New Florence. New Renaissance.

"Multi-sensory" cuisine

Courtesy of Workfront, I had a chance to enjoy a Heston Blumenthal meal during a recent trip to London.

He is a brilliant chef who has innovated "multi-sensory"dishes

"Blumenthal’s discovery that what we hear, smell, see, and touch when we eat can have a profound effect on how little or how much we enjoy our dinner is simultaneously obvious and groundbreaking. He’s now using this notion to trigger happy memories for the people that are lucky enough to eat at The Fat Duck in Bray, southern England. The single dish that sums up the multi-sensory approach is Sound of the Sea. Seafood, kelp, seaweed and edible sand are plated to resemble the seashore and served alongside an iPod in a conch shell, which plays sounds of seagulls and the ocean waves."

Here is a video from his "experimental cuisine"

 

 

Happy 150th, Periodic Table

The History of the Periodical Table

 

Lavoisier’s list of elements, published in 1789, five years before his execution, had 33 entries. Of those, 23—a fifth of the total now recognised—have stood the test of time. Some, like gold, iron and sulphur, had been known since ancient days. Others, like manganese, molybdenum and tungsten, were recent discoveries. What the list did not have was a structure. It was, avant la lettre, a stamp collection. But the album was missing.

 

Creating that album, filling it and understanding why it is the way it is took a century and a half. It is now, though, a familiar feature of every high-school science laboratory. Its rows and columns of rectangles, each containing a one- or two-letter abbreviation of the name of an element, together with its sequential atomic number, represent an order and underlying structure to the universe that would have astonished Lavoisier. It is little exaggeration to say that almost everything in modern science is connected, usually at only one or two removes, to the periodic table.

The Economist

 

 

Polywood

Those milk jugs sparked an idea in Rassi—namely, to create a "lumber" that would be durable and sustainable. "Because of my entrepreneurial experience with vinyl fencing, I had a deep understanding of alternative material that [could] replace products made of wood in outdoor applications," he tells the Connection. When he saw his first Adirondack chair on a trip to Boston, he knew he’d found the perfect match, so he went to work creating an Adirondack chair out of plastic bottle waste (think milk and detergent bottles) and other high-density polyethylene material. Rassi made the first chairs himself out of what was named POLYWOOD, and the duo sold them in Phillabaum’s store in Syracuse, Indiana.

Costco Connection

 

Of Monopolies and Hand Soap

Next time you wash your hands at an airport or theater or restaurant in the US, you will likely be using a foamy hand soap. I noticed that on my recent trip through SE Asia. They had non-foam liquid or bar soap in public restrooms.

Did you know that liquid soap, foamy or not, is  a fairly recent phenomenon even though it was originally patented in 1865?

Here’s some recent history. The Minnetonka Corporation released Softsoap in 1980. It was a runaway success (as soaps go) and It then proceeded to buy up all the plastic pump dispensers in the country (said to be over 100,000,000 units). Minnetonka enjoyed a virtual monopoly on liquid soap until they were bought by Colgate-Palmolive in 1987.

Back to the foamy kind. I used to think it was a procurement, lowest cost-driven decision for public restrooms, but the foam is also environmentally sound.

From National Purity

Because it is a diluted form of liquid hand soap, less soap is used per hand washing session. It is also thinner and less likely to clog drains, which people often use harsh chemicals and detergents to resolve. When less soap gets rinsed down the drain, less soap ends up in the environment….foaming hand soap can be used to lather without wetting the hands and water need only be used to rinse the soap away, which can reduce water usage during hand washing by up to 45 percent. Foam soap doesn’t rely on chemicals to create lather, either. Forced air causes natural lathering, which helps foaming soap biodegrade faster than traditional liquid soap. Additionally, you can get more hand washes per package with foaming soap, reducing packaging and transportation impacts on the environment.

The foamy soap needs a special dispenser which mixes the liquid and air at pre-set ratios – not the kind Minnetonka cornered. There are lots of choices including some which can dispense the foam in the form of a rose. 

Hope this useless piece of trivia brings a smile to your face next time you use a foam dispenser at an airport

 

Graphene's countless applications

Growth will be driven by much bigger ­players than niche sportswear startups. Although bendable tablets and fast-charging car batteries won’t arrive until at least a year, more incremental innovations are coming. Huawei Technologies Co.’s Mate 20x series marks the first time graphene has been used in a smartphone. Mackenzie fly rods have integrated the material for a better bend in its fishing poles, while tennis gear manufacturer Head has released a line of graphene rackets for truer serves. The fall collection of Prada SpA’s sporty Linea Rossa includes jackets that use nylon and graphene to help regulate body temperature. Ray-Ban is already using it in sunglasses.

BusinessWeek

 

 

The science behind Coke at McDonalds

Cokes taste better at that chain. It’s not a myth. MyRecipes goes into excruciating detail why.

While most restaurants have their soda syrup delivered to them in plastic bags, McDonald’s Coca-Cola syrup is stored in stainless steel tanks. This preserves the syrup’s flavor and protects it from temperature, light, and air, all things that can degrade the flavor quickly. The stuff in the bags doesn’t stand a chance.

McDonald’s filters their water many times over to maintain consistent flavor and quality. They have to do this because different municipalities have different water sources.

McDonald’s also mixes their syrup-to-water ratio to account for ice melt. That means the drink has a slightly higher ratio at sip number one to make sure that sips four, five, and six are supremely refreshing too. This is also why you should never order your McDonald’s Coca-Cola without ice. You’d be totally messing with the carefully designed soda experience.

The temperature of the water is also optimized for peak carbon dioxide (CO2) levels. Indeed, CO2 doesn’t escape as easily from really cold liquids, so this temperature is designed to be both more refreshing and to keep your pop bubbly and crisp longer.

Compare a McDonald’s straw to that of any other fast-food chain, and you’ll see a size difference: McDonald’s is wider.

More in vid below

Reebok’s Sports Bra

The creation of the bra was spearheaded by Danielle Witek, a Reebok designer, who stumbled upon the technology while thumbing through a science journal (something she does for fun). In 2005, chemical engineers at the University of Delaware had invented a new substance called Shear Thickening Fluid, a gel-like solution that takes liquid form when in a still or slow-moving state, and stiffens into a solid when moving at high velocities. It was originally designed to be a modern form of armor technology, since you can incorporate it into a protective garment to defend the wearer from items flying at their body at a high speed–it’s since been used in everything from Kelvar bulletproof vests to NASA spacesuits that protect astronauts from shrapnel.

Fast Company

 

Densified Wood in cars

Yes, wood might no longer be just for dashboards and Morgan body framing. Researchers at the University of Maryland have developed a way to make cheap, renewable, fast-growing, CO2-consuming wood 10 times stronger and tougher than natural wood, aligning its strength with some steels but at one-sixth the weight and vastly lower cost. (The cost savings over carbon fiber apply, as well.)

It's called "densified wood." Producing it involves boiling the wood in a solution containing sodium hydroxide and sodium sulfate just long enough to remove 12 percent of the cellulose, 73 percent of the hemicellulose, and 46 percent of the lignin. It's then boiled in deionized water to remove these chemicals and then hot-pressed (perpendicular to the growth direction) at 725 psi and 212 degrees F until it's squashed to about 20 percent of its original thickness.

Motor Trend

Billion-dollar colors

During his nine-year sojourn into the strange, finicky realm of color, Subramanian, a materials science professor at Oregon State University at Corvallis, has grown infatuated with a form of chemistry that he, like many of his peers, once considered decidedly low-tech. His renown derives from his accidental creation, in 2009, of a new pigment, a substance capable of imparting color onto another material. YInMn blue (pronounced YIN-min) is an amalgam of yttrium, indium oxide, and manganese—elements deep within the periodic table that together form something unique. YInMn was the first blue pigment discovered in more than 200 years.

It isn’t only the exotic blueness that has excited the color industry, but also the other hues the pigment can generate. Subramanian soon realized that by adding copper, he could make a green. With iron, he got orange. Zinc and titanium, a muted purple.

BusinessWeek

 

Botany at the Bar

Even in the spirited world of bitters, the flavors that Shoots & Roots draw from their tinctures stand out. Demon Flower is a mixture of 12 plants from Mexico and the Philippines; Chai Jolokia combines the native North Indian ghost pepper with masala chai; Black Bear’s Bitters uses osha root and juniper cone, two plants that bears eat to aid digestion.
The trio’s forthcoming book, Botany at the Bar, is taking their bitter transparency a step further by providing instructions for people who want to make bitters at home. Most of these plants, however, aren’t easy to find at the grocery store. “One of our missions is to increase awareness for underutilized crops,” DuVal says. “We hope generating more market interest might increase the availability of these plants down the road.”

Southwest Magazine