Could part of the solution for global warming fit inside an ice cream cone? Maybe—at least, that’s what the developers of so-called “ambient” ice cream are hoping.
Unilever, the world’s largest ice cream producer (and owner of perhaps the world’s best ice cream, Ben & Jerry’s), is trying to figure out how to produce a new kind of frozen treat that can be shipped and sold at room temperature, before being frozen at home once purchased. The goal is to reduce the carbon that is needed to keep today’s ice cream from turning into a sloppy mess. The Times Online reports:
A spokesman for Unilever said that warm, or so-called ambient, ice cream was a “very interesting idea” but one that posed tough challenges that its scientists were trying to solve. “The key question which has yet to be fully answered is: how do you ensure that, when the ambient ice cream is frozen at home it will have the right microstructure to produce a fantastic consumer experience?”
The new ice cream may be the tastiest part of an overall program to help Unilever cut down on the impact its products, such as dishwashers and refrigerators, have on the environment. Of course, an even bigger way to reduce carbon: Eat less ice cream.
We recently covered a study in which every single fish tested from U.S. streams was tainted with mercury. But that may be the least of our worries: The demand for fish will increase by 40 percent in the next two decades. As the world population hits 9 billion by 2050, the continued depletion of biodiversity and poor environmental conditions of the ocean could end up wiping fish completely off our menus. Not surprisingly though, aquaculture is picking up, and now more than 50 percent of the fish that ends up in our bellies was raised in coastal fish farms.
Fish raised in farms near the coastline are exposed to more pollution than wild fish, and therefore grow to be less nutritious. Ideally, we’d like our fish to roam around freely in the sea before we eat them.
Enter MIT’s Offshore Aquaculture Engineering Center, which is building robotic cages so fish can be farmed in the ocean away from the coastal waters. The Aquapod cage has 8-foot long propellers, which are controlled and powered from a generator in an attached boat. The cage, which strikingly resembles the Apple Store on New York’s Fifth Avenue, is built with triangular panels that are coated in steel nets. National Geographic reports:
“The idea of a cage towing a buoy, with the buoy in radio contact with the shore, is quite feasible,” [director Cliff Goudey said]. “It’s a little futuristic for today’s industry, but we could have a sensor on the cage which gives its heading and a GPS system to report its effective speed over the ground.”
Another group at Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory has a more open idea for a “cage”: They allow their fish to swim freely, but train them to return to their cage at the sound of a dinner bell. Granted, fish are hardly terriers: The bell worked for black sea bass for about a week, but when a school of bluefish came to dine on the bass, they refused to return to their cage despite the researchers’ offer of free food.
Will showing pictures of cake to dieting women send them running for the Entenmann’s outlet? Or strengthen their resolve to avoid sweets? The answer is option B, according to a study of 54 women out of Utrecht University in the Netherlands. New Scientistreports:
[Study leader Floor] Kroese and her colleagues asked 54 female students to look at a picture of either a slice of chocolate cake or a flower under the guise of a memory test. The researchers then questioned the students about any plans to eat more healthily and offered them a choice between a chocolate or oatmeal cookie.
Women shown the cake picture gave a higher priority to their healthy eating intentions than their counterparts shown the flower. They were also significantly more likely to pick the oatmeal cookie – which earlier tests showed was generally perceived as the healthier option.
Kroese speculates that in this case, viewing pictures of the objects of their temptation—not the cake itself, mind you, but pics of it—” reminded people of their goal to watch their weight, and helped them act accordingly.” Of course, it’s doubtful that we should start papering billboards with German chocolate cake to curb the obesity epidemic:
Kroese suggests that sticking pictures of tempting foods on the fridge door may help to bring weight-watching goals to mind. But she cautions that the results can only be applied to women wanting to lose weight: it is unclear whether they would hold in the general population.
Not that we need an excuse to eat chocolate, but if you’ve had a heart attack, you may want to grab the Ghirardelli. Scientists know that eating dark chocolate (not milk—that’s the obesity-feeder) can reduce person’s risk of stroke and heart disease. Now researchers have found that eating chocolate can increase a person’s chances of survival after they’ve suffered a heart attack.
In the Journal of Internal Medicine, Boston researchers published a study finding that when people who’d had a heart attack ate chocolate two to three times a week, they significantly reduced their risk of dying from heart disease.
The scientists studied over 1,000 non-diabetic Swedish men and women between the ages of 45 and 70, all of whom had suffered from a heart attack in the 1990s. They were asked about their diet over the past year and about how much chocolate they ate. The researchers compared their heath exam from the three months after their initial hospital stay to their condition eight years later. They found that “the incidence of fatal heart attacks correlated inversely with the amount of chocolate consumed.”
So what’s the secret in dark chocolate? The researchers believe the antioxidants in cocoa keep free radicals from damaging cells the body. Plus it tastes so darn good.
We know that obesity levels aren’t going anywhere near down. We also know that the biggest increase is among the lower-income segment of the population. Now we have data that proves a logical assumption from these two facts: Being on food stamps makes you more likely to be obese.
New research in the current issue of Economics and Human Biology (hat tip: Sci Am) found that people who receive food stamps have, on average, a BMI of more than 1 point higher than people not participating in the food stamp program. “Every way we looked at the data, it was clear that the use of food stamps was associated with weight gain,” said Jay Zagorsky, co-author of the study.
Why is this? Because food stamps offer a very small amount of credit—$81 a month for the average recipient in 2002—with which to purchase food. As such, people relying on the stamps have a strong incentive to buy cheap foods that are filling—in other words, the exact type of foods contributing to the obesity epidemic.
As we’ve said before, there are two camps when it comes to fighting obesity: punishing or restricting bad behavior (like oh, say, banning new fast food restaurants in poorer neighborhoods) and rewarding good behavior. We’ve come out in favor of the second option before, and this time is no exception. Rather than penalize food stamp recipients who buy unhealthy foods, we should offer incentives and rewards for purchasing produce, whole grains, and other ingredients that don’t pack on the pounds.
To conserve energy this summer, why not harness the insane amount of heat your car collects to—what else—bake cookies? Instead of warming up your oven (and your kitchen) on an already-too-hot day, it makes sense to use the heat that automobiles naturally store to finagle some freshly baked sweet treats.
The blog Baking Bites tried it out and found that standard-sized chocolate chip cookies took about two-and-a-half hours to bake in the writer’s car, which reached 180 degrees Fahrenheit (the temperature outside, meanwhile, topped 100 degrees).
“I think that they were best hot out of the car,” writes the blogger, who placed the cookies on a baking sheet on her car’s dashboard. The cookies never browned, but apparently they did smell and taste delicious. “They were slightly crisp at the edges and chewy in the center,” she writes.
Those of us without cars will just have to bake our cookies the old-fashioned way (or use someone else’s). Still, if you can manage it, car-baked cookies will also make your car interior smell pretty darn good.
Former FDA head David Kessler’s much-lauded book The End of Overeating discusses in detail the use of technology by the food industry to provide the maximum caloric/fat bang for the consumer’s buck. And nowhere is this more beautifully illustrated than in the following video, an unusually candid inside look at the making of pork rinds. Which are hardly an example of healthy food (and we’re using the word “food” liberally). Fried pig skin squares, anyone?
We already knew that a diet based on junk food is bad for people and crows. Now a study shows that the health of cockroaches also suffers when the critters eat an unbalanced diet.
In fact, roaches fed a poor-quality diet matured more slowly and were fatter than those fed a well-balanced one. Females who ate badly also were less willing to mate than their well-nourished peers. LiveScience reports:
[Researchers] picked young female cockroach nymphs and divided them into two dietary groups. Half were fed a good-quality balanced diet of protein-rich fish food and high-carbohydrate oatmeal, while the rest were raised on fish food only. Both groups were allowed to eat as much as they wanted….When the nymphs became adults, the team switched the diets of some animals.
Half of the cockroaches raised with good quality diet lost their oatmeal, while half of the bugs fed poorly were promoted to a good-quality diet. Eighteen days after the switch, the diet control ended and some of the surviving cockroaches were dissected. The effects of unbalanced meals continued throughout the cockroaches’ lives, even for the few that were switched to good-quality food.
Placentophagy, or the practice of ingesting the placenta after giving birth, has been inching its way into the mainstream. Animals do it, and mothers have been offering testimony that eating the nutrient-rich placenta can have health benefits, including regulating hormones that may cause postpartum depression. Granted, no empirical data exists to prove that this is true—but that hasn’t stopped some mothers from adopting the “what does science know about my body/my child” approach (a philosophy that has yielded less-than-stellar results in other health debates).
Still, no evidence has surfaced showing that placenta-eating causes any harm, so for now it remains a harmless endeavor—and one ripe for media commentary. Take a fringe health pseudo-trend and add a journalist’s personal experience, and you have Joel Stein’s witty Time magazine account of just how the mechanics of eating a placenta go down. Writes Stein:
When the placenta did come out, Cassandra, dazed from 21 hours of labor, somehow made sure the nurses delivered it to us in a flat plastic container, which I put into an ice-filled Monsters vs Aliens cooler I brought….
In a fog, I drove the placenta home, where I wrapped the container in a bag and wrapped that bag in a bag and wrapped that bag in every remaining bag we had in the house. (more…)
A recent development in food science may offer solace for dieters who are fed up, so to speak, with the tried-and-true “eat-less, move-more” mantra: Scientists say that modifying a common food additive makes food take longer to leave the body, literally keeping you full for twice as long.
Most processed foods contain emulsifiers and stabilizers, which enhance texture and prevent ingredients from separating. Scientists say that adding a type of stabilizer that is more chemically stable keeps food in the body for a longer period of time—about twice as long—because it makes food harder to break down.
DiscoBlog is DISCOVER's compendium of quirky, funny, and surprising science news from the edge of the known universe. It's edited by Eliza Strickland, and written by Brett Israel and Andrew Moseman.
Could part of the solution for global warming fit inside an ice cream cone? Maybe—at least, that’s what the developers of so-called “ambient” ice cream are hoping.
We recently covered a study in which 
Will showing pictures of cake to dieting women send them running for the Entenmann’s outlet? Or strengthen their resolve to avoid sweets? The answer is option B, according to a study of 54 women out of Utrecht University in the Netherlands. New Scientist 
Not that we need an excuse to eat chocolate, but if you’ve had a heart attack, you may want to grab the Ghirardelli. Scientists 
We know that obesity levels aren’t going anywhere near down. We also know that the biggest increase is among the 
To conserve energy this summer, why not harness the insane amount of heat your car collects to—what else—bake cookies? Instead of warming up your oven (and your kitchen) on an already-too-hot day, it makes sense to use the heat that automobiles naturally store to finagle some freshly baked sweet treats.
We already knew that a diet based on junk food is bad for people and 
Placentophagy, or the practice of ingesting the placenta after giving birth, has been inching its way 
A recent development in food science may offer solace for dieters who are fed up, so to speak, with the tried-and-true “eat-less, move-more” mantra: Scientists say that 
