HOME |
RSS | 
Did you know that the foam on a can of Guinness comes from a widget? It’s a ball of nitrogen that is released into the stout when the can is opened. Now that you know, widgets may be on the way out.
Nitrogen-infused stouts are known for their long-lasting and creamy heads, a feature that carbonated beers can’t emulate. But nitrogen doesn’t froth up on its own, so to get foam on a canned stout, brewers insert a widget — a small plastic ball with a hole in it. When a can is opened, the widget releases pressurized nitrogen into the beer, which then triggers more dissolved nitrogen in the beer to bubble out.
But a graduate student supervised by applied mathematician William Lee at the University of Limerick in Ireland discovered that microscopic plant fibers made of cellulose, such as cotton, can also froth up a stout.
“What happens around these fibers is really complex, so it’s a ripe area for research,” said Lee, who posted his team’s research March 2 on arXiv.org. “This is also a matter of national pride. Stout beers are as culturally important to Ireland as champagne is to France.”
The equivalent of a postage-stamp piece of a coffee filter attached to the inside of the can would do the trick, making canned stout both cheaper and more environmentally-friendly. Link -via Discoblog
French physicists at the Université de Reims have studied the best way to pour champagne; their surprising discovery is that it should be poured into a tilted long-stemmed glass rather than into an upright one. The goal is to retain as much dissolved carbon dioxide as possible in the decanted liquid:
In champagne and sparkling wine tasting, the concentration of dissolved CO2 is a parameter of great importance since it directly impacts the four following sensory properties: (i) the frequency of bubble formation in the glass, (ii) the growth rate of rising bubbles, (iii) the mouth feel, i.e., the mechanical action of collapsing bubbles as well as the chemosensory excitation of nociceptors in the oral cavity (via the conversion of dissolved CO2 to carbonic acid), (iv) and the nose of champagne, i.e., its so-called bouquet…
They used infrared thermography (left illustration) to document the escape of carbon dioxide from the glass, and measured the dissolved carbon dioxide in the champagne (right illustration) over time and at different temperatures. The results are discussed in their publication in the ACS Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, where there are detailed photographs of bubble formation and a mathematical analysis of the degassing process.
Link, via Physics Buzz.
Here on land, we undertake great engineering projects to get rid of biological waste from cities and livestock farms. What about the sea, where huge animals produce a lot of it? It turns out that whales have the ability to offset greenhouse gasses with their poop!
Sperm whales in the Southern Ocean release 220,462 tons of carbon when they exhale carbon dioxide at the water’s surface, but their poo stimulates the drawdown of 440,925 tons of carbon, according to the research, published in the latest Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
These ocean giants and certain other marine mammals may therefore be among the most environmentally beneficial animals on the planet.
“If Southern Ocean sperm whales were at their historic levels, meaning their population size before whaling, we would have an extra 2 million tons (2,204,623 tons) of carbon being removed from our atmosphere each and every year,” lead author Trisha Lavery Told Discovery News.
Lavery, a marine biologist at Flinders University of South Australia, and her colleagues explained how the cleaning process works.
You can read all about it at Discovery News. Link -via Digg
(Image credit: Flickr user Erwin Winkelman)
Photo: Justin Ries
Yay for global warming! New study by marine geologist Justin Ries shows that if carbon dioxide emissions increase to extreme levels, we’ll get giant lobsters:
A new study published in the journal Geology shows that if carbon dioxide emissions reach extreme levels, the changes in the world’s oceans might result in lobsters 50 percent bigger than normal.
Lobsters can take carbon from the water and use it to build their exoskeletons, says marine geologist Justin Ries, who oversaw the study. The theory, he tells NPR’s Guy Raz, is that lobsters are able to convert the extra carbon into material for building up their shells.
People love to overlook certain things that pollute, just because we don’t have an alternative yet. We never talk about the emissions caused from cement, which produces more carbon dioxide than the entire aviation industry. Did you know that 5% of all CO2 production comes from cement?
There is finally an alternative. The British engineering firm, Novacem, has created a new cement that uses magnesium silicates, which emit no carbon dioxide when they are heated. As the cement hardens, it absorbs CO2. In all, it removes about .6 tons of carbon dioxide per ton of cement used.
