Not just me, everyone! I'm going to try and avoid the melons:boobies analogy, but it will be hard difficult given the context. It works the same way as Viagra does, but is less targetted.

Citrulline is present in watermelons and is converted to arginine in the body. Arginine promotes nitric oxide, or laughing gas synthesis. Nitric oxide relaxes blood vessels which lets the blood flow through us - yes, everywhere.



So nitric oxide, eh? I recall being put under by laughing gas when I was getting cavities drilled. Neither the doctor nor the nurse complimented me on my way out, so it either didn't happen, or they were unimpressed. This must mean that erectile dysfunction happens because the arteries and whatnot become too tense and can't flow the blood through our system fast enough, or with enough vigor.

I found this on ScienceDirect, aka science by press release. Sometimes they mention in the article where the work is being published, in which case I would look it up and cite that instead. This isn't the case, so I just have to take in what they wrote.

Photo: Flickr

Godspeed.

[Comments: 0] [Tags: food, science]

My love for Jones Soda is nothing new. They make excellent Christmas sodas, and it's been decided that Jones Soda is very manly. It was to my delight that I found the following Google ad appear in my Gmail:



The first part had me intrigued, then when they mentioned Jones, I was sold. This is brilliant. Each candidate (this was apparently around before Clinton dropped out) has their own soda, and they're keeping track of how many are bought. If this is any gauge of the election, it's looking good for democrats.



The whole site is really great though. Look at the logo below. Very well done; very detailed. Look closely at the bottles in the eagle's talons - awesome. It's very official looking. Their marketing and graphic design teams both deserve awards. The second image below is the headline for the site. Now that's a great catchline. It's expanded in the text of the page, "There’s no limit to how many times you can vote, here at Jones you can buy your candidate’s way to victory! "





I tip my hat to you, Jones. Check out Campaign Cola 2008 for yourself.

Godspeed.

[Comments: 0] [Tags: food, politics]

Lindinger's group at the Nestle Research Center in Switzerland published a study back in March 2008 in Analytical Chemistry about analyzing coffee with mass spec. I read about this on Engadget then promptly forgot about it. I even gave a presentation on it for my Analytical class, only later to see this in my RSS bookmarks.

Basically by using PTR-MS (proton transfer reaction mass spectrometry) they did an analysis of different coffees. They emphasized that this was a data-driven study, not a chemical analysis study, because they weren't necessarily analyzing the different compounds individually. Rather, what they were doing was taking the results of the mass spec, then combining them with the 'results' of a 10-member panel of coffee experts to create a model. So they just took the intensities of the different peaks (all the compounds that had 108 m/z, 110 m/z, etc.) and compared them to the 'intensities' of the panel ratings. A rough scheme is shown below.



The panelists rated the intensity of different qualities (coffee, bitter, cocoa, roasted, woody, cereal, butter toffee, acid, citrus, winey, and flowery) of the coffee. They ran a blind study, and the panel was able to produce reproducible results, so they apparently know what they're doing. I would imagine they look something like this:



Once the model was created, they did PTR-MS on another set of coffees, had the panel do their tests, then compare how well the model was able to predict it. You can see in the graph below that they were pretty successful. You can see that there are only 8 qualities below; they decided to scrap a few qualities, but didn't really explain why. The ones that they got rid of were: winey, flowery, cereal. You can assume that they took those out because they didn't fit with the model as well, and that's probably because those qualities are made up. Nobody drinks coffee and thinks, oh that was nice and flowery. But not winey enough. Nonsense.



I'd like to see them create a model that determines if coffee is good or bad. Sure, that's even more arbitrary, but it's more useful. Then we could take samples from a bunch of different coffee shops, and finally scientifically prove that Starbucks' coffee blows.



Lindinger, C., Labbe, D., Pollien, P., Rytz, A., Juillerat, M., Yeretzian, C., Blank, I. (2008). When Machine Tastes Coffee: Instrumental Approach To Predict the Sensory Profile of Espresso Coffee. Analytical Chemistry, 80(5), 1574-1581. DOI: 10.1021/ac702196z

Photo: Louisiana State Museum
Photo: Flickr

Godspeed.

[Comments: 2] [Tags: food, journals, science]

Back in some techy engineering'ish class I took in high school, we got to make a Rube Goldberg machine. It was a good time. I don't remember how many steps it had - probably 15 or so. The idea was to put toothpaste onto a toothbrush. I forget how it started, but I know it ended with dominoes falling onto a rat trap, which pulled out pegs from underneath a brick, which landed on the toothpaste tube. It was a lot of fun.

It was far less impressive than the 156 steps that a team at Purdue used to assemble a hamburger. On the other hand, we didn't spend about 5,000 man hours on it.



Godspeed.

[Comments: 0] [Tags: food, technology]

Before I moved off of Roosevelt Island, I had a ton of leftover food. What to do with it? Let's put it all in a pile, then play Iron Chef! We didn't have a "secret ingredient" that you had to use in all of your dishes, the idea was to just get rid of food. Since I was a college student, the food consisted mostly of things like ramen, macaroni and cheese, and soup. Dianna and I both made 4 dishes, then rated each other based on taste and appearance. She ended up winning.


It took a lot of sweettalking to get Dianna to even try it.

[Comments: 1] [Tags: food, roosevelt island]

I was thinking about writing a post about how good the cupcakes at Georgetown Cupcake are, but after some thought, it might come out sounding really whiny. In place of this, luckily, The Washington Post stopped by when a few of us from Georgetown went there, so they can do the writing for me.



All I will say is that they are fantastic. I had the Key Lime, amazing.

Photo: Washington Post

Godspeed.

[Comments: 0] [Tags: food]

Every year, Jones Soda makes a holiday batch of sodas. This year they had a Christmas and Hanukkah pack. In the Christmas pack was Christmas Ham. So I talked someone who eats kosher into splitting the costs of ordering a pack of each, and we did a taste test throughout the department.


That wraps up the mini-reviews, now just for some miscellaneous pictures. Here's Ilana paying me.

[Comments: 0] [Tags: christmas, food]

Of course. Science goes ahead and creates tearless onions AFTER I stop working at Quizno's. All of those days, being the newest guy, having to cut the onions could have been less miserable. I would have to go stand in the walk-in refrigerator and let my eyes recover during those onion cutting sessions.

I'm all for scientific progress, but let's try and get these things worked out when they would still be useful for me!

Godspeed.

[Comments: 0] [Tags: science, food]

I was reading "The Genie in the Bottle: 67 All-New Commentaries on the Fascinating Chemistry of Everyday Life" by Dr. Joe Schwarcz. I came across a section called "Cheers for Sour Cherries". It talks about how putting cherries in burgers makes them healthier and taste better. I was intrigued, so I looked online for a recipe, and I found one on "an open cupboard". I wasn't convinced at how good it would be, so I tried to go about this scientifically. I would make a cherry burger, a raspberry burger, and a control - a normal burger. Unfortunately, at Trader Joe's, cherries aren't in season, but I read that cherry juice works as well so I bought some unfiltered cherry juice. The recipe and results are below.



Ground Beef
~1/2 cup Cherry Juice (for cherry burgers)
10 Raspberries (for raspberry burgers)
Pepper
Salt
Garlic Powder
Ground Nutmeg
Romaine Lettuce
Mustard (I used Trader Joe's Hot and Sweet Mustard)



The instructions are pretty easy. Put all the ingredients except the lettuce and mustard together. Mix them. Shape it into a patty, and pan fry it.



Burgers are better medium in my opinion, but medium-rare is good too. I cooked these to about medium. I made them smaller than I normally would since I was going to have to eat three of them.



I then topped them with the romaine and mustard. The results were very pleasing. The cherry burger turned out to be the best one. The tartness level was the best, and it was kind of sweet as well. It was also juiciest, but I would imagine that's due to me using juice instead of fruit. Overall, both were still better than the regular burger, which was still good though.



The Cherry Burger Wins!



Click here to see the full photo gallery.

[Comments: 2] [Tags: food]

I was reading a science book and saw that "cherry burgers" were delicious and healthy, so I decided to try them. Here are the results. For my full writeup on this, click here.


Top is cherry, counterclockwise from that is the raspberry, and the other is the regular.

[Comments: 0] [Tags: food]

Well this was disappointing. I was up last night putting up the pierogies pictures, but then I fell asleep. This is the first time in a few weeks I've failed at my schedule. Ugh. Well I'll do two today then. Anyhow, in keeping with the most recent update theme, I was going to put up the scavenger hunt pictures (which was a lot of fun), but then yesterday, Adam and I made pierogies, which made that the most recent event. However, the Pierogies are Wednesday's update, and I'm going to do Thursday's update right after this, which will be the scavenger hunt pictures.

Godspeed.

[Comments: 0] [Tags: food]

Adam and I decided one day to make pierogies. His Aunt's batch made about 7 dozen. We doubled it and a half. We made ours a little big, and we ended up with 165. It took 9 hours, but it was a lot of fun.


All ready!

[Comments: 0] [Tags: food]

I bet Yan that I could eat a pint of Ben and Jerry's in two minutes or less. He disagreed. If I finish it in two minutes, he pays for the ice cream and gives me $5, if not, I just bought myself some ice cream. Take a look and see if I did it or not.

[Comments: 0] [Tags: food, roosevelt island]

Let's all sit around and have a conversation about Nina's cherry. Interpret this however you want to do so; but let's just say in the end we watch her play with it. Enjoy!

[Comments: 0] [Tags: food]

Just look at the way the steam rolls off that mound of green vegetables. Isn't it so moving, so touching? Doesn't it just make you wanna cry?!? Or maybe it's steaming cause it's actually magical! Ooo magical vegetables. Scrumptious.

[Comments: 0] [Tags: food]

These aren't just any noodles, they're handmade/handcut noodles that took a really long time. It's interesting the things that I do when I get bored enough.

[Comments: 0] [Tags: food]