Applications of physics to your household items. A scale using Archimedes’ principle, and several devices using concepts of fluid dynamics.
Category Archives: Food
Pizza! Yes? No? Maybe?
If you can get the dough thin enough, the calzone style has a lot to recommend it. It’s certainly the version that looks most like a waffle. And you don’t have to heat up the oven. The problem with doing it this way is the tendency for it to be too bready. After all, it’s going to have two crusts. If you haven’t, say, been working in a pizzeria for a few years, you might find it difficult to get the dough as thin as it needs to be for this to be optimal.
The alternative, waffling the dough and then topping it and baking it, means the finished product may not completely resemble a waffle. But it’s a more forgiving dough-to-topping ratio. Even if the dough is thicker than you might like, the balance is less likely to be wildly off. Also, if you’re going to make multiple waffled pizzas, this is the way to go. Waffling the dough will take a bit of time, but then you can finish the pizzas in the oven together.
Waffleizer tackles the question “Will it waffle?”
Story related to waffles: A colleague’s brother is a chef, who was objecting to management’s push for him to do a daily special at the restaurant (often it’s whatever’s about to go bad rather than a specialty of the chef). So in protest, he offered up the Awful Falafel Waffle. No more requests to do specials.
I Knew They Were Good for Something
Zucchini, that is.
What's Cooking in the Pizza Lab?
The Pizza Lab: Bringing Neapolitan Pizza Home (aka ‘The Skillet-Broiler Method’)
Real food science — bringing the physics along with the recipe.
It’s basic thermodynamics. Air at a given temperature has less energy than stone at a given temperature. Because of this, even if both my stone and the air in my oven are at 550 degrees, the part of the pizza in contact with the stone cooks much more rapidly than the top. By the time the bottom is crisp, the top has yet to take on any significant color.
The solution to this is quite simple, and happily makes for a much cooler kitchen as well: forget preheating the oven: just use the broiler. A broiler not only cooks via hot air like the oven, but more importantly, it adds a significant amount of radiant heat to the mix, cooking the top of the pizza directly with electro-magnetic waves—a much more efficient means of heat transfer.
Another Dimension to Add to Your Nightmares
Radioactive Wild Boars Increase in Number
I wasn’t really all that concerned about wild boars, but now that I know they are radioactive and multiplying, a foul-tempered spider pig mutant becomes a terrifying idea. At least they aren’t zombie boars.
A couple of hiccups in the report
Although the radioactivity has been detected in other animals, such as birds, wild boar are more susceptible to contamination because they often eat mushrooms and truffles that absorb the harmful radioactivity. The radioactivity, in turn, can remain in the soil for years. In fact, levels in mushrooms and truffles are predicted to rise in the not too distant future.
Radioactivity isn’t a substance, it’s a process, so you don’t absorb radioactivity, nor is it left in the soil. (Iterations ofradioactive or radiation are almost universally preceded by harmful or dangerous. It’s apparently part of the pirate journalist code). But this (like heat) is a term that scientists will use carelessly, so it’s no wonder it propagates to the press, and I don’t take 10 points from Gryffindor for that.
Hunters aren’t idly standing by. They’ve found a concoction called Giese salt that supposedly causes wild boar to excrete radioactive substances after the animals have ingested the salt. Work performed in Bavaria, according to the Bavarian Hunting Federation, indicates the salt does the trick, presumably allowing the meat to pass government inspections.
One of the components in the salt strongly binds to the Cesium (or presumably any alkali), rather than just causing them to arbitrarily excrete any and all radioactive substances.
It’s already been 24 years since the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, but experts are predicting the problem of radioactive wild boars will plague Germany “for at least the next 50 years.”
The reason being that Cs-137 has a half-life of 30 years. Still, if boars are exhibiting 7000 Becquerel per kilogram (1 Bq is one decay per second. We physicists must have our unit names!), and if this is primarily from Cs-137 being ingested, this isn’t going to drop below 2,000 in 50 years much less the target of 600, unless some other process is present that will get rid of the Cs-137. Otherwise we’re talking 100 years.
Are Grad Students Making Too Much?
Dinner can’t interrupt geekdom. Though I don’t recall being able to afford steak on my stipend …
I'm Concerned About Your Cantaloupe
The Pop of Pop
The Baron of Bubbles
The Sultan of Soda
The Ayatollah of Coca-Cola
Cocktail Party Physics: father of fizz
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).
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What to call it: I have previously linked to a Soda vs Pop map
This Beer Also Knows What You Did Last Summer
This Beer Knows Where You’ve Been
New research suggests that your visits to such places can be tracked by analyzing chemical traces in your hair. That’s because water molecules differ slightly in their isotope ratios depending on the minerals at their source. In a study published in the current issue of The Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, researchers found that water samples from 33 cities across the United State could be reliably traced back to their origin based on their isotope ratios.
From the paper
The δ2H and δ18O values of a fluid input composed of beverages distributed on a large, regional scale may not necessarily mirror those of local tap water. The power of prediction using local tap water isotope ratios in models like that of Ehleringer et al. (1) would be confounded by the consumption of nonlocal beverages. On the other hand, some beverages (e.g., carbonated soft drinks, microbrew beer) likely use a more local distribution system. We expect the isotopic composition of a fluid input composed of beverages distributed on a small, local scale would generally mirror those of local tap water.
Which is why, to hide my whereabouts, I drink bottled water and imported beer. Stay thirsty, my friends.
You Can Do This with Light, Too
I won’t go into the whole primary and secondary color thing, but these colors, when stacked upon each other, create other colors. There is not an orange or green layer. It just looks like it when the red and yellow layers touch and then yellow and blue layers touch. Pretty cool.