shop and confiscated a flavor made from human breast milk.

Dubbed “Baby Gaga,” this mammary morsel—a blend containing Madagascan vanilla pods, lemon zest, and, yes, human milk—debuted last Friday and was so popular that it sold out the same day. Touted as organic and free-range (I hope so!), this ice cream was created from the milk of 15 lactating women, who were paid $2.40 for each ounce of milk, which explains its whopping price of over $22 per serving.

London authorities put the kibosh on this ice cream after they received two complaints from people who were squeamish at the thought of ingesting a stranger’s body fluids. The fear (beyond the awkwardness factor) is that people innocently enjoying a novel ice cream flavor could contract hepatitis—a virus that can be passed on through breast milk. So is Baby Gaga really dangerous?Matt O’Connor, founder of the company that created the flavor, predictably doesn’t think so. “As far as we are aware there ...

Gorgeous Guts: Pretty Photos of Fly Intestines Reveal Digestive Secrets

Sarah Stanley — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 16:58:35 +0000

Click here to view gallery

Booze-Soaked Superconductors Provide Hot Physics Results

Shannon Palus — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 12:34:17 +0000

A paper that explores the unlikely coupling of warm wine and the electric properties of iron is currently making its rounds on the media circuit—leading us to conclude that people get excited about science when there is alcohol involved.

“Drunk scientists pour wine on superconductors and make incredibly discovery,” declares the (slightly inaccurate) headline on io9. “’Tis the season to be pickling your liver in alcohol,” announces the (slightly irrelevant) opening line of a CNET article.

The researchers’ experiment—led by Keita Deguchi of the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan—involved first submersing an iron alloy in various hot alcoholic beverages, and then finding the temperature at which the treated alloy starts to display superconducting properties. A superconductor is a material that has no electrical resistivity, allowing electrons to flow through it with essentially zero friction.

The paper abstract, which was published on arXiv, gives an overview of the experiment’s findings and method (although there’s no mention of beverage consumption that might have inspired these scientific antics):

“We found that hot commercial alcohol drinks are much effective to induce superconductivity in FeTe0.8S0.2 compared to water, ethanol and water-ethanol ...

Beef Fat Spill Turns the Houston Ship Channel Into a Clogged Artery

Jennifer Welsh — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 22:38:13 +0000

Fat is in the news: Not just because of the world’s obesity problems, but because one agriculture company accidentally fattened up the Houston Ship Channel on Tuesday by spilling 15,000 gallons of beef tallow into it.

The fat was in an onshore storage tank owned by agricultural company Jacob Sterns and Sons, which for unknown reasons leaked about 250,000 gallons of animal fat. About 15,000 gallons seeped into the channel through a storm drain, and immediately solidified after hitting the water, Coast Guard spokesman Richard Brahm told The Wall Street Journal:

“Luckily the stuff is easy to clean up,” Mr. Brahm said. “It solidifies at room temperature, so as soon as it hit the water it just kind of sat there.”

The floating fat looks like a collection of dirty little icebergs (officially called “patties”), but is causing some problems. Three quarters of the northern end of the channel had to be shut down for the cleanup effort–luckily it didn’t block tanker traffic along the waterway.

The US Coast Guard helped clean up the fat in the channel, and finished pitch forking and booming the ...

Potty Trained Piggies Help Keep Taiwanese Rivers Clean

Jennifer Welsh — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 16:38:47 +0000

Toddlers can learn, cats can be taught–so why not take the next step and potty-train our livestock? Taiwan’s Environmental Protection Administration is encouraging its pig farmers to do just that with the countries’ six million pigs. The move will clean up the farms and help prevent water pollution, they say.

To keep the pig waste from flowing into the rivers (and to save water on cleaning up farms), the pigs are trained to relieve themselves in a trough. The “toilets” are smeared with feces and urine to attract the pigs–kinda like that spot on the carpet where the dog keeps relieving itself. All it took to start the porcine potty-training revolution was one genius farmer in 2009 trying to avoid the Taiwanese government’s “water pollution fee.” He noticed the difference immediately, he told the Mail and Guardian Online:

“The pig toilets on my farm help me collect about 95% of all pig waste, making cleaning much, much easier,” Chang Chung-tou, a pig farmer in Yunlin county, said.

After a trial of 10,000 pigs by Chung-tou and others in 2009, the Taiwanese ...

What to Do With Troublesome Invasive Species: 1) Eat Them, 2) Wear Them

Jennifer Welsh — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 18:53:38 +0000

Sick of invasive snakes eating through your wiring and biting your babies? Don’t have any tylenol-doped mice to lob at them? You might be in luck, we have a few ideas of what to invasive species that insist on making pests of themselves.

Idea #1: Make Them Into Dinner

Become a part of the “invasivore” movement by ingesting some tasty lionfish (pictured) or asian carp, and by nomming on some kudzu or Japanese knotweed. One “almost serious” invasivore, Rachel Kesel, blogged on the subject and talked to The New York Times:

She said in an interview that she was studying in London when she wrote the post, which grew out of conversations about diet and ecology. “If you really want to get down on conservation you should eat weeds,” she decided. And so she blogged. She now works for the parks department of San Francisco and said she did indeed pursue the vegetable side of the diet she proposed. “I’m really looking forward to some of our spring weeds here,” she said, notably Brassica rapa, also known as ...

Which Celebrities Are Science-Illiterate Whack Jobs? Find Out Here

Jennifer Welsh — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 19:31:30 +0000

Every year, the Sense About Science group puts out a list of some of the most egregious blunders made in science and medicine during the past 12 months. But they’re not talking about surgeons’ errors or the research mistakes of lab workers; instead, SAS focuses on celebrities who adopt fad diets and bogus healing remedies, and then spread the nonsense around the world.

In 2010, many celebrities–including David Beckham, Robert De Niro, and Shaquille O’Neal–jumped on the “Power Balance” sports fad (don’t actually go to that website, it will make you stupider). This absurd system suggests that plastic bracelets and pendants with holograms will optimize the body’s natural energy flow because they’re “designed to resonate with and respond to the natural energy field of the body.”

Sigh, I suppose we actually have to say this: There is no way a hologram could change your athletic ability. The website doesn’t even try to explain the company’s “science.” But just so we cheapies don’t all go around strapping our credit cards to ourselves before a long run, Michael Blastland responded to a claim from Shaq ...

Are Booze-Drenched Societies More Likely To Be Monogamous?

Jennifer Welsh — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 22:03:48 +0000

A new study out in the American Association of Wine Economist’s “Wine Economics” journal suggests that monogamous societies are bigger drinkers than those in polygamous societies. Does this mean that being stuck with only one partner drives us to the bottle, or does drinking make us more likely to settle down?

Actually the answer is most likely neither. Both monogamy and drunkenness seem to be related to economics, or at least, that’s why both seem to have blossomed during the industrial revolution. Jo Swinnen, one of the study’s authors, told The New York Times Freakonomics blog (which seemed to have missed the actual conclusion of the study) that he noticed the correlation over, unsurprisingly, a glass of wine:

The inspiration came from a casual observation (over a glass of wine) that the two social/religious groups that do allow polygamy ((parts of) Mormonism and Islam) also do not consume alcohol. So we wondered whether this was a coincidence or not.

While many studies have compared alcohol and cultural traits, this is the study to look at its relationship with polygamy. The researchers compared the marital ...

Fridge of the Future Predicts We Will Be Lazy

Jennifer Welsh — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 18:07:45 +0000

Future forecast: laziness ahead. Appliance designers are trying to make even eating and cooking as fool- and work-proof as possible.

The fridge of the future they are designing can do it all: order food, plan your recipes, and even count your calories.

This future-is-now technology is being created by a team of researchers at University of Central Lancashire (that’s in England, in case your fridge hasn’t told you) working with grocery delivery company Ocado. The fridge will automatically scan its contents and order groceries accordingly. It can even plan recipes around the fridge contents, designer Simon Sommerville told the Daily Mail:

“If the specific item for a recipe is not present, the refrigerator might suggest a delayed option, which allows time for delivery, or possibly attempt to find or propose a passable alternative for the missing ingredient.”

It will even clean itself and its nano-tile shelves will move older food and leftovers forward so it can be used. It will also detect decomposing food, keeping those stinky fridge smells from developing and reducing waste. Dieting will be easier, too, as the fridge ...

Elephant Bird’s Tasty, Giant Eggs Were Most Likely Its Downfall

Jennifer Welsh — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 17:59:48 +0000

The extinct elephant bird could grow to over ten feet tall and weigh in at around half a ton, with its eggs about 180 times the size of a chicken egg. They lived well in Madagascar until about 2,000 years ago, when humans first settled the island; then, about 1,000 years later, they were extinct. In an upcoming documentary, Sir David Attenborough says it wasn’t the skill of human hunters that caused the big bird’s demise:

“I doubt it was hunted to extinction – anyone who has seen an ostrich in a zoo knows that it has a kick which can open a man’s stomach and an enraged elephant bird, many times the size of an ostrich, must have been a truly formidable opponent.”

Instead, he says, humans probably killed off the elephant bird by eating all their eggs—someone stumbling on a nest and stealing one of it’s calorie-rich eggs could keep their family happy for several meals.

Attenborough discovered the egg shells on a visit to Madagascar in the 1960′s. For the documentary he returns to the area which has changed dramatically in the 50 years since then, he ...

SpaceX Reveals Secret Cargo on Its Orbital Test Flight: Space Cheese!

Jennifer Welsh — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 16:45:41 +0000

This top-secret space passenger doesn’t have the attributes often associated with astronauts–instead of being labeled brave and resolute, this passenger has been described as nutty, sweet, and buttery. Meet Le Brouere, a space-faring wheel of cheese.

The cheese in question was a passenger on SpaceX’s successful test of its Dragon crew capsule this week, a flight CNN describes as:

One small step for a cheese, one giant leap fromage-kind.

The mild French cheese Le Brouere isn’t the first of its kind to be blasted towards space, but it is the first to reach orbit and to be successfully recovered post-flight. The cheese orbited the Earth twice before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean on Wednesday. The test flight was the first ever orbital reentry and recovery mission by a commercial space company.

The cheese was chosen in reverent reference to sketch comedy troupe Monty Python, company spokeswoman Kirstin Brost told CNN:

The block of fermented curd was a nod to one of the group’s best-known sketches, “Cheese Shop.” The wheel, described only as “very big,” was being towed ...

Is That a Sausage in Your Petri Dish?

Jennifer Welsh — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 20:04:17 +0000

Soylent Green may be made of people, but in the future that biomedical engineer Mark Post envisions, Soylent Pink is his lab-grown pork sausage. Lab-grown meat could reduce the need for farm animals, Post told Nature’s Nicola Jones:

“I realized this could have much greater impact than any of the medical work I’d been doing over 20 years — in terms of environmental benefits, health benefits, benefits against world starvation,” he says.

Before his future comes, there are several hurdles lab-meat researchers need to jump. Post believes he is close, though, and estimates that he could produce a single “demonstration” sausage in a year–if he can just round up about $250,000 in funding.

Making Muscles:

Post isolates adult muscle stem cells taken from a biopsy of a live pig, and grows the cells in the lab. Another researcher, Morris Benjaminson, uses the whole biopsy, and even grew a goldfish fillet in the lab (almost doubling the size of the biopsy by adding extra cells).

But adult cells can’t grow forever; the telomeres on the ends of ...

How to Prep for Oil Spills: Dump 210,000 Gallons of Popcorn in the Water

Jennifer Welsh — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 16:55:30 +0000

One large bucket of popcorn, please, hold the salt, oil, and butter. Actually, make that 210,000 gallons of popcorn. We have an oil spill to re-enact.

Brazilian oil spill clean-up experts leapt into action last week to clean up a popcorn spill that makes movie theater accidents seem pretty tame. It turns out that popcorn makes a good approximation for spilled oil, explains the EFE, a Spanish news agency:

Although it sounds quaint, popcorn has been used to replace oil in simulations for over ten years by [Petrobras]. After testing seeds and grains, the experts found several positive factors in the popcorn: it is biodegradable–prepared without salt and no cooking oil–gives good flotation and serves as food for fish.

The popcorn spill was set up in the Rio Negro outside of Manaus, Brazil by the oil company Petrobras and the Brazilian navy. The organizations were keen to test their readiness to respond to spills because oil companies drill in the nearby Amazon, and transport their oil through the river’s delta. Petrobras’ spokesperson explained to EFE:

“Major emergencies ...

To Make Gold Nanoparticles, Add a Dash of Cinnamon

Jennifer Welsh — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 19:32:34 +0000

“Is it just me, or do these gold nanoparticles taste like apple pie?”

Ok, you probably won’t hear that one around the lab (taste-testing the nano-gold is a strict no-no), but researchers have discovered a way to replace the toxic chemicals typically used to make gold nanoparticles with cinnamon.

Researcher Raghuraman Kannan explains in the press release:

“The procedure we have developed is non-toxic,” Kannan said. “No chemicals are used in the generation of gold nanoparticles, except gold salts. It is a true ‘green’ process.”

The cinnamon takes the place of the toxic agents that remove the gold particles from gold salts, explains Popular Science:

There are several ways to produce gold particles, but most involve dissolving chloroauric acid, also called gold salts, in liquid and adding chemicals to precipitate gold atoms. Common mixtures include sodium citrates, sodium borohydride (also used to bleach wood pulp) and ammonium compounds.

Sodium borohydride is corrosive, toxic, and flammable while tetraoctylammonium bromide and sodium citrates are irritants. The different ways to

Chubby Kitties, Tubby Turtles, Mega Marmosets: Animals Are Fattening Up

Jennifer Welsh — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 19:39:43 +0000

A prophetic story from The Onion in 2003 seems to be coming true: our pets and even lab and wild animals are becoming obese alongside humans:

Amid a barrage of commercials for new diet dog and cat foods, many owners say that their pets are being held to impossibly high animal-body standards perpetrated by the media. “I don’t care what anyone says, my Sassy looks good,” said Janice Guswhite.

Back in the non-satirical world, the findings are alarming. A study of over 20,000 animals from 12 different populations, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, found that over the last 20 years the animals in every population they studied have been growing significantly tubbier, paralleling the human obesity epidemic.

Not only pets are fattening up–the group also studied wild animals living near humans and animals living in labs and zoos. All of them have been chubbing-out over the last two decades. This could mean we are thinking about the obesity epidemic all wrong, lead author David Allison told Nature News:

“Now, we don’t know why these increases occurred, ...

Mother’s Fatty Diet Makes Baby Monkeys Afraid of Mr. Potato Head

Jennifer Welsh — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 17:49:44 +0000

What monkey mothers eat has a large impact on how skittish their offspring act in stressful situations like stranger danger–or the presence of a Mr. Potato Head in their cage.

According to researchers, even normal monkeys find the toy’s large eyes to be “mildly stressful.” But baby monkeys from mothers who were fed a high-fat diet (over 35 percent of calories from fat, modeled after a typical American diet) had a much stronger reaction to an encounter with the spud man, and also spazzed in the presence of an unknown human.

The study, presented at the Society for Neuroscience annual conference, found that in stressful situations, the female offspring were more anxious and the males more aggressive, explains LiveScience:

The babies of the moms on the fatty diet were overwhelmingly more freaked out by the toys and stranger, the researchers found. That was especially true of female monkeys, which were reluctant to approach the toys (although they responded eagerly to food). The male offspring of fatty-diet moms were more likely to behave aggressively, threatening the human intruder in the stranger test, ...

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Jennifer Welsh — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 16:26:42 +0000