utenzi

I want to play with my food. Lately I've been reading about using industrial chemical techniques at home. Here's a link to an interesting article on just that topic. The article is written by Louisa Chu , who is a chef and food writer. She's on PBS's Gourmet's Diary of a Foodie as well as Movable Feast. The point of the chemical exercise is to encapsulate liquids. All that is required to do that is to add sodium alginate (from seaweed) to the liquid then drop small quantities of the mixture into a dilute solution of calcium chloride. The reaction of the two chemicals forms a skin with the liquid inside. The example on the page above, and the picture to the left, used ice tea but you can use pretty much any liquid. Avant garde restaurants use this technique to add liquids to a plate in "dry" form so they can have intense flavors without the problems that liquids like sauces can present. There's something very amusing about the idea of rolling balls of...

I work in cancer research and of late I've been investigating the affects of some chemicals on angiogenesis, particularly as it relates to breast cancer. Now I'm a technician, not a PI, so my nose is to the ground and I often miss the big picture since my concerns are oriented towards the day-to-day research. As a result, I often get tunnel vision and only look at cancer through the prism of my research. In this case that means that I frequently think of cancer as only developing when there's plenty of oxygen available--which is reasonable since as a fast dividing group of cells, a cancer tumor needs lots of energy which would seem to imply oxidative reduction, not glycolysis--which requires sufficient vascularization and thus angiogenesis. However the cancer picture is more complex than that and the Warburg Effect is one example of that. Some tumors actually preferentially grow in the absence of oxygen and use glycolysis as their primary source of energy. They do this by b...

Is your potato breathing? Yes it is, but very slowly. I was reading an article on Thursday by a science reporter and he wrote a line something like: "Unlike animals, plants don't breathe oxygen or exhale carbon dioxoide instead..." That mistaken notion is one of my pet peeves and I've seen it made many times. Sometimes even by biologists. Let's set the record straight. Plants breathe oxygen just like you or I--they just don't use lungs. We're all descended from the same unicellular creature billions of years ago--but don't expect a tree, bush, or head of lettuce to attend your family reunion. We have been drifting apart from plants for quite some time. In case you're wondering why in frickin' Hell you should care that plants breathe (actually the correct term is respirate as in respiration), it's because it changes the way we should treat them. If you want to slow down a plants internal processes, just deprive them of oxygen and slow down t...

A few days ago I did a post about chemistry and at the end I posed a question. Well, the answer to it is that oxidative reduction is critically important to us because it allows for a dramatic difference in energy production. The trade off for this efficiency is that to use the process you have to take in a nasty poisonous gas--which also causes you do die early. That actually brings to mind the first serious pollution crisis on Earth. A lot of people assume that we people are the first polluters of the planet. Not so, not by a long shot. The worst pollution crisis on Earth happened a good long time ago and almost wiped out all the life on the planet. The pollution was in the form of a deadly gas--one that's very chemically active and tends to end up creating chemical havoc. The nasty gas was, of course, oxygen and those first polluters were cyanobacteria, sort of like primitive algae. This all took place around 3.2 billion years ago. Ancient history even in geological terms. The ...