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

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.

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)

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.

Link

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.

Link Via Good