Archive for category pop
The perfect condiment from the Red Planet: Martian ketchup!
Astrobiologists at Florida Tech’s Aldrin Space Institute recently teamed up with Kraft Heinz to make ketchup from tomatoes grown in Mars-like conditions. Never mind Pillsbury’s Space Food Sticks or Tang—my favorite foods growing up in awe of astronauts: Bring on the Martian ketchup!
The Florida Tech News Bureau provides these fascinating facts and figures on this unearthly food-science development:
- A team of more than a dozen students, scientists, and technicians worked in a greenhouse, known as the Red House, to grow the Martian tomatoes
- Powerful LED lighting on 7,800 pounds of soil from the Mohave Desert provided Martian conditions for the 450 experimental tomato plants grown over a period of two years
- A bottle of “Marz” ketchup survived a 23-mile-altitude balloon-flight that reduced its temperature to minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit.
Here’s another amazing statistic cited widely on the internet: The average American eats 71 pounds of ketchup per year, which Google data supports—it being the condiment of choice in nearly half of USA’s states.*
For more details on the HEINZ Ketchup Marz Edition and a picture of a Martian-like tomato see this November 9 report by the Space Coast Daily.
“Working with the tomato masters at Heinz has allowed us to see what the possibilities are for long term food production beyond Earth.”
Andrew Palmer, Associate Professor of Biological Sciences, Aldrin Space Institute
*(BestLife, 4/28/21, This Is the Most Popular Condiment in Your State, According to Data)
Glow sticks—bright full (not frightful) for fun, safe Halloweening
The daylight here in Minnesota continues to dwindle depressingly, going from nearly 12 hours on the first of October to about 10 hours on the 31st. Therefore, it will be welcome, albeit brief, relief to see glow-stick-waving trick-or-treaters coming by on Halloween night. These colorful light-emitting wands add a lot of pizzazz to the celebration, but most importantly, they make it far safer, especially along my sidewalk-less suburban street.
For the history of this chemiluminescent invention and the science behind it see this week’s feature by Chemical and Engineering News detailing “What are glow sticks, and what’s the chemical reaction that makes them light up?”.
Glow sticks flare out far too fast—only lasting for about 8 to 12 hours, which makes the annual Halloween far more precious. Now we must contend with several weeks of increasingly dark, cold and dreary days (I dislike November very much!) until relief comes with Thanksgiving and the full-on display of holiday lights. However, glow sticks can be bought cheaply just after Halloween. Why not break one out on a nightly basis to bridge the holiday gap? Brighten up!
By the way, if you have ever been tempted to crack open a tube of chemiluminescent fluid, first watch this YouTube video by TKOR (The King of Random). Do not try this at home, especially rubbing the contents on your teeth to make them glow.
Marshmallows and s’mores—an underappreciated wonder of food science
My family gathered around a campfire recently to enjoy s’mores—a tasty sandwich made with graham crackers, milk chocolate bars and marshmallows.
The trickiest part of putting together these calorific concoctions is the roasting. I prefer sticking my marshmallows in just the right place where they turn golden brown. Others just go for the burn and blow out the flames quickly enough to keep the ashes from overwhelming the gooey sweetness. Either way, most s’more fans take their marshmallows for granted, never realizing their precise chemistry.
I became enlightened when Chemical and Engineering News in their 4/28 issue* explained how the three ingredients in marshmallows—sugar, corn syrup, and gelatin—“come together in a complex chemical dance to make your taste buds sing.”
The trick is to put these components together in just the right ratios so they can be foamed with air into a stable form. This only works because of the elasticity provided by the gelatin—a triple helix. Furthermore, gelatin is thermo-reversible, so it can melt and reset. Even better, it does so at just the right temperature to melt in your mouth.
Check out this new video showing how to make s’mores completely from scratch—far more delicious than using store-bought ingredients.
Savor s’mores and their association with good times around a campfire. But also, appreciate the unique combination of their ingredients, as well as the science behind them that makes such a sweet sensation of smooth chewiness. Yum!
*Reference: What’s in marshmallows, and how do the ingredients work together to make ooey-gooey treats?.
Illuminating results from sparkler experiment
Posted by mark in Education, pop, Uncategorized on April 16, 2021
This video, concluding with the obligatory lighting up of multiple sparklers, lays out the results of another fun and educational experiment by Chemical and Biological Engineering (CBE) students at South Dakota School of Mines and Technology (SDSMT) for their Applied Design of Experiments for the Chemical Industry class.
The testers: Anthony Best, Henry Brouwer, and Jordyn Tygesen, uncovered significant interactions of wind, water and lighting position on the burn time as illustrated by the Pareto chart of effects from Design-Expert software.
I expect these three experimenters will be enjoying extremely sparkly celebrations this summer!
Applying multifactor testing to a wine-making simulator
The Pudding, a digital publication devoted to data-driven visualization of current culture, currently features a very interesting essay on Wine and Math, A Model Pairing. The author, Lars Verspohl, provides many eye-catching graphics of the analytics behind producing quality wines.
What got my attention was a simulator for making red Portuguese Vinho Verde. Verspohl sifted through a dataset of 1600 wines to develop a model that predicts quality based on 11 factors. You can slide these up and down to try making a fine wine—rated at 7 or more on a scale of 10.
Not being content with haphazard searching on so many variables, I set up a multifactor test. Using version 13 of Design-Expert® software (free trial here), I laid out a minimum-run (plus 2) screening design on the 8 factors ranked most important by Verspohl’s Random Forest analysis, bypassing the bottom 3 (pH, residual sugar and free sulfur dioxide). I then worked through the 18 combinations and recorded the quality results in percent.
As shown on its Pareto plot of effects, Design-Expert revealed that only 5 of the effects tested produced significant effects.
The numeric optimization tools led to the optimal red Vinho Verde flagged in this 3D plot at the highest alcohol and lowest volatile acid levels. Settings for the other attributes are indicated by the position of the slide bars, e.g.; sulphates at the high level*. The factors defaulted to the middle are ones that did not get picked for the model.
Now that I’ve solved this simulator, my next mission is to locate a bottle of red Vinho Verde for some one-glass-at-a-time testing.
*This result surprised me—not being a big fan of sulfurous compounds in wines. This skepticism is borne out by another take on the Vinho Verde wine here. The only way to resolve the conflicting results would be to do an actual experiment on the composition of a red wine, ideally a mixture design for optimal formulation.
Experiment reveals secret to maximizing microwave popcorn—Part two: Results
Posted by mark in pop, Uncategorized on January 3, 2021
Nothing beats microwave popcorn for snacking. That’s what makes unpopped kernels (UPK) so aggravating—not just for the loss of yummy yield, but also for the pain from accidentally biting down on them. Therefore, I am quite pleased to report significantly reduced UPK discovered by my designed experiment detailed in part 1 of this blog.
The big reveal comes from the interaction plot showing that the effect of preheating depends on the timing method.
First off, look up at the upper left of the graph and notice that the default GE timing, done by a humidity sensor, creates significantly greater UPKs—the lower end of the least significant difference (LSD) bars (p<0.5) fall above the higher ends of all other LSDs. The actual results using my GE microwave popcorn button, shown by the red (no preheat) and green (yes-preheat) circles on the left, ranged from 41 to 92—far too many UPKs per bag.
Next, see how the combination of GE++ (adding time) with no preheating wins out overall. The actual counts, shown by the red circles at middle bottom, ranged from 23 to 34—far fewer UPKs than before.
Life is good: Best not bother to put in 1 cup of water and wait for a minute; also, no complications introduced by setting up my cell phone, quieting the household, and standing by to turn off the microwave when alerted by Popcorn Expert. All I need to do is press the popcorn button and then 9 twice for the extra time. Easy! And, by the way, the popcorn tastes great—no burning!
I never would have made this significant improvement without the more-precise:
- measurement of UPK counts (versus weight) and
- Poisson-regression (versus ordinary least squares) modeling*
*(available in the newly released version 13 of Design-Expert® software)
I encourage you to do your own microwave popcorn experiment, ideally multifactor ones using Design-Expert version 13, now available as a free, fully functional, 14-day trial. Many factors can be tested—first and foremost being brand of popcorn and time in the microwave. Two ‘hacks’ posted to the question-and-answer website Quora intrigue me:
Another hack botched by me (as confessed in part 1) is pouring the popcorn into a vented microwave container. Throw one or more of these factors into your design of experiment (DOE) and please let me know the statistical outcome along with the raw data.
I remain a few dozen kernels short of the perfect microwave popcorn: Zero UPK with every exploded morsel being incredibly delicious.
Every once in a while, someone will mail me a single popcorn kernel that didn’t pop. I’ll get out a fresh kernel, tape it to a piece of paper and mail it back to them.
Orville Redenbacher
New study reveals the benefits of being a bad wrapper
My wife Karen pulled a good trick on me this weekend. While surrounded with gifts for our very large family (now including 9 grandchildren), she asked “would you like to help me with wrapping?” Ha ha. At the beginning of our nearly half-century together, I taped comics from the Sunday paper around my gifts to her—pathetic but colorful. When Hallmark introduced handled gift bags in 1987, my presentation improved greatly with little effort required other than finding a suitable size and decor—thank goodness.
The ribbons! The wrappings! The tags! And the tinsel! The trimmings! The trappings!
Dr. Seuss
However, I may need to give wrapping another go after seeing this scientific study on gift wrapping that reveals why presents should look messy. It turns out that family and friends prefer sloppily wrapped gifts significantly more than those neatly trimmed. So it seems that my lack of talent in anything crafty is a strong point. Ha ha. (Last laugh.)
Cheers!
Raisin Bran sun wearing sunglasses and other shady “alternate memories”
Your mind plays many frustrating tricks. For example, as I detailed in How to arrest what’s-his-name’s [Ebbinghaus] forgetting curve, the brain purges valuable information far too quickly. A fellow statistical trainer recently refreshed my memory of the forgetting curve—citing this study that replicated the original experimental results from Ebbinghaus.
Coincidentally, I watched Friday’s episode of the quirky new “How to With John Wilson” HBO show*, which featured widely shared alternate (false!) memories such as:
- The Raisin Bran sun wearing sunglasses
- Stouffer’s Stove Top Stuffing mix
- Mandela dying in prison.
The last common misconception spawned a growing belief in what became known as the “Mandela Effect”. Check out this list with hundreds of other alternate memories and see if some resonate with your recollection. If so, you may be living in an alternate universe!
The “Mandela Effect” really plays tricks with your mind with memories that never happened but seem as if they did. However, it may not be evidence of a multiverse, but rather more mundane mental mistakes explained here by Healthline.
Never mind the Mandela Effect, the memory lapse that works for me is the forgetting curve—it doing its magic on the year of 2020.
“Forgetfulness is a form of freedom.”
― Kahlil Gibran
* Reviewed highly here by Vulture.
Statisticians earn residuals by airing errors
Posted by mark in design of experiments, pop on October 10, 2020
A new book by David S. Salsburg provides a series of Cautionary Tales in Designed Experiments. Salsburg wrote the classic The Lady Tasting Tea, which I read with great delight. I passed along the titular story (quite amazing!) in a book review (article #4) for the July 2004 DOE FAQ Alert.
Salsburg’s cautionary tales offer a quick read with minimal mathematics on what can go wrong with poorly designed or badly managed experiments—mainly medical. I especially liked his story of the Lanarkshire Milk Experiment of 1930, which attempted to test whether pasteurization removed all the “good”. Another funny bit from Salsburg, also related in The Lady Tasting Tea and passed only by me in my review, stems from his time doing clinical research at Pfizer when a manager complained about him making too many “errors”. He changed this statistical term to “residuals” to make everyone happy.
With all the controversy now about clinical trials of Covid-19 vaccines and the associated politics, Cautionary Tales in Designed Experiments offers a welcome look with a light touch at how far science progressed over the past century in their experimental protocols.
“It is the well-designed randomized experiment that provides the final ‘proof’ of the finding. The terminology often differs from field to field. Atomic physicists look for “six sigma” deviations, structure-activity chemists look for a high percentage of variance accounted for, and medical scientists describe the “specificity” and “sensitivity” of measurements. But all of it starts with statistically based design of experiments.”
David S. Salsburg, conclusion to Cautionary Tales in Designed Experiments
Butterfly effect debunked (but, even so, best you not step on them)
It’s peak butterfly season—a beautiful time of the year to watch for these wonderfully winged insects, such as the Tiger Swallowtail caught on camera this week by my son-in-law Ryan Bretzel.
Coincidentally, physicists from the Los Alamos National Laboratory just announced* that we need not worry about butterflies in Minnesota setting off hurricanes in Florida, as speculated by chaoticians (such as Dr. Ian Malcolm in the movie Jurassic Park).
“For those interested in the technical details, a number of entangled qubits were run through a set of logic gates before being returned to their initial setup.”
– Mike McRae, Science Alert, 7/31/20, Time Travel Simulation Shows Quantum ‘Butterfly Effect’ Doesn’t Exist
That’s one less thing to worry about for Floridians! They need all the help they can get, being at the peak of pandemic and hurricane season.
* Recovery of Damaged Information and the Out-of-Time-Ordered Correlators, Bin Yan and Nikolai A. Sinitsyn, Physical Review Letters, 125, 040605 – Published 24 July 2020.