Jen-Luc Piquant sez: "They like us! They really like us!"
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This week, I wrote about the latest results from the XENON100 experiment for New Scientist, and it's not promising news for the DAMA collaboration. No sign of seasonal dark matter after four years of searching.
Poker may be the latest game to fold against artificial intelligence. Two research groups have developed poker-playing AI programs that show how computers can out-hustle the best humans.
STOMP visits CERN: group known for making music with everyday objects got their hands on some extraordinary props. "Lab visitors are generally discouraged from hitting the experiments." [Image: Maximilien Brice, CERN]
First beam at SESAME synchrotron in Jordan. Iran, Israel, PA, Cyprus, Turkey collaborate on big science.
Legendary radio telescope hangs in the balance: NSF looks to slash funding for Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory.
Energy Dept issues new "scientific integrity" policy shortly after controversial Trump transition questionnaire. Related: US Department of Energy has released guidelines to protect researchers from political interference. Also: Via Ernie Moniz on Twitter: "New State of the National Labs Report shows how our 17 labs make the nation stronger. It’s science for the people." Finally, because this is the absurd world we live in now: “Man, if believing in facts is an act of resistance, well then, so be it.”
Albert Einstein Explains How Slavery Has Crippled Everyone’s Ability (Even Aristotle’s) to Think Clearly About Racism.
Reading the emotions of physicists' profile images: Mostly happy, many neutral, and one (Brian Cox) angry, although that's in error--he's just really excited (per Microsoft Cognitive Services' Emotion API).
How colour-changing cats might warn future humans of radioactive waste. As the UK gets ready to build more nuclear plants, scientists are looking for new ways to tell our distant descendants where we’ve buried our sludge.
Watch an Early Silent Film About Relativity. Per Mental Floss: "Although it's entirely silent (and of course quite dated), it's a thoroughly lucid way to understand Einstein's most important work."
You Think You Know Albert Einstein? NatGeo's first scripted series, Genius, Begs to Differ. The series airs in April.
"I'm a scientist on wheels / I never need an Uber and my girlfriend wear her heels." A bike + minerals rap.
Cool Worlds interviews my own Sean Carroll at the AAS meeting in Grapevine, TX about a burning question: is time an illusion?
[Note: The following is adapted/updated from a 2006 blog post -- because Jell-O never goes out of style.]
One of my favorite scenes in the film My Best Friend's Wedding is the heart-to-heart conversation between bride-to-be Kimmi (Cameron Diaz) and Julia Roberts' would-be groom stealer, right after the groom has called off the wedding because of a misunderstanding (orchestrated, it must be noted, by a now-repentant Roberts). Attempting to explain why the groom would change his mind so suddenly, Roberts' character -- a food critic by trade -- draws a culinary analogy between creme brulee and that All-American staple, Jell-O. A diner in a fine restaurant might be enamored with the sweet, elegant perfection of creme brulee, she maintains, but could then suddenly realize that what he really wants is... Jell-O. Why? "Because he's comfortable with Jell-O," she says. "I can be Jell-O," Kimmi tearfully offers, to which Roberts tartly replies, "No. You can't. Creme brulee can never be Jell-O."
I'll spare you my exasperated rant over Kimmi's insistent follow-up -- "But I have to be Jell-O!" -- with all its implications for the character's sad lack of self-esteem. That's another post altogether. Roberts' food critic has a point: creme brulee can never be Jell-O, even though both depend on cross-linking proteins for their jiggly consistency. With creme brulee, proteins in the eggs and milk form stronger bonds in response to heat, changing its consistency from a liquid to a semi-solid. The opposite occurs with Jell-O: the proteins form stronger bonds as they cool.
I'm kind of with Roberts on the creme brulee vs Jell-O debate, to be honest, although Jen-Luc Piquant prefers the former. (We're both suckers for a tasty Grand Marnier souffle, served to perfection at Fleur de Lys, a restaurant in Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas.) I mean, can creme brulee do this?
Drop a creme brulee and it would just go splat -- although that, too, might look pretty good in super slo-mo. The components of Jell-O are gloriously simple: nothing but gelatin, water and sugar, plus any artificial flavors and colorings that are added to bolster the fun factor. But where does the gelatin come from? You might be sorry you asked. Gelatin is a processed protein called collagen, derived from the bones, hooves and connective tissues of cows or pigs. Those parts are ground up and mixed with acid or other chemicals to break down the cellular structure, thereby releasing the collagen. Boiling the whole mess causes a layer of gelatin to form on the top, which can be skimmed off for further processing. Eventually it ends up in your local grocery store aisle in powder form.
Different proteins have different structures, and this gives them different properties, which in turn determines whether they solidify into gelatin or creme brulee (or a yummy flan, for that matter). Gelatin 's structure is similar to DNA, except where DNA has two chains twisted together into a spiral, the proteins that make up gelatin have three chains of amino acids tightly bonded together. The only thing that breaks those bonds is energy. A lot of energy. That's where the boiling water comes in: it adds a great deal of energy, in the form of heat, sufficient to cause the three strands of amino acids in collagen to unwind. Adding cold water, and then putting the Jell-O into the refrigerator to cool, causes the chains to start bonding again.
Because it takes so long to cool, the amino acid chains become entangled (when stirred) and water gets into gaps between the chains. That's why Jell-O wriggles so appealingly. It's also why the "short-cut" method of adding ice so the gelatin will set more quickly, is never quite as firm as the Jell-O produced by the slow-set method. The various molecules cool so quickly that they can't self-organize in the most efficient and strongest bonds possible; instead, only a loose matrix forms. If the energy levels of the requisite molecules are lowered more gradually, as in the slow-setting method, they have more time to align properly, forming a much denser lattice structure, trapping the mixture of sugar, pigments and water in between the strands of amino acids.
Fans of Jell-O shots, take note: adding alcohol to the starting mixuture means it will take that much longer to gel, as one intrepid amateur scientist deduced in a fun experiment a few years ago. He set out to determine the highest possible concentration of alcohol (using 80% proof vodka) a given Jell-O shot could contain while still maintaining "structural integrity." See, alcohol has a lower freezing point than water. That's why legend has it that the cook aboard the doomed Titanic managed to survive being plunged into icy ocean waters: he'd been drinking heavily, and all that extra blood in his alcohol kept him from freezing to death before he could be rescued. So it stands to reason that adding more and more alcohol to Jell-O shots would make it harder and harder for the substance to gel. (BTW, the same dude also experimented with what happens when you try to light a Jell-O shot on fire. I'll bet he's a blast at parties.)
At least one Hollywood blockbuster film required special CGI effects that mimicked the properties of a gelatinous substance: Walt Disney's Flubber. Robin Williams co-starred with a jiggling green blob -- the Flubber -- that had a consistency based in part on a type of hair gel, according to animation director Tom Bertino, who never did identify the brand publicly. To get the right degree of elasticity, Bertino's team used a computer modeling program called Metaclay, normally used to simulate liquid effects, to mold and shape the green blob frame by frame, much like old-fashioned hand-drawn animation.
So Jell-O is good, jiggly fun, even if it can't compete with creme brulee on the haute cuisine front. But it's also good science. Scientists have found that adding stem cells -- which can cure rats of spinal cord injuries, if not humans -- to spinal implants made of hydrogels can help patients with old injuries regain a certain degree of function. The gels are basically polymers whose properties are very similar to those of Jell-O, resembling the soft tissue that surrounds the human spinal cord as it develops in the womb. The hydrogel fills the spaces in the injured areas, creating a kind of scaffolding that new cells can grow around, building a bridge of sorts to repair the damage.
This semester, I'm teaching a class I haven't taught before: Writing Research Papers (I know: why didn't my students learn that in high school? That's another post.) I'm loving it because I've always enjoyed research and it makes me go back and think about the fundamental methods and questions of the activity. What do you look for in a fishing trip? How do you find reliable sources? How can you tell if a source is or isn't reliable? How do you formulate your questions? What makes a good hypothesis or thesis? How do you interpret data? How do you recognize your own biases? And one of the most important questions (at least I think so): how do you frame both your questions and your answer?
These questions apply to all kinds of research, whether what you're looking at is literary, historical, social, psychological, or hard science data and sources. Research, even when all you're doing is a review of the topic, ends up with some kind of focused point: here's what the trends are, here's what we know, here's what seems to be an answer to these questions, here are the caveats, here's what we don't know. Part of your answer always depends on what question(s) you ask. It's crucial to keep an open mind, no matter what you're researching. Very often, on the way to looking for one answer, you find one you didn't expect, or the answer to a question you hadn't thought to ask. This is why I've always loved poking around in libraries and the time I've spent in school and college labs, even running experiments that already had answers. It's the process as much as the product that's so enjoyable and instructive.
I was reminded of the importance of recognizing personal and cultural biases twice this week. One of the papers my students are working on is a comparison of the lives and work of Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. My students are predominantly African-American and, like me, hold both figures in high esteem. I warned them that when they went fishing, they were likely to find events in both men's lives that painted them in a less-than-rosy glow. No matter what great things we might do, we're all human, and subject to human weaknesses. For some, this was a new thought, and for many it was troubling. It always is to find your heroes have clay feet. But it's an important step to take in intellectual growth. Can you still admire the accomplishments of someone, even after you discover they're not as saintly as you thought? Which matters more?
The other reminder was this article on WebMD, posted by a Facebook friend, that explains the findings of a study of the correlation between working mothers and childhood BMI. I'm not even going to go into what a crap standard BMI is as a measure of health. That's a topic for another post too. What jolted me about this article was the way the question had been framed: "Maternal Employment, Work Schedules, and Children’s Body Mass Index" [emphasis mine]. Really, I thought we were over this "blame mothers for everything that goes wrong with kids," but apparently this bias persists even in research women do. In the past, mothers have shouldered the blame for their children's schizophrenia, anorexia, and alcoholism, even adult sexual dysfunction. It's still a current motif (PDF) in autism treatment and studies.
The major problem with this idea, especially in late 20th and early 21st century developed countries is that it ignores the social changes in child rearing that have occurred with women entering the workforce. Women are no longer the sole caregivers for children or primarily responsible for such chores as cooking meals or grocery shopping, both of which figure in what children eat. Why, then, were father's activities and timetables not included in this study? Why are we not asking how having both parents working and the work schedules that regularly hinder both parents from spending more time with their children affect what children eat? Because, as a culture, we are still deeply ambivalent about women in the workforce and still see them as children's primary caregivers. Although 64-78% of mothers are in the workforce full time, the continuing lack of salary parity, number of women CEOs, dearth of trustworthy child care provisions and paid maternity leave are evidence that our society as a whole does not really value women's presence in the workforce (PDF).
There are, of course, other reasons for these problems, but a bias against women (and their ability to raise a family and work outside the home, one that does not exist for men) is certainly the main contender, and that bias, like racism, is just as often unconscious and shared by the people who are its objects, including female researchers. In this case, there are studies that look at the involvement of both parents in their children's eating habits (in Germany) and many more on women's influence, but none that I could find that look at only the effect of paternal employment on children's eating habits and obesity. Google, in fact, kept asking me if I meant "parental" instead of "paternal." It's not that the question isn't important, but that the other side of the question, or the collective question needs to be asked too. In fact, another study from the University of Maryland discovered "that paternal employment plays a significant role as well." In the WebMD study, we have what's called a selection bias; the researcher's have chosen to study only part of the group which may be a causal factor.
But the way the study is reported—its framing—is also part of the problem; it creates a perception that women are solely responsible for children's eating habits or nutrition, which clearly isn't the case. The WebMD article says,
Bottom line: The longer a mom's employment — whether she's toiling at a regular 9-to-5 job or works irregular hours — the more likely her child is to gain more weight than is healthy.
"This is not a reason for moms to feel guilty," Morrissey tells WebMD. ''It’s not maternal employment per se that's the issue. It's an underlying environmental factor that leads to this association."
What that factor (or factors) is has yet to be uncovered, she says.
The way this is phrased, it's almost impossible for moms to not take home the message that it's their fault if their kid is fat. Until that underlying environmental factor is pinpointed, we have only the correlation of maternal employment and increasing obesity, about which we can do very little. Leaving father's out of this equation reflects and exacerbates a bias already present in the culture.
Biases exist in every research study, in every discipline. The kinds of questions we ask and how we ask them will reveal those biases if we're aware and thorough enough to examine them honestly. The best we can do is try to control for them and acknowledge them. And people communicating those results to the general public need to be careful about not perpetuating their own biases too. It's not only our heroes who have clay feet; we do too.
The Spousal Unit gave a mind-bendingly good -- and incredibly persuasive -- talk on Sunday to the Caltech Skeptics Society on "Particles and People," outlining the term he coined recently to describe his intriguing new science-based worldview: dysteleological physicalism. Google it today! How persuasive was he? Let's just say Jen-Luc Piquant had a "Saul on the Road to Tarsus" experience and will be seeking to convince her fellow avatars across Cyberspace to embrace supervenience (it's akin to my recent blog post on introducing the physics concept of duality into our public discourse). And I was reminded all over again why I fell for the guy in the first place. He's smart, articulate, witty, charming, and always uses coasters to avoid staining the coffee table.
Trust me, that last one can be a deal-breaker if you're the Coaster Queen. I've amassed quite the collection of novelty coasters over the years; my current faves are tumbled marble squares imprinted with classic winery labels. And now I covet my very own set of "interactive coasters," after reading about them in Technology Review. A couple of postdocs at Newcastle University came up with the idea after attending a science conference in Germany and noticing far too many people sitting in isolated groups, not interacting. (They should have hung out with the science writing contingent. Those people know how to party.) Apparently there's been at least one attempt at designing "interactive badges" at conferences as an icebreaking strategy, but users understandably balked at entering their personal information.
The coaster scheme invented by Tom Bartindale and Jack Weeden involves a partially transparent "smart bar" surface, with an infrared light source, a camera and a projector just underneath. So the bar surface can detect when one of the special coasters is placed on the bar, and automatically assigns that coaster a gender and sexual preference. Now the coaster has been activated -- evidenced by a halo around it created by the projector that displays lines of text -- and it will try to "chat up" any nearby coasters with a series of very bad pick up lines. ("Are you a parking ticket? Because you've got 'fine' written all over you.") Apparently Bartindale and Weeden Googled "bad chat-up lines" for material. They have a sense of humor. (Why yes, there's a list of bad physics pickup lines, many of which are very bad indeed: "What's your resonance frequency?") The receiving coaster then rates the pick-up line; if the sending coaster scores badly, the receiving coaster will refuse to talk to it anymore. Nice to see these guys programmed rejection into their science experiment. At least the rejected coaster doesn't get a drink tossed in its face.
Why am I such a fan of coasters? Probably because a tiny part of me dies inside whenever I see a nice tabletop permanently stained with wine rings -- or, for that matter, coffee rings. (Image at right by Michael Naples, from his A Painting a Day blog.) On the upside, turns out there's some interesting physics going on with the latter.
I wrote a couple of blog posts back in November about nifty papers presented at the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics meeting, but never got around to blogging about one of the coolest: three physicists who have been studying the physics of coffee ring formation (a.k.a. "the coffee ring effect") with an eye towards developing useful tools for "microphysics" -- a rather vague term that seems to incorporate such areas as industrial coatings, electronic fabrication, and drug development.
Fundamentally these are all deposition processes. So it all comes down to being able to control particles suspended in fluids at tiny size scales to ensure -- if we're talking about coatings, for example -- that they are deposited uniformly across a given surface. And as any physicist working in this area can tell you, that's easier said than done. I mean, how complicated can coffee rings be, really? The answer is, not very, if all you care about is not staining the table.
But if you're trying to understand what's going on at the micro-level so well that you can make the micro-droplets do whatever you want -- well, then it gets complicated, because you're dealing with a complex system. To figure out what causes those coffee stains, you need (a) a scanning electron microscope, and (b) high-performance computers capable of doing some pretty advanced mathematical modeling (or you've got to be pretty fast with a pencil and paper). Those were the tools of Shreyas Mandre (Brown University), Ning Wu (Colorado School of Mines), and L. Mahadevan and Joanna Aizenberg, both from Harvard. They used an SEM to study microscopic glass particles in a solution in the lab, and combined those findings with mathematical models to describe characteristics of the ring patterns that formed. What did they find?
The team found that during ring deposition, a particle layer of uniform thickness is deposited if the concentration is above a certain threshold. Below that threshold the deposits form non-uniform bands. The threshold is formed because evaporation at the solid-liquid interface of the rim occurs faster than a replenishing flow of water from the center of the droplet can replace the evaporating rim fluid. This leaves the particles on the rim high, dry -- and deposited.
Having trouble visualizing it? Go on, you folks who don't use coasters: pick up your coffee mug and check the inevitable ring pattern left behind. Now wait until the liquid has evaporated and note the darker ring around the perimeter. It's darker because the particles in that ring are much more concentrated than those in the center.
The effect occurs with other liquids too, which means it might be possible to use that telltale ring as a disease marker in biosensing, using blood, salive or other bodily fluids -- which contain microscale and nanoscale molecules or particles that can be indicators of disease (or lack thereof). Being able to control the effect at such small scales would mean being able to pack thousands of biosensors on a single lab-on-a-chip, possibly even testing for multiple diseases at once. And since the technique relies on the natural process of evaporation, there's fewer complicating factors to deal with, like electrical power sources or moving parts.
Six months before the DFD meeting (that would be May 2010), PhysOrg.com ran a story about a UCLA team studying the coffee ring effect with an eye towards applying it to biosensing. Lead researcher Chih-Ming Ho told PhysOrg.com that "Before we can engineer biosensing devices to do these applications, we need to know the definitive limits of this phenomenon. So our research turned to physical chemistry to find the lowest limits of coffee-ring formation." The idea here is that particles move to the perimeter of a droplet as the water evaporates, resulting in a ring pattern, but if the droplet is small enough, the water evaporates so fast that the particles don't have time to move to the perimeter, and you end up with a concentrated center stain.
Ho's team conducted an experiment with latex particles of various (small) sizes suspended in water and poured it on a specially designed surface with checkerboard squares of alternating water-loving and water-repellant squares. They found that the threshold for 100-nanometer particles is a droplet measuring around 10 micrometers (10 times smaller than a human hair, to use the classic science writing analogy). That's the point where the water evaporated so quickly that the particles didn't have time to drift to the perimeter. (Check out the image above for a visual representation of their results.) The whole coffee ring effect fascination has been around since 1997, incidentally, when graduate students in Sid Nagel's lab at the University of Chicago started investigating after Nagel broached the topic to them over lunch one day. (I'm guessing Nagel doesn't use a coaster.)
There's tons of science involved in brewing coffee, too. Until quite recently, the Spousal Unit had a rather inelegant approach to making his morning cup of coffee. Let's just say that while he always ground the coffee beans fresh each morning -- a must for anyone who cares about good coffee -- the rest of the process involved placing the grounds into a loose coffee filter inside a plastic funnel and positioning it over a mug, then pouring hot water into it.
It worked fine, but the Spousal Unit also loves fancy gadgets, and started scouring the Internet for the perfect coffee making machine, combining aesthetic form with function at a reasonable price. That's when he came across syphon coffee makers, quite possibly the most labor-intensive, gadgetry-obsessed, snobbish approach to making coffee ever invented. But the gadget in question is oh-so-pretty, so very scientific in its operating principles, and -- by all accounts -- results in one hell of a brew.
The syphon method (also known as a vacuum brewer, vac pot, siphon, or syphon coffee maker) has been around since the 1930s, when (Wikipedia tells me, without providing further details) someone named Loeff of Berlin invented it. Its use was a bit too complicated for the average household coffee drinker, but hipster coffee enthusiasts were around even then; siphon coffee has always had its fans, usually of the well-heeled variety. Listen to the folks at Coffee Geek rhapsodize about it:
"Almost everything about using a vacuum coffee maker is sensory involved: aromas, fragrance, motion, touch, action. Grind the coffee, add it to the top vessel. Add cold (or hot) water to the bottom. Put the bottom on a heat source. Add the top vessel with its attached siphon. Watch. Liquids defy gravity. The brew gurgles, but it's not boiling. Remove from the heat source. Watch the coffee move back down, or "south." Watch the bottom vessel's brewed coffee gurgle as air is drawn through the spent grounds to release the built up vacuum. Remove top vessel. Smell. Ahhhh. Pour. Taste. More ahhh."
As the name implies, the method relies on vapor pressure and creating a vacuum to brew the coffee; it exploits the expansion and contraction of gases. There are two chambers: a bottom container where you put the plain water, and where the final brew will come to rest, and a top container with a siphon tube attached, where the actual brewing will take place. You also need something like a rubber gasket to act as a seal so you can create a partial vacuum, a filter, and a heating source (usually a cloth-wick alcohol burner, gas or electric stovetop, or, if you're a true purist, a specialty butane burner).
As the water in the bottom container heats up, it starts converting to a vapor -- a phase transition -- which expands and starts to compress. Since it can only compress so much, it needs to relieve that pressure, and the only route available is through the siphon tube -- but there's a bunch of water in the way. So the gas pushes the water through the tube into the top chamber, where the coffee grounds live, and starts brewing. At some point the water level in the bottom container will be lower than the siphon tube, and vapor pours into the top chamber, creating ideal brewing temperatures of around 90-95 degrees Celsius (185-204 degrees F). When the coffee is done brewing, just remove the heat source, so that the water vapor starts to contract. This creates negative pressure in the bottom container and the brewed coffee travels back down the siphon tube the bottom container, through the filter.
Voila! You have what many consider to be the perfect cup of coffee. Needless to say, while admiring the artistry and gadgetry involved in the syphon coffee process, the Spousal Unit also is not a morning person. He needed something a bit simpler for his morning cup of joe. So instead we have a sleek, shiny, stainless steel contraption that is "Morning-Person Proof." It's still a vast improvement over a coffee filter stuffed inside a plastic funnel, and should the Spousal Unit have a craving for siphon-brewed coffee, well, there's an Intelligentsia coffee house a mile or so away.
And just in case tea drinkers are feeling left out, there's science to the art of brewing the perfect cup of tea, too. Christopher Hitchens has weighed in on this recently, citing no less an authority than George Orwell, who published "A Nice Cup of Tea" in The Evening Standard on January 12, 1946 outlining 11 "golden rules" to follow. But Hitchens can reduce those to one: make sure the water is boiling.
Ground [coffee] beans are heaver and denser, and in any case many good coffees require water that is just fractionally off the boi. Whereas tea is a herb (or an herb if you insist) that has been thoroughly dried. In order for it to release its innate qualities, it requires to be infused. And an infusion, by definition, needs the water to be boiling when it hits the tea. Grasp only this, and you hold the root of the matter."
Lest you question how much Orwell or Hitchens knows about the science of brewing tea, let me point you to an excellent PDF paper by a young grad student in mechanical engineering named Daniel Ives, describing an experiment he conducted as part of a flow visualization class.
He placed a clear glass of hot water against a white paper background, and then sprinkled a teaspoon of hibiscus tea leaves onto the surface. Hitchens would object right here: the tea should already be in the cup (or teapot), and the water should be boiling at contact. But Ives needed to take "before", "during" and "after" pictures to document the diffusion process (as dictated by Fick's laws of diffusion). He's doing science, not making the perfect cuppa -- although an interesting follow-up experiment might be a multiple "taste test" of various brewed teas to test Hitchens' hypothesis about how the water must be boiling.
Anyway, Ives' photos capture both the aesthetics and the fluid flows of a brewing cup of tea quite nicely. His anaylsis invokes the Archimedes Principle describing buoyancy:
The hibiscus flowers, like tea leaves, contain various water- soluble particles. When placed in contact with water, the hibiscus flowers become hydrated and swell. The absorbed water acts as a solvent, pulling various solutes from the flowers into the water. the water that closely surrounds the flowers becomes saturated with a high concentration of solutes compared to the rest of the water in the glass.... As the streams of water containing a high concentration of solute particles flow downward, they mix with the bulk water. Over time, the solutes will diffuse throughout the glass until there is an equilibrium concentration of solutes in the water.
Here's where Archimedes comes in. The tea leaves have a higher density than water at 85 °C, so they will have an upward buoyancy force equal to the weight of water they displace. This is countered by a downward gravitational force for each particle in the tea leaves, and that gravitational force is greater than the buoyancy force. So the water saturated with "leached solutes" sinks in the glass. Ives concludes: "However, because the volume of each particle is so small, the net downward force is very small, leading to a very small downward acceleration of each particle by Newton’s Second Law of Physics."
Eureka! There you have it: the science behind the perfect cup of tea. Why not brew yourself a nice cuppa this evening? Don't forget to use a coaster.
Back from Dragon*Con, with my very own case of "con crud" -- clearly I am paying the price for not bringing my personal supply of Purell. But in the meantime, here's a post from the archives about the science of beer, inspired by news this week that ancient beer had an antibiotic effect in Nubian civilizations. Archaeologists say so! So next time you imbibe while out with friends, you can regale them with your science-y expertise.
The Spousal Unit and I are all moved into our shiny new Echo Park townhouse, and as always happens with the packing and unpacking process, we got rid of a bunch of unnecessary items that had been languishing in storage the last two years. The move also prompted me to sift through my bulging blog fodder file, tossing out things that just haven't developed into actual ideas for blog posts, and combining several others on related topics into handy paper-clipped bunches for future reference. For instance, I seem to have collected an impressive array of items on various science-y aspects of beer, which forms the topic of today's monster post. Benjamin Franklin once observed, "Beer is living proof that God wants us to be happy," and we're all about sharing the joy here at the cocktail party.
First, a few words about beer's long and glorious history. It's one of the oldest beverages, a staple in ancient Egypt, where yeast was used both to make bread and beer. Those Egyptians made the most of their resources. Early forms of beer were flavored with things like wild rosemary, coriander, giner, anise seed or juniper berries, but by 400 BC or so, hops had become the staple for imparting flavor, aroma and stability to the brew. Hop is the flower of the hop vine (related to hemp), and has natural antiseptic properties, which might be why it proved so popular as a brewers' additive: they could have a lower alcohol content and still prevent spoilage, thereby expanding their profit margins.
The earliest reference to beer dates back to 6000 BC, with an actual recipe -- in verse, no less, called "The Hymn to Ninkasi", the goddess of brewing -- appearing on a 4000-year-old Sumerian tablet. The Anchor Brewing Company actually produced a limited edition beer based on the this recipe, which is no small feat considering how vague the "instructions" are:
The filtering vat, which makes
a pleasant sound,
You place appropriately on [top of]
a large collector vat.
Ninkasi, the filtering vat,
which makes a pleasant sound,
you place appropriately on [top of]
a large collector vat.
Okay, so maybe the ancient Sumerians triumph in the category of Earliest Recorded Recipe for Beer, but a pair of archaeologists at the Moore Archaeological and Environmental Services in Galway insist that the Irish also have a long tradition of brewing beer, possibly dating back as far as 2500 BC. In 2007, Billy Quinn and Declan Moore suggested that ancient sites in Ireland called fulacht fiadh may have been used for brewing a Bronze-Age ale, based on evidence they've uncovered at those sites. These are small, horseshoe shaped grass covered mounds, composed of burnt and fire cracked stones and a central pit or trough. There are as many as 4500 known fulacht fiadh throughout the country. Last year the archaeologists bolstered their case by conducting their own brewing experiments at the site, per this article in The Indian (h/t: Lighthouse Patriot Journal):
With a view to investigating their theory, the two researchers set out to recreate the process. They used an old wooden trough filled with water and added heated stones. After achieving an optimum temperature of 60 to 70 degrees Celsius, the researchers began to add milled barley, and after about 45 minutes simply baled the final product into fermentation vessels. The researchers added natural wild flavourings taking care to avoid anything toxic or hallucinogenic, and later added yeast after cooling the vessels in a bath of cold water for several hours.
“Including the leftover liquid we could easily have produced up to 300 litres of this most basic ale,” said Moore. The researchers said that the results of their experiments suggested that the process of brewing ale in a fulacht using hot rock technology was a simple process, and that to produce the ale took only a few hours, followed by a few-days wait to allow for fermentation. Although Quinn and Moore’s theory is based solely on circumstantial and experimental evidence, both researchers believe that a primary use of the fulacht fiadh was for brewing beer.
The article doesn't say whether or not Quinn and Moore actually drank the fermented product of their experiment, but microbiologist Raul Cano did, and he then turned his experiments into a bona fide brewing company. Cano first made headlines back in 1995 when he successfully extracted living bacterium from a bee entombed in amber dating back some 24-45 million years -- the plot device underlying Jurassic Park, which is why Cano got so much attention (the film came out in 1995). Cano is the director of Cal Poly's Evnironmental Biotechnology Institute (EBI), and was thrilled when he successfully extracted more than 200 different kinds of microscopic creatures from inside a Lebanese weevil trapped into ancient Burmese amber. The tiny colony of bacteria and yeast had lain dormant for millions of years, and Cano was able to activate the ancient yeast to brew his own tasty fermented concoctions.
At the cast party for Jurassic Park: The Lost World, he served samples of T-Rex Lager, Stegosaurus Stout, Jurassic Amber Ale, and Ancient Ale. The crew was thrilled, and while his scientific colleagues were initially skeptical -- as scientists are wont to be -- since then, at least three independent experiments have verified that it is indeed possible to isolate and extract a living organism from ancient amber. (Note that this doesn't mean we'll be cloning dinosaurs any time soon. Any good DNA expert will tell you that extracted DNA is far too damaged for cloning purposes.)
One of those confirming scientists, Lewis "Chip" Lambert, is now Cano's partner in Fossil Fuels Brewing Company. The idea is to brew commercially viable beer using their prehistoric yeast, and use the proceeds to fund biofuels research. They teamed up with commercial brewer Pete Hacket of Stumptown, famed for its Rat Bastard Ale. A blind tasting director of Celebrator Beer News named Jay Brooks pronounced Tyrannosaurus Rat beer as "smoother, with softer fruity flavor characteristics [than Rat Bastard Ale] and just a touch of lemony sweetness that isn't tart" -- demonstrating that beer lovers might one day rival oenophiles when it comes to lurid descriptions of their favored beverages. Other reviewers have talked of a "weird spiciness at the finish," and described it as "smooth and spicy."
That unique flavor, says Cano, is partly due to the fact the ancient yeast can only metabolize a narrow selection of carbohydrates, unlike modern yeasts, which devour just about any kind of sugar it encounters. And he expects the ancient stuff will gradually evolve to more closely resemble its modern cousins in terms of a broader metabolism. That may alter the taste, so Cano is keeping a batch of the original yeast in storage, just in case. How such microorganisms survived for 35 million years trapped in amber remains a mystery, but suggests the tantalizing possibility that we could one day induce dormancy in infectious creatures, rather than killing them outright with antibiotics. If it can be induced by downing a tasty beer, so much the better.
Last October, news broke that a group of undergraduates at Rice University were using genetic engineering to create a beer that combats cancer, with the intention of entering their "BioBeer" in the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition. (A team from Slovenia wound up winning the Grand Prize, but the Rice Students were runners up, and won for best presentation.) They call themselves the BiOWLogists, and got the idea while brainstorming ideas for their team entry in the 2008 iGEM competition. Grad student Peter Nguyen joked that they should try putting resveratrol into beer -- a chemical in wine that has reduced cancer and heart disease in laboratory animals.
It might have stayed a joke, except the students found that there's actually quite a lot of published scientific literature dealing with the modification of yeast with genes related to resveratrol, and they realized "You know, we could actually do this," according to junior Thomas Segall-Shapiro. They did indeed create a genetically modified strain of yeast to ferment beer and produce resveratrol at the same time. Yes, they brewed some test patches -- even though many team members technically aren't of legal drinking age -- but it wasn't fit for consumption because it necessarily contained chemical markers. "There's no way anyone's drinking any of this until we get rid of that," says Segall-Shapiro, adding that there's only one genetically modified strain of yeast currently approved for use in beer.
It's nice how beer seems to inspire all manner of creativity in both scientists and non-scientists alike -- not to mention science-and-beer aficionados like John Carnett, a staff photographer at Popular Science who invented his own all-in-one microbrewery that boils, ferments, chills and pours his own homemade brewskis:
In most home-brewing setups, each step in the process requires moving the beer to a new container by hand, which increases the chance of contamination and requires you to lift stuff. Carnett's machine keeps everything in the carts' closed system and requires only that he swap a few CO2-pressurized hoses to move the liquid along. It also employs a complex temperature-control system to regulate the fermentation (often done in a corner of a basement) to within a degree or two. A couple weeks later, the same system chills the beer on its way from keg to tap, so the Device is always ready with a cold pour and consumes no power when it's not serving or fermenting.
Last November, New Yorker writer Burkhard Bilger wrote a lengthy article on the rise of extreme beer for that magazine, profiling Baltimore businessman John Gasparine, who owns a flooring company. While traveling through southern Paraguay on quest for sustainably harvested wood, he found local wood-carvers favored palo santo (holy wood), "so heavy that it sank in water, so hard and oily that it was sometimes made into ball bearings or self-lubricating bushings," Bilger wrote. "It smelled as sweet as sandalwood and was said to impart its fragrance to food and drink."
Among the many uses of the wood was fashioning wine barrels. Gasparine is more of a beer man, and his favorite bar in downtown Baltimore served an unusual beer from a brewery called Dogfish Head, with the motto "Off-Centered Ales for Off-Centered People." Dogfish makes standard Belgian ales, but also experiments with beers brewed with oysters or arctic cloudberries, and sometimes aged its beer in oak barrels. Sensing a unique business opportunity, Gasparine wrote to the owner, Sam Calagione, suggesting he try fashioning a barrel out of palo santo. It wasn't an easy task to build a barrel to hold nine thousand gallons: the wood is three times harder than rock maple, and easily dulls saw blades.
But they succeeded, and the result was Palo Santo Marron, containing 12% alcohol with "hints of tobacco and molasses in it, black cherries and dark chocolate, all interlaced with the wood's spicy resin. It tasted like some ancient elixir that the Inca might have made." (Bilger, apparently, is an Off-Centered Beer Man.) It makes a nice addition to the Dogfish line-up which also includes 120 Minite I.P.A. (India Pale Ale), famed for being one of the strongest beers of its kind in the world, with 18% alcohol and 120 international bittering units, or IBUs. (Most India pale ales have 6% alcohol and only 40 IBUs.) In fact, Dogfish brews more beers with at least 10% alcohol than any other brewer, according to Bilger's article, and gets inspiration for bizarre ingredients from ancient recipes -- possibly even that old Sumerian tablet.
So much for the science and and craft of brewing beer. The bottles have their own underlying physics, evidenced by a demonstration at the APS March Meeting in Pittsburgh a few weeks ago that showed what's really going on when you break a beer bottle with your bare hands. I'm not talking about smashing a bottle on the edge of a pool table to create a makeshift weapon -- a move that's a staple of cinematic fight scene choreography. (Not that I've ever tried this myself, mind you, but I'm told by those who have tried it that it's easier said than done.)
It's also possible to fill a beer bottle with water, with just a small space near the top, jerk the bottle sharply upward while smacking the opening with your palm. Get everything just right and the bottom of the bottle will shatter while the rest of the bottle remains intact. The secret? Bubbles. Or more accurately, acoustic cavitation. It's a cool effect which is probably why videos of the trick can easily be found on YouTube.
As for the March Meeting demo, it all started a couple of years ago when Sunny Jung, an MIT mathematician, was attending a party at New York University with a few colleagues from MIT, NYU and Kent State. After a few Coronas, the conversation naturally turned to the "beer bottle trick" and possible explanations for the physical phenomenon behind it. The scientists first assumed that it as the pressure change created in the bottle with the hand strike, except when they tried the trick with ultra-pure water with no bubbles it didn't work, even if the bottle was struck with the same amount of force. Clearly the microbubbles created in the water by the upward jerk played a critical role, and they figured it had to be acoustic cavitation. (The pistol shrimp -- one of the loudest creatures in the ocean -- has one very large claw that, when snapped, creates bubbles with enough energy to stun its prey.)
So Jung and his cohorts had their working hypothesis and it was time to test it. They hooked up a high speed camera and microphone in a lab and did the trick again. The experiment revealed that when the beer bottle is struck all the liquid rushes rapidly upwardly, and as the pressure in the moving water dropped, thousands of tiny bubbles formed, clumping together at the bottom and imploding. "The force of all these collapsing bubbles becomes concentrated into a small area," Sung's collaborator Jake Fontana explained, who was able to calculate that the pressure generated at the bottom of the bottle was around 1000 pounds per square inch.
It's worth noting that not just any glass container will do. It's the shape of the beer bottle -- featuring a flat bottom and narrow neck -- that concentrates all those bubbles. And for those tempted to try this at home, Jung et al suggest wearing protective gloves and safety goggles, and performing the experiment over a nice big bucket to catch the shattering glass.
The other built-in risk factor for beer is, of course, the hangover. I haven't had too many of these, but the ones I've had were certainly memorable. They were not, however, due to over-consumption of beer, but to over-consumption of other liquor, notably, scotch and tequila. And my very first hangover arose from mixing alcohols: I started off with a beer, followed it with a kamikaze, then a margarita, and finished with a glass of cheap chablis, with predictably disastrous results. College students learn this mantra very quickly: "Beer before liquor, never sicker. Liquor before beer, never fear." (Drink enough of anything, obviously, and the mantra becomes moot.)
Apparently there's a scientific basis for that mantra. One of the contributing factors to hangovers are congeners, toxic chemicals formed during the fermentation process. Not all alcohols are created equal when it comes to concentration of congeners: vodka has the least, followed by gin, while scotch whiskey, brandy, rum, and single malt scotch have four to six times more congeners than gin. Per the British Medical Journal, you're more likely to get a hangover from drinking brandy, followed by red wine, rum, whiskey, white wine, gin and vodka. And it really is not a good idea to mix booze, since this makes it harder for your body to process all the varieties congeners.
As for taking "a hair of the dog that bit you" to remedy a hangover, this does work at easing the symptoms of a hangover, but ultimately it just postpones the inevitable. Drinking lots of water before retiring for the night can counter alcohol's dehydrating effects -- another contributing factor to hangovers -- and drinking coffee the next morning might only make it worse, since both alcohol and caffeine are diuretics.
Ultimately, the best defense is not to over-indulge in the first place. "Moderation in all things," as our good friend Epicurus once said. One leaves one's college years behind, and discovers the joys of quality over quantity. But I still want to drag the Spousal Unit to a new college hangout near USC called The Lab GastroPub. You can't go wrong with beer, victuals, and chalkboards filled with equations.
Dragon*Con is nigh, and I'll be heading out to Atlanta next Thursday to participate in several panels over that weekend, including one on "The Science of the Whedonverse," wherein I will join fine folks like JPL's Kevin Grazier (tech consultant for Eureka) analyzing the science behind Joss Whedon's most beloved series: Firefly/Serenity, Dollhouse, and of course, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.(I'll also be on a few panels on the Skeptic track, and talking about The Calculus Diaries, given that the book's release is -- yikes! -- this Tuesday.)
There's far too much to discuss in one hour (I wrote an entire book on Buffyverse physics, and you could easily do the same for Firefly and the neuroscience of Dollhouse), but I hope we'll touch on some of my favorite topics: the Gentlemen's exploding heads in the Emmy-nominated episode "Hush"; the time-tinkering physicist in "Happy Anniversary" (Angel, Season 2); the thermodynamics of magic in the Buffyverse; and some of the real-world biological counterparts to demons and monsters, like the Queller demon in "Listening to Fear" (Buffy, Season 5). As the episode opens, Willow and Tara are gazing at the constellations when they a meteor streaking across the sky. It’s not an ordinary meteor: this one has a soft chewy demon center, unleashing an overgrown, slimy lizard-like creature onto a community already overrun with demons. The Queller demon vomits a sticky, odiferous substance onto its victim’s face, which then hardens, suffocating said victim. Xander resents being forced to spend his weekend researching a killer snot monster, and an exasperated Giles upbraids him that it's important because "it's a killer snot monster from outer space!" I'm still waiting for the SyFy original movie on that one: Killer Snot Monsters from Outer Space would give Sharktopus a run for its money.
I was reminded of all things slimy and snot-like this past week, upon reading a short post by Brian of Laelaps about a new method for extracting DNA-rich tissue from dolphins. In the past, the standard techique has been dart biopsies: you shoot the creature with a small harpoon-like device and when you pull it out, there's a bit of tissue attached, ideal for genetic analysis. Jen-Luc Piquant sniffs that if she were a dolphin, she would find this very irritating, if not outright painful. And indeed, dart biopsies can't be used on very young dolphins for fear of injury.
Get a dolphin to blow in a tube, however -- the dolphin equivalent of a breathlayzer -- and you collect a sample of "dolphin blow" (oh, stop sniggering!): air infused with a mix of proteins and liquids to comprise a sort of "lung surfactant." Per Brian, prior work showed that dolphin blow contains traces of reproductive hormones, so why not genetic material? To find out, the University of Queensland researchers held polyproplene tubes -- which look disturbingly akin to a solidified condom in the photo below -- over the dolphins' blowholes and collected enough genetic material to produce DNA profiles that closely matched that obtained by analyzing the dolphins' blood. One more challenge remains: the dolphins used in the study were from the National Aquarium in Baltimore, who are far more likely to cooperate with such procedures than dophins reared in the wild. But I'm sure if we just explained to them that they can either be pinged with sharp darts and lose a bit of tissue, or breathe into a tube for a few minutes, they'll see reason.
From Brian's description, dolphin blow seems quite similar to what a materials scientist might term a "viscous colloid," a class of materials that includes mucus, a substance with which we all have had firsthand experience. When the Spousal Unit appeared on The Colbert Report this past March, I went with him to NYC, only to be felled by a nasy cold virus during our stay. For three days, my morning ritual included the ceremonial Clearing of the Mucus -- undertaken while the Spousal Unit was off getting his morning coffee to spare him the horror of witnessing something akin to a scene from The Exorcist. (A good marriage needs a bit of mystery.) Having witnessed what was expelled form my nasal passages, I can readily believe Wikipedia's assertion that "the average human body produces about a liter of mucus per day."
Usually, though, mucus is beneficial, helping ward off infection by trapping nasty paticles that enter through the nose (or mouth) before they can get down into the respiratory tract. It's a bit sensitive to temperature: in cold weather, for instance, our mucus can thicken, only to "melt" when we come in from the cold for a nice hot bowl of soup, thereby causing one's nose to run at the table in a most unappetizing fashion. I hate being "that person" at the dinner table. We have all been that person at some point.
Elsewhere in Nature, mucus and other slimy substances have some very desirable properties of great interest to scientists – not to mention celebrities of advancing years. Slug mucus is enjoying a renaissance of sorts as an anti-aging compound in high-end cosmetics. Beyond the pursuit of vanity, it also provides a useful model in the development of new synthetic lubricants, which could one day be used to combat friction in molecular-scale nanomachines. And then there's the lowly hagfish, a pretty darn ugly eel-like creature that excretes copious amounts of slime from pores all along its body when it feels threatened in any way. That slime mixes with saltwater to transform into a sticky goo.
The hagfish puts the human mucus production system to shame: it can churn out 1 liter of mucus in less than a second, according to hagfish guru Douglas Fudge, a marine biologist at the University if Guelph in Canada. Hence the creature's Latin name, Myxine glutinosa, from the Greek myxa ("mucus") and the Latin gluten ("glue"). The resulting slime bonds to the gills of an attacking fish and blocks respiratory flow: the victim perishes by choking on snot. Should the victim attempt to chew its way through the slime to escape, the stuff will just expand further, and the victim will suffocate that much faster. The hagfish gets out of its own mess by tying itself into a knot, then pushing the knot down the length of its body to scrape off the slime.
And that brings me to another gratuitious Buffyverse reference! The long-suffering Giles turns into a Fyarl demon in “A New Man” (Buffy, Season 4), gaining the ability to shoot a sticky mucus through his nostrils that hardens into a solid and immobilizes an opponent. Excreting large globules of snot it not as showy as, say, shooting searing laser beams from his eyes, but Spike declares the ability dead useful in a fight. Just ask the hagfish. Or Peter Venkman in Ghostbusters.
Mucus is what’s known as a “phase-change” material because it moves from liquid to solid. The change is usually triggered by temperature (hot to cold, or vice versa) or environmental factors (wet to dry, dry to wet). Mucus is made up of protein-and-sugar molecules (mucin), as well as lots of water, which gives the material its slippery texture. As the substance loses moisture, it becomes more rigid, undergoing a sort of phase transition, although scientists who study these strange materials prefer to describe the process in more vague terms: the substance goes from a “fluid-like” to a “solid-like” state. Once ejected, the substance rapidly cools down and begins losing moisture. As it dries out, it forms a hard shell.
Unlike other forms of mucus, hagfish slime doesn’t harden. It stays slimy even in very chilly water, in part because both the hagfish and its victim are immersed in salty seawater, so it never has a chance to dry out. But hagfish slime has a secret ingredient: the usual protein-and-sugar concoction also contains long threadlike fibers. The technical term is "intermediate filaments," and these fibers are finer than spider's silk, and as strong. The fibers form protein strands that expand rapidly once the mucins comes into contact with seawater, causing the substance to “blow up” into a sticky gel. The consistency is a bit like half-solidified Jell-O, or watered-down hair gel. The fibers are so stretcy, they can enlongate like taffy to three times their length before finally snapping. Fudhe designed his own apparatus to stretch the filaments: something akin to a ping pong paddle, except with a filament where the paddle part should be. (Diagnostic electronics are embedded in the handle.)
Intermediate filaments can be found in most animal cells, creating a kind of scaffolding so that the cells are rigid enough to maintain their shape, yet still flexible enough to have a bit of give and take. That's an interesting finding, because until quite recently, most biologists had assumed cell structure was rigidly inflexible. So they were initially skeptical of Fudge's model, until French researchers traced a 3D contour of the fibers using an atomic force microscope, and also found them to be stretchy rather than inflexible.
Fudge is one of the leading experts on hagfish, which might be a dubious distinction if the creature weren't so fascinating... and if its slime weren't so complex. There's still a lot to learn about hagfish slime. For instance, the goo is ejected as a mix of disc-shaped vesciles and wound-up protein fibers (just like balls of yarn), and the vesicles burst when they come into contact with sea water, and the fibers unwind. The resulting mixture traps sea water, and that's what causes it to swell. But what keeps those vesicles from bursting prematurely? There has to be a stabilizaing compound among the ingredients.
In 2003, Fudge thought he'd found the answer when an analysis revealed very high concentrations of methylamines, notably trimethylamine oxide. That's a compound often found in shark tissue, for instance, to keep salt water from leaching bodily fluids out of the shark through osmosis. But it turned out to be something of a red herring. His team actually "milked" the glands of drugged-up hagfish, releasing the substance into air instead of salt water -- and still there was an explosion of slime. The hagfish is full of surprises. Fudge surmises that the gland might be pressurized -- kind of like how Reddi-Wip doesn't foam up until it's released from the can.
All promising materials have potential applications and hagfish slime is no exception. Its unique properties could help save human lives by curtailing bleeding in an accident victim during surgery, for example. The mucus would expand upon contact with the blood (which is mostly water and salt), staunching blood flow. That stretchy property is another bonus for potential applications. Fudge compares them to the plastic rings tha hold together a six-pack of beer: pull them apart and they syart to loosen and deform; in the case of the fibers, they actually rearrange into new molecular formations, eerily similar to spider silk. So those amazing fibers could be used -- or synthesized -- to make ultra-light yet super-strong textiles ("bio-steel"), as well as biomedical devices, tissue engineering and biosensors. And as any hagfish could attest, mucus is a terrific defense mechanism, which is one reason why the U.S. military is investigating its properties for military applications.
More frivolously, a group of students in British Columbia figured out how to use hagfish slime as an egg substitute in scones; they believe it could also serve as a thickening agent in eggnog. They failed to include the recipe in their report, but an interpid blogger at the Museum of Awful Food adapted a recipe for just that purpose, which we reproduce here (duly credited) for those in need of some fresh-baked hagfish slime scones for Sunday morning. If you make them, be sure to let us know how they taste; we share the blogger's skepticism that hagfish slime will be an effective substitute, given that egg yolk plays a big role in emulsification and texture....
Hagfish-Slime Cheddar-Gruyere Scones
4 cups all-purpose flour 2 tablespoons baking powder 4 teaspoons sugar 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 cup (two sticks) chilled unsalted butter, cut into 1/2-inch cubes 2 cups (packed) coarsely grated extra-sharp yellow cheddar cheese (about 9 ounces), or a mix of 6 ounces cheddar and 3 ounces gruyere. 1-1/2 cups chilled heavy whipping cream 6 tablespoons hagfish slime
Preheat oven to 375F
In a food processor, blend flour, baking powder, sugar, and salt. Cut in the butter using quick pulses until the mixture resembles coarse meal. Add cheese and cut in using quick pulses. In a small bowl, whisk together the cream and hagfish slime. With the food processor running, add cream mixture through feed tube. Process until dough just holds together – don’t overmix!
Turn dough out onto a lightly floured work surface. Gather the dough together and divide into quarters. Pat each quarter into a round just short of 1 inch high (it should be about 6-7 inches in diameter). Using a clean, sharp knife, cut each round into six wedges. Transfer half the wedges to ungreased baking sheets lined with parchment paper, spacing them about 2 inches apart.
Bake the first batch of scones until the edges just start to brown and a toothpick comes out clean, about 20 minutes. Transfer them, still on their parchment paper, to a wire rack to cool at least 10 minutes, during which time put in the second batch of scones.
Serve warm or at room temperature. The scones will stand for about 8 hours. Do not refrigerate. If you want to reheat them, warm them in a 350F oven for about 5 minutes.
In honor of "Pepsipocalypse," and my own inordinate fondness for Diet Coke (which I share with Bora!, as evidenced by the photo at the end of this post, although he's partial to the sugared variety), it seems appropriate to pay tribute to the grand-daddy of fizzy drinks: British scientist Joseph Priestley. He didn't actually invent carbonation, which is a natural process: at high pressures underground, spring water can absorb carbon dioxide and become "effervescent." "Seltzer" originally referred to the mineral water naturally produced in springs near a German town called Niederseltsers, although today, it's pretty much just filtered tap water that's been artificially carbonated. No, Priestley is responsible for the artificial carbonation process, along with "discovering" oxygen (more on that, and the caveats, later) and eight other gases, including carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide (laughing gas).
Born in 1733 in a small town near Leeds, Priestley was the eldest of six children born to Jonas Priestley, a "dresser and finisher of cloth," and Mary, the daughter of a local farmer. So fecund was his mother, that the brood grew rapidly, and Joseph was sent to live with his grandfather at an early age. His mother died when he was nine, and when his father remarried, he was adopted by his father's sister. In her household, he was exposed to the theological and political discussions of so-called "Dissenters," a group of believers who did not strictly adhere to the doctrines of the official Church of England, and were often discriminated against, if not outright persecuted, for their supposedly heretical beliefs. He was extremely precocious, mastering (via recitation) his catechism by age 4 (!). (Overachiever. Sheesh. I could barely read at 4.)
Initially Priestley attended local schools, but a bout with tuberculosis in his teenage years forced him to drop out. He had learned Greek, Latin and a bit of Hebrew while at school, and subsequently taught himself French, Italian, German, Chaldean, Syrian and Arabic), as well as the basics of geometry and algebra. He enrolled at Daventry Academy with the aim of becoming a minister, and it was here he first became interested in what was then known as natural and experimental philosophy. But he became a minister, nonetheless, despite suffering from a speech impediment (the result of his childhood illness) and alienating some members of his first rural congregation in Needham Market, Suffolk, with his strong Unitarian leanings. He was much happier in his second post at Nantwich, Cheshire, where he helped establish a school and trained his students in natural philosophy, among other subjects.
Technically, Priestley was a Rational Dissenter: one who "emphasized the rational analysis of the natural world and the Bible," according to Wikipedia. He loathed strict dogma and eschewed mysticism. Priestley was probably relieved when, in 1761, he was transferred to the far more urbane Warrington (known as "the Athens of North") to become a tutor of modern languages and rhetoric at the local Dissenting Academy. He married in 1762 -- to one Mary Wilkinson, whom he described as "a woman of excellent understanding much improved by reading, of great fortitude and strength of mind, and of a temper in the highest degree affectionate and generous; feeling strongly for others, and little for herself" -- and became acquainted with scientific society during annual visits to London.
Warrington was an excellent environment for Priestley's growing interest in scientific experimentation. He met Benjamin Franklin in London, who encouraged him to investigate electricity. Priestley initially focused on reproducing known experiments, but soon found himself designing his own experiments to answer some of the questions raised. He published A History and Present State of Electricity, and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1766 as a result of this work. He even published a popularized version of the book, teaching himself perspective drawing so he could illustrate the concepts adequately. His description of "a current of real air" between two electrified points" would later influence both Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell in their pioneering studies of electromagnetism. But his interests soon turned to chemistry.
By 1767, Priestley was living next to a brewery in Leeds and started experimenting with the brewery gas (carbon dioxide) using candles and burning pieces of wood. In one such experiment, he placed a bowl of water above the surface of a liquor in the process of fermenting, and found it quickly took on a sweetly acidic taste akin to the famed mineral water of Niederseltsers. The end result was the 1772 publication of Impregnating Water with Fixed Air, which included very simple instructions:
"If water be only in contact with fixed air, it will begin to imbibe it, but the mixture is greatly accelerated by agitation, which is continually bringing fresh particles of air and water into contact. All that is necessary, therefore, to make this process expeditious and effectual, is first to procure a sufficient quantity of this fixed air, and then to contrive a method by which the air and water may be strongly agitated in the same vessel, without any danger of admitting the common air to them; and this is easily done by first filling any vessel with water, and introducing the fixed air to it, while it stands inverted in another vessel of water."
The Royal Society awarded him the prestigious Copley Medal for his work in carbonation. Priestley's carbonation process was further refined, and bottled "seltzer water" officially hit the commercial market in 1807, thanks to a Yale University chemistry professor named Benjamin Silliman. The first soda fountain appeared in Philadelphia in 1838, featuring sweetened and flavored carbonated drinks, and by 1891 there were more soda fountains in New York City than bars. Just a few years earlier, in 1886, Atlanta druggist John S. Pemberton sought a remedy for headaches and hangovers, and devised the bright idea of adding kola nut extract to coca extract. The result: Coca-Cola. A century later, the diet version of Pemberton's concoction would get me through many a college all-nighter, and remains the pause that refreshes even today. Thank you, Mr. Pemberton.
And then he discovered oxygen -- or, more precisely, he became the first to isolate "dephlogisticated air," along with seven other kinds of gases. (Both Carl Scheele and Antoine Lavoisier also can stake a claim to oxygen's discovery.) This was a huge achievement. Remember that Priestley was working in a pre-modern chemistry environment, at a time when most scientists still adhered to the principles of Aristotle -- namely that there was only one kind of "air." This was also an era dominated by the so-called "phlogiston theory," in which burning or oxidizing a given substance corresponded to the release of another material substance. It was used to explain things like combustion, smelting, calcination and similar chemical processes.
Basically, he isolated oxygen in its gaseous state by using a pneumatic trough apparatus (see illustration) for "gathering gases over water," or in Priestley's early experiments, mercury.
In an experiment conducted in August 1, 1774, he focused sunlight through a lens, thereby heating a sample of mercuric oxide, resulting in a gas that allowed a candle to burn brightly, and also enabled a mouse to live for a good long while under glass. "I have discovered an air five or six times as good as common air," he wrote. Over the next 12 years, he compiled Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air, replacing Aristotle's outdated theory of four elements with Priestley's own variation of phlogiston theory. He called his discovery "dephlogisticated air." (Priestley was surprisingly frank when writing about his experiments, both successes and failures. One of his early biographers noted, "Whatever he knows or thinks, he tells: doubts, perplexities, blunders are set down with the most refreshing candour.")
While traveling in Paris later that year, Priestley met Lavoisier and replicated his experiment for the French chemist. It was Lavoisier who figured out that what Priestley had really discovered was purified air ("without alteration"), leading to the abandonment of phlogiston theory by the scientific community. Instead, the new chemistry embraced the concepts of elements and compounds, and the notion of conservation of mass (mass is neither created nor destroyed in chemical reactions). Unfortunately, for whatever reason, Priestley rejected the Lavoisier school of thought, insisting that there were only three types of "air": "fixed," "alkaline" and "acid." He rejected conservation of mass, and still insisted on focusing on "changes in the sensible properties" of gases, and even though he successfully isolated carbon monoxide, he never realized it was a different kind of "air. So he never embraced the modern chemistry for which his work paved the way. French naturalist George Cuvier, writing in the 19th century with the benefit of hindsight, lamented Priestley's uncharacteristic stubbornness in clinging to the phylogiston theory, describing him as "the father of modern chemistry [who] never acknowledged his daughter."
Priestley's religious convictions cost him dearly, both personally and professionally. While serving as a minister in Birmingham, he earned considerable public enmity for some of his pamphlets, particularly those attacking the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. He was branded an agent of the devil and denounced in the House of Commons. Technically, being a dissenter and disagreeing with the Church of England meant you could be stripped of of the rights of citizenship, and members of the sect were routinely persecuted. Small wonder that when the French Revolution broke out across the English Channel, dissenters tended to side with the revolutionaries and against privileged tyranny, having suffered at the hands of a state-sponsored religion.
On July 14, 1791, there was a dinner at a local hotel to celebrate Bastille Day, which went off peacefully enough, despite a large crowd gathered outside in protest. The violence came later that night, after said crowd had been drinking heavily: they sacked and burned both meeting houses where Priestley preached, even though he hadn't even attended the dinner. Warned that a mob was after him, Priestley fled the house with his family, "with nothing more than the clothes we happened to have on." He suffered the sight of his home going up in flames, destroying his laboratory and many unpublished manuscripts. The riot raged for three whole days, and many other homes were destroyed.
The family fled to London, but the hostility followed them. Poor Priestley was burned in effigy, once again denounced in the House of Commons, as well as from Church of England pulpits, and was even forced to resign his membership in the Royal Society by scientific colleagues (who one would think should have been more tolerant of dissenting views). On the upside, France made him an honorary citizen, although since France was then at war with England, this didn't help Priestley's standing back home.
Realizing he would never have peace again, Priestley and his family emigrated to America in 1794, when he was 61. He was offered a chair in chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, but opted instead to follow his elder son, Joseph, and a friend, Thomas Cooper, 150 miles north of the City of Brotherly Love, in the town of Northumberland. It was intended to be a colony for English dissenters, but within a year Priestley's youngest son had died. Priestley kept up with his experiments in a brand new laboratory, but found himself spending winters in Philadelphia to stave off the isolation. He also founded the first Unitarian church in the US, and both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson attended his sermons.
Unfortunately, Priestley's physical health wasn't as robust as his mind. He nearly died in 1801 during a trip to Philadelphia (Jefferson by then was US President), and never fully recovered. By February 1804, he could no longer shave or dress himself, and was bedridden. There's a touching account of his death here. Apparently, after bidding farewell to his children, he reviewed some manuscripts he'd been working on with the help of Thomas Cooper, finally nodding and saying, "That is right. I have now done." He died 30 minutes later, mindful of his family to the end: he put his hand to his face as he expired so his wife and son wouldn't see it happen.
For all the animosity Priestley faced as a result of his religious beliefs, by the time he died he was among the world's most respected scientists, and a member of almost every scientific society in the Western World. (No doubt it helped that he spoke so many different languages.) In 1833, on the 100th anniversary of Priestley's birth, Michael Faraday -- arguably an intellectual descendant of this reluctant father of modern chemistry -- praised his forebear's "freedom of mind" and "independence of dogma and of preconceived notions, by which men are so often bowed down and carried forward from fallacy to fallacy." Faraday exhorted his listeners to follow Priestley's example, fostering "a mind which could be easily moved from what it had held to the reception of new thoughts and notions." That, indeed, is the mark of an excellent scientist.
This blog post brought to you by Coke (TM) and Diet Coke (TM). And, indirectly, Joseph Priestley.
Entropy is a harsh mistress. Three years ago, when I moved to Los Angeles, I bought the first car I'd owned in 20 years: a brand new 2007 shiny red Prius. It was all downhill from there, starting with the first little ding, a scrap on the bumper, a new back fender thanks to some jerk who sideswiped the Prius in a parking lot, knocking loose the bumper, and then didn't bother leaving a note, and so forth. Sure, I bring it in for regularly scheduled tuneups, but hey -- things fall apart. Entropy happens, and I'm okay with that. And as a conscientious car owner, I've familiarized myself with the basics about how it works. But every now and then something happens that makes me realize how little I really know about my car.
Take last week, when I went to fill the car up with gas, and for some reason, the pump didn't shut off automatically when the tank was full, as pumps are supposed to do. Fortunately, I do know how many gallons per fill-up I normally get, so I sensed something was wrong and stopped pumping. It wasn't quite soon enough: gas began burbling out of the tank and running down the side of the car. This station had a mechanic on duty who helped me siphon out some of the excess gasoline, and rinse off the spilled gas.
Then he pointed out that I seemed to be missing the little metal doohickey that usually covers the tube leading to the gas tank -- you know, the thin piece of metal that you see whenever you unscrew the gas cap to insert the pump handle. His theory: the gas pump didn't stop automatically when the tank was filled because that piece of metal responds to the rising levels of gas in the tank, and the pump senses that rising back pressure and stops. Without that piece of metal, there was no way for the pump to know when to stop. Neither one of us could think of what the doohickey is actually called (and neither could the mechanic at the Toyota dealership), but apparently it's pretty vital. When it comes to car parts, size doesn't matter. Even a tiny piece can have serious ramifications if something goes amiss.
I screwed in the gas cap and drove off, and brought the Prius in for repair a few days later, since it was due for another tuneup anyway. No doubt there's a few car buffs out there who've already figured out that the gas station mechanic was wrong about the cause of the trouble. The Prius doesn't have one of those metal doohickey things over the gas valve -- never had it, never will. The Prius repairman was a bit vague on the details, but apparently all that pressure sensing equipment is located elsewhere in the tank on the Prius. Which means that it wasn't my car that was at fault; it was the actual pump at the gas station that malfunctioned.
Being of a curious bent, once I got home, I turned to teh Google and started nosing around the Interwebz looking for information on gas pumps, gas tanks, and so forth. The ever-reliable How Stuff Works provided an excellent explanation for how gas station pumps work, as well as a brief summary of how it knows (ideally) when to turn off. It's purely mechanical: there's a small hole at the top of the nozzle, connected to a small pipe that leads back to the storage tank in the pump. A device called a venturi (basically a small pipe) is used to create suction at one end. If your car's tank isn't full -- which, at the outset, it probably isn't, otherwise why are you pumping gas? -- air gets drawn through that hole in the nozzle because of the vacuum that's been created. But eventually the level of gas in the tank gets high enough that it blocks the hole. Another bit of mechanics in the pump handle senses the change in suction, and the pump automatically turns off.
But what happens when that pressure sensing mechanism fails, as it did in my case? Well, the tank overflows. Duh. This is potentially a bigger problem in a Prius because rather than a solid tank, it has a flexible rubber fuel bladder, purportedly because it does a better job of preventing gas fumes from escaping. So when I over-filled my tank, I basically created a water balloon, and the flexible bladder squirted the excess fluid back out the way it came in. If this happens once, it's not such a big deal (although it did screw up my gas gauge reading for awhile), but routinely over-topping when you fill the tank can eventually lead to destruction of the vapor-capture system -- a pricey repair.
(Incidentally, that flexible rubber bladder is also why there's often such a big discrepancy between the "official" fuel tank capacity cited by Toyota for the Prius (11.9 gallons for the 2010 model) and real-world usage. That 11.9 gallons only applies in temperatures above 70 degrees F, apparently. In colder weather, the rubber gets more rigid, just like what happens if you put a rubber band into the freezer. It has less "give" and thus holds less fuel -- sometimes as much as 2-3 gallons less -- because of the above described mechanism that causes a gas pump to shut off automatically in response to back pressure from the tank.)
So there was nothing wrong with my Prius, after all, and now that's it had a full tune-up, it's purring along almost as good as new -- at least until entropy starts taking its toll again. And as a result of my little adventure, I stumbled across a physical concept that doesn't get bandied around much these days at cocktail parties (in the blogosphere or otherwise); the Venturi Effect.
The name derives from Giovanni Battista Venturi, an Italian scientist who started out as an ordained priest, going on to teach logic at a local seminary. Logic leads to geometry and philosophy, and eventually Venturi found himself teaching physics at the University of Modena in 1776 (he was contemporary with Lagrange and Laplace). Venturi championed Leonardo da Vinci's scientific achievements -- not just Leonardo's artistic gifts -- and also published many of Galileo's surviving manuscripts and letters.
There are scant details readily available about Venturi, but at some point he became intrigued by fluid flow and the work of Daniel Bernoulli, best known for developing the Bernoulli Principle detailing the relationship between a fluid's pressure and its velocity. But what happens when a fluid flows through part of a pipe, for example, that has been constructed? Well, the pressure drops -- not because the fluid is traveling more slowly through the constricted pathway, but because it is flowing more rapidly, in accordance with something called the equation of continuity. That's just a differential equation that describes the transport of some kind of conserved quantity, usually things like mass, energy, momentum, or electric charge. If something is conserved, that means that quantity -- say, of energy -- cannot increase or decrease, it can only move from place to place, or take a different form. Energy conservation also dictates the drop in pressure: per Wikipedia, "the gain in kinetic energy is balanced by a drop in pressure." And as someone who now has a passing familiarity with calculus, I was pleased to read that Venturi mathematically derived an equation for his eponymous effect from a combination of Bernoulli's principle and the equation of continuity.
So now we know why the pipe in gas pumps that keeps track of the rate of fluid flow is called a venturi. There's a similar device known as a de Laval nozzle: a tube pinched in the middle so that it forms a kind of hourglass shape, that can be used to get a hot pressurized gas to speed up as it passes through. You'll find de Laval nozzles in steam turbines, rocket engines, and supersonic jet engines, for example -- basically anything that involves the combustion of a hot gas.
As for the Venturi effect, it's well nigh everywhere. It can be found in those perfume atomizers wielded by aggressive shopgirls that spray you with unwanted scent as you maneuver your way through a department store, as well as the nozzles of fire extinguishers and automated pool cleaners that use water pressure flows to collect debris. It's used to regulate the slow of oxygen in scuba diving gear; in recoilless rifles; in the capillaries of the human circulatory system (blood flow); and in the barrel of modern clarinets, where it helps speed up air as it flows down the tube to produce better tone. The Venturi effect also comes into play in your car's carburetor. Diandra's the resident expert on automobiles at the cocktail party, so I'll let her explain:
A venturi is used to create a region of low pressure where the gas is mechanically sucked into air flow and into the intake manifold. The carburetor was invented by Karl Benz (Yes, of Mercedes-Benz) in 1885. The throttle on a carbureted car does not control the amount of fuel going inot the engine. It actually meters how much air is being pulled into the entire and the speed (which determines the pressure), automatically puts the right amount of fuel into the airstream.. Instead, it actuates carburetor mechanisms which meter the flow of air being pulled into the engine. The speed of this flow, and therefore its pressure, determines the amount of fuel drawn into the airstream.
A carburetor basically consists of an open pipe, a "throat" or "barrel" through which the air passes into the inlet manifold of the engine. The pipe is in the form of a venturi: it narrows in section and then widens again, causing the airflow to increase in speed in the narrowest part. Below the venturi is a butterfly valve called the throttle valve — a rotating disc that can be turned end-on to the airflow, so as to hardly restrict the flow at all, or can be rotated so that it (almost) completely blocks the flow of air. This valve controls the flow of air through the carburetor throat and thus the quantity of air/fuel mixture the system will deliver, thereby regulating engine power and speed.
Oh, and there's one more interesting application for the Venturi effect, specifically for hardcore oenophiles: it's exploited in the wine aerators that are used as a speedy shortcut for decanting wine. We received one as a gift last year -- along with a traditional decanter -- and it fits neatly over the mouth of the decanter, essentially mixing air in the wine as it flows through the device. But the type that uses the Venturti effect is a handheld injection-style acrylic aerator -- similar to the devices used in engineering -- like the carburetor system Diandra describes above. That's a whole 'nother blog post in its own right, and I know Diandra's got one in the works. So I'll let a Florida wine-maker named Tim have the last word on wine and the Venturi effect:
We are diehard fans of Nick and Nora Charles here at the cocktail party, for obvious reasons: check out the science-themed cocktails in our sidebar. The Thin Man showcased the glamor of the American love affair with the cocktail better than any film since. In fact, we first meet our protagonists in a swanky hotel bar, as Nick Charles -- the wise-cracking former detective who married a lanky brunette heiress with a "wicked jaw" -- demonstrates to the bartenders the correct method for shaking a perfect martini. Whereas a Manhattan should be shaken to the tempo of a foxtrot, he insists, "A dry martini you always shake to Waltz time." Nora makes her entrance shortly thereafter, and insists on lining up six martinis to catch up with her inebriated spouse. It was a harbinger of all the spirits to come: Nick and Nora were hard drinkers when hard drinking was cool -- and this being Hollywood, never mind that their real-life counterparts, Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman, were raging alcoholics.
We now live in an age of twelve-step programs and stringent moderation -- I'm a one-or-two-drinks, maximum, girl myself -- but the cocktail is more popular than ever. It's just that the emphasis is more on quality rather than quantity. A perfectly balanced classic martini is a sign of sophistication and a refined palate: to H.L. Mencken is was "the only American invention as perfect as the sonnet, while E.B. White rhapsodized that a martini is "the elixir of quietude." Perhaps that is why it's the drink of choice for that suave British agent, James Bond (although Ian Fleming originally had Bond drinking a version called the Vesper). Of course, as the Spousal Unit and any number of other martini aficionados will tell you, Bond's martini preferences would not meet with the approval of the "purists." He insists on a vodka martini, for starters, when gin is the preferred spirit for the purists, and usually requests a twist of lemon instead of the typical olive garnish.
While Bond and Nick Charles might like their martinis shaken, the debate still rages among bartenders as to whether this is the "proper" way to prepare the drink. Many consider it an abomination, like W. Somerset Maugham, who declared, "Martinis should always be stirred, not shaken, so that the molecules lie sensuously one on top of the other." (If it comes down to fisticuffs or a duel at dawn, Jen-Luc Piquant's money is on Bond.) The claim is that shaking "bruises" the gin -- the Spousal Unit says this is nonsense, and per Wikipedia, it seems the notion actually relates to how not bruise the mint leaves while preparing a mint julep. There are lots of "citations needed" in this particular entry, though, so the matter isn't 100% settled.
What's the difference? Well, the pro-stir crowd prefers a delicate blending to a rapid shaking, although the latter technique is great for cocktails with ingredients that are harder to mix (eggs, dairy, fruit juices and the like). Shaking also tends to make the drink cloudy due to something called a "chill haze": a shaken drink is colder and particularly in the 19th century martini, this would cause certain compounds in the vermouth to separate and form droplets in the glass. And David Wondrich, author of an excellent new book on the history of mixology called Imbibe, claims that "Shaking introduces a plethora of tiny bubbles that disrupt the silken, thick texture that results from stirring." The Spousal Unit shakes his martinis, preferring a bit of aeration and a good chill. That said, the trend toward stirring didn't arise until 1910 or so, when casual elegance was favored over showy techniques while mixing. Shaking is just so labor intensive when it's so much easier to mix with a flick of the wrist.
So there's definitely a science to the art of mixology, and right now that science is hot. Heck, even that venerated science museum, San Francisco's Exploratorium, is holding an evening event later this month on the science of cocktails, where it will explore the pressing issue of shaken vs. stirred, among other topics. (The event is already sold out, but we look forward to the planned online exhibit to come.) As with food, a good cocktail is about achieving the perfect balance between different tastes and flavors: not too sweet, not too bitter, not too dry, etc. Take the evolution of the martini, which is traditionally made with gin and vermouth. Per the Spousal Unit:
Original martini recipes called for nearly equal proportions of gin and vermouth, and only later did experimentation reveal that a much smaller proportion of vermouth made for a more successful drink. Four-to-one is about right, although there is room for variations in taste. But this worthy discovery has devolved into a pointlessly macho competition about whose martini is the driest.
Bartenders now regularly splash vermouth into their shakers and then pour it out before adding the gin, leaving behind a helplessly thin coating of the original spirit. The next step is to simply pour chilled gin into your glass while doing a Google image search for “vermouth.” There is a name for the resulting drink: it’s called “gin.” It’s not a cocktail, it’s just a straight spirit, one step removed from doing shooters of grain alcohol.
The Spousal Unit is one of those martini aficionados who likes to taste the vermouth (his co-blogger Mark Trodden is another). Apparently Winston Churchill begged to differ, preferring to only get as close to the vermouth bottle as to "look at it across the room." The martini is one of the oldest cocktails, so opinions are bound to range widely.
Where did the martini come from? Legend has it that during the California Gold Rush, a miner struck it rich in 1849 and stopped off in a bar en route to San Francisco. He wanted champagne to celebrate his good fortune, but the bartender said he had something better (or possibly he was just fresh out of champagne). He made the miner a "Martinez Special," and the miner liked it so much, he tried to order the drink again when he finally got to San Francisco. He had to tell the bartender how to make it: one part very dry Sauterne wine, three parts gin, stirred with ice and garnished with an olive. And word continued to spread; over time, the name was shortened to the martini, and the wine was replaced by vermouth. It's a nice story, but the other prevailing theory is more likely: the name comes from the vermouth, specifically the dry white version created by Martini & Rossi in 1863 (as opposed to the sweet red Italian variety of vermouth).
Actual cocktails date back a little bit farther. Wikipedia says the first printed use of the term "cocktail" can be found in a succinct note contained in the April 28, 1803 issue of The Farmer's Cabinet: "Drank a glass of cocktail -- excellent for the head.... call'd at the Doct's. found Burnham -- he looked very wise -- drank another glass of cocktail." Clearly the author is a kindred spirit of Nick and Nora Charles. The first written definition of a cocktail, according to both Wikipedia and this Website, occurred in the May 1806 issue of an American magazine called The Balance and Columbian Repository, along with a snide bit of political commentary:
"Cocktail is a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters -- it is vulgarly called a bittered sling and is supposed to be an excellent electioneering potion, inasmuch as it renders the heart stout and bold, at the same time that it fuddles the head. It is said, also to be of great use to a Democratic candidate because a person, having swallowed a glass of it, is ready to swallow anything else." (Jen-Luc Piquant sez: "How times have changed. Now it's Republicans bringing on the crazy and never letting actual facts get in the way of a good conspiracy theory." Thankfully, we still have cocktails to see us through.)
The person most responsible for the spread of the cocktail's popularity, however, is Jeremiah (Jerry) Thomas, known as the father of mixology. He was a bartender who started out working in California during the old rush, then opened a saloon in New York City. He even toured Europe for a spell, equipped with his own silver bar tools. Nicknamed "professor" because of his exhaustive knowledge of all things related to mixing drinks, Thomas may well have been the bartender who first introduced the Martinez to the lucky miner during the California gold rush.
In 1862 Thomas published the seminal collection of cocktail recipes: The Bartender's Guide, also known as How to Mix Drinks, or The Bon Vivant's Companion. It contained recipes for the Martinez, the Tom Collins, the Brandy Daisy, the Fizz, the Flip, the Sour, and so on. Thomas was also a bit of a showman, able to juggle bottles behind the bar, for instance. And what could be showier than fire? His signature drink was the Blue Blazer, which involves lighting whiskey and passing it back and forth between two whiskey glasses, then sweetening with a bit of suagr and serving with a piece of lemon peel. Thomas was skilled enough to pass the burning liquid between glasses as much as a meter apart, creating a long blue arc of flame between them. Sadly, he lost his fortune toward the end of his life through failed speculation on Wall Street, and was forced to sell his most famous New York City saloon, located on Broadway between 21s and 22nd Streets. (Go there today and you'll find a Restoration Hardware on the site.)
The first bona fide cocktail party took place in St. Louis, Missouri, in May 1917, at the home of one Mrs. Julius Walsh, who invited 50-some guests to her home for a tipple before lunch was served. But then came Prohibition, driving folks to drink in underground speakeasies. Cocktails surged in popularity in part because the mixing helped disguise the fact that the speakeasies served inferior quality alcohol. Tastes also shifted from whiskey to gin, because it was easier to make the latter illegally (it didn't require aging). "Bathtub gin" was a staple, and more than one person was poisoned by a bad batch during this period. Then Prohibition was repealed, and the Age of the Happy Hour, the Rat Pack, and three-martini lunch (featured on the hit series Mad Men) was born. In the 1960s, all the young Bohemians moved away from alcohol into marijuana, LSD and other drugs, but cocktails still reigned supreme among suburban professionals.
By the 1980s and 1990s, cocktails became hip again, and serious bartenders were looking to invent their own concoctions, such as the "Cosmopolitan" that became the drink of choice for the ladies of Sex and the City. (Don't even get the Spousal Unit started on those frothy sugary concoctions that pass for "martinis" on cocktail menus around the country. Slapping a "-tini" suffix on something does not a martini make, although if someone invented a "Higgs-tini," we would gladly feature it in out spiffy sidebar.) Bartenders also hearkened back to the good professor, Jerry Thomas, and fostered showy mixing skills so that customers could be entertained. Check out Tom Cruise's killer mixing moves as he does the "hippy hippy shake" in this scene from Cocktail (1988):
And just so the ladies don't feel left out, Coyote Ugly (2000) dispensed with the art of the cocktail altogether to focus on raunchy dance moves on top of the bar served up with pints of beer and shots of tequila, even the occasional bit of arson. No sissy designer cocktails here, no sirree! And may the Flying Spaghetti Monster have mercy on your soul should you have the audacity to ask for water.
The whole point of movies like this is to make everyone feel like they're missing out on the party. (I've been to the original Coyote Ugly, and believe me, it was pretty tame in comparison -- certainly nobody set the bar on fire.) But as much fun as the odd Dionysian revelry can be, it's not really about the cocktail. Nowadays mixologists are respected professionals, resulting in a surge of nifty new concoctions, as well as a return to the classics. That means I now have a shot at getting a decent sidecar in Los Angeles. (I once sent back a purported "sidecar" on the grounds that it tasted as if it had been made with Tang. Lesson learned: if the bartender has to ask you how to mix your favorite drink, order something else.) My favorite version is the infused sidecar served at the Bellagio's Baccarat Bar in Las Vegas, although the pisco sour tasting trio can match it in smooth complexity and balance.
The Los Angeles Times recently ran a feature on some of the hot new designer cocktails featured at hip bars around town. The Blood Sugar Sex Magic served at Rivera downtown features straight rye whiskey, agave nectar, chili pepper, lemon slices and basil, and the result is an evenly blended mix of sweet, citrus (sour) and spice. The same mixologist also created the Barbacoa, which blends tequila, lime juice, red jalapenos, red bell peppers, chipotle puree, ginger syrup, and agave nectar, garnished with beef jerky -- really, why order food at all? I've also had the well-nigh perfect pisco sour at Bar Centro in the Bazaar in Beverly Hills (it's chef Jose Andres' signature restaurant in LA, housed in the SLS Hotel).
Andres is part of the molecular gastronomy crowd -- the use of scientific tools and techniques in cooking -- and thus it's not surprising to find that his bar/restaurant in Los Angeles is also one of several cities at the forefront of the new field of molecular mixology. New York is the epicenter, naturally, but Boston has STIX and its beverage director, Paul Westerkamp. He's invented such delectable concoctions as the 10 Cane Raspberry Sashimi, served in a Bento box and looking for all the world like slices of raw fish -- except it's slices of 10 Cane rum gelatinized with raspberry puree. With that kind of presentation, it's almost worth the $15 price tag. Almost. It's certainly not the kind of drink you just gulp down without thinking about it. If you're looking to get soused, STIX might ot be your best bet.
But if you're intrigued by creative flavors and textures, and the application of innovative new techniques to mixology, a night at STIX or similar bars could be a lot of fun. Grant Aschatz, who owns Chicago's Alinea, invented something called an Anti-Griddle, which basically flash-freezes sauces and purees to sub-zero temperatures. It's perfect for turning liquor into a crepe-like concoction. Liquid nitrogen, dry ice, gelatin, even Pop Rocks, are staples of the molecular mixology movement, along with foam. In fact, Moet & Chandon now has a line of champagne drinks with foams and caviars. Providence here in LA serves mojito "spheres" made with sodium hexametaphosphate), while NYC's WD-50 restaurant (home to chef Wiley Dufresne) serves a Cape Codder where the vodka and cranberry juice are transformed into edible pearls.
London's gotten into the act as well, according to this article in New Scientist, featuring Tony Conigliaro, mixologist at 69 Colebrook Row in London. He uses sous-vide techniques (Lee blogged about that technique earlier this year) to create rhubarb-infused gin, raspberry-infused tequila, black currant-infused gin, even getting essence of rose petals into vodka. Should the Spousal Unit find himself in London sometime in the coming year, I guarantee he'll want to sample Conigliaro's take on the dry martini. Knowing that the tannins found in red wine, for example, have a mouth-drying effect (apparently they react with proteins in saliva), Conigliaro used vacuum equipment (a rotary evaporator usually used to remove volatile solvents from a substance by heating it under a partial vacuum) to extract nearly pure tannins from grape seeds. Then he pipettes 150 microliters of the stuff into a bottle of vermouth. Why might the Spousal Unit be pleased? This recipe calls for more vermouth to produce a "dryer" drink -- you get the dryness, and you can taste the vermouth.
That, I think, will the ultimate legacy of molecular mixology once all the trendy excitement dies down: using what mixologists learned about making cocktails, taking the best new techniques and equipment, and using all of that to get back to the basics: good, clean, well-balanced flavors that tickle the palate. There's a place for experimentation, a place for showmanship; I can appreciate the novelty of mojito spheres, or jellied gin and tonics. But in the long run, give me a perfect classic sidecar or pisco sour, and hold the hype.
A very happy, albeit jet-lagged Thanksgiving to you all. Major apologies for not getting this up earlier, but it represents my first attempt at vlogging and the learning curve ended up being a little steeper than I anticipated. I just returned from London last night (this morning?) and, after trying to figure out the correct encoding right up to the time I had to leave for the airport, I dragged the whole project with me to England, only to find out that my poor little underpowered laptop didn't have the horsepower to run Adobe Premiere Pro. Thanks to a lack of Cornish game hens in the area, I'm making chicken and stuffing this holiday, which means I have a little more time this morning to get the video uploaded. The video is a little on the long side, and I know there are some lighting problems - I am learning about that you can know all you want about optics, but it doesn't mean you know anything about lighting. The vlog features the science behind - as Jennifer pointed out - why brining a turkey is the absolute best way to make Thanksgiving dinner. Luckily for me (as it is probably a little late to start on your T-bird now), it's such an easy technique that I use it when we're barbecuing chicken, or basically anytime I am cooking fowl.
A couple additional links for more information.
If you're going to try brining, I recommend the original Martha Stewart recipe that got me started. The ingredients sound a little odd, but believe me, they turn out a really tasty bird. Pay attention to the concentration of salt and sugar in the water, though!
One hint I forgot to add in the video: It's really important to let the brine cool before you dunk in your birds, so I like to use about 1/4 of the water to heat and dissolve the salt/sugar in, and then make up the other 3/4 of the water with ice, so the liquid cools down and you can start with the brining faster.
I recommend the scanning electron micrograph images at the Internet Microscope for Schools site for looking at the different types of salt a little closer.
The Salt Institute, for everything else you ever wanted to know about salt
I'm still experimenting with the vlog format, so please be gentle with your comments about the strange blue cast of some of the scenes and a couple of awkward cuts! My big challenge now is translating the British recipe I brought home for sticky toffee pudding into U.S. measurement (and words!) Muscavato sugar anyone?
The perfect pick-me-up when gravity gets you down.
2 oz Tequila
2 oz Triple sec
2 oz Rose's sweetened lime juice
7-Up or Sprite
Mix tequila, triple sec and lime juice in a shaker and pour into a margarita glass. (Salted rim and ice are optional.) Top off with 7-Up/Sprite and let the weight of the world lift off your shoulders.
Listening to the Drums of Feynman
The perfect nightcap after a long day struggling with QED equations.
1 oz dark rum
1/2 oz light rum
1 oz Tia Maria
2 oz light cream
Crushed ice
1/8 tsp ground nutmeg
In a shaker half-filled with ice, combine the dark and light rum, Tia Maria, and cream. Shake well. Strain into an old fashioned glass almost filled with crushed ice. Dust with the nutmeg, and serve. Bongos optional.
Combustible Edison
Electrify your friends with amazing pyrotechnics!
2 oz brandy
1 oz Campari
1 oz fresh lemon juice
Combine Campari and lemon juice in shaker filled with cracked ice. Shake and strain into chilled cocktail glass. Heat brandy in chafing dish, then ignite and pour into glass. Cocktail Go BOOM! Plus, Fire = Pretty!
Hiroshima Bomber
Dr. Strangelove's drink of choice.
3/4 Triple sec
1/4 oz Bailey's Irish Cream
2-3 drops Grenadine
Fill shot glass 3/4 with Triple Sec. Layer Bailey's on top. Drop Grenadine in center of shot; it should billow up like a mushroom cloud. Remember to "duck and cover."
Mad Scientist
Any mad scientist will tell you that flames make drinking more fun. What good is science if no one gets hurt?
1 oz Midori melon liqueur
1-1/2 oz sour mix
1 splash soda water
151 proof rum
Mix melon liqueur, sour mix and soda water with ice in shaker. Shake and strain into martini glass. Top with rum and ignite. Try to take over the world.
Laser Beam
Warning: may result in amplified stimulated emission.
1 oz Southern Comfort
1/2 oz Amaretto
1/2 oz sloe gin
1/2 oz vodka
1/2 oz Triple sec
7 oz orange juice
Combine all liquor in a full glass of ice. Shake well. Garnish with orange and cherry. Serve to attractive target of choice.
Quantum Theory
Guaranteed to collapse your wave function:
3/4 oz Rum
1/2 oz Strega
1/4 oz Grand Marnier
2 oz Pineapple juice
Fill with Sweet and sour
Pour rum, strega and Grand Marnier into a collins glass. Add pineapple and fill with sweet and sour. Sip until all the day's super-positioned states disappear.
The Black Hole
So called because after one of these, you have already passed the event horizon of inebriation.
1 oz. Kahlua
1 oz. vodka
.5 oz. Cointreau or Triple Sec
.5 oz. dark rum
.5 oz. Amaretto
Pour into an old-fashioned glass over (scant) ice. Stir gently. Watch time slow.
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