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?.
Experiment airs dirty laundry
This headline by BBC Science Focus Magazine caught my eye the other day: “Scientists are burying 2,000 pairs of underpants in Switzerland.” What in the world?
Further research revealed that this is a ‘thing’ for those who love their mother earth: Bury your briefs (provided they be 100 percent cotton). Then dig them up later and inspect their holiness, that is, degradation due to desirable microorganisms in your earth.
“The more active microorganisms live in the soil, the faster and the more holistically the underpants will be eaten up.”
– Swiss research institute Agroscope
The BBC reports that volunteers will each receive two pairs of pants, along with tea bags as a control. One will be dug up after a month, the other after two months and both analyzed for holes. My observations:
- It is good that the scientists leave nothing to chance by not allowing helpers to bury their personal underwear. (Yuk!)
- This is a great example of a paired tea test (inside statistical joke).
Some farmers in southern Minnesota buried their undies a few years ago and discovered them to be completely disintegrated after only a couple of months—nothing left but the elastic bands. That is not surprising given the incredible fertility of land down there. As you can see in this report by MPR News, the remnants serve well for scaring off crows. However, I question the organizers’ judgement for naming this experiment “Soil Your Undies.” That is just gross.
For a more scientific approach to this methodology for assessing the quality of your soil, see this 2015 report from a research technician at the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture. However, though attention getting, using actual underwear versus cotton swatches may not be the best idea for quantitative measurements and decency—though the elastic bands can be very handy as I learned the hard way as a child with mischievous friends who liked to inflict wedgies.
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!
Mentos volcano rocks Rapid City
Posted by mark in design of experiments, Education on April 12, 2021
It was my pleasure to oversee another outstanding collection of fun experiments by the Chemical and Biological Engineering (CBE) students at South Dakota School of Mines and Technology (SDSMT) for this Spring semester’s Applied Design of Experiments for the Chemical Industry class presented by Stat-Ease. They continued on the excellent tradition established by the class of 2020 which I reported in my blog on “DOE It Yourself” hits the spot for distance-learning projects.
As promised, I am highlighting a few of the many A+ projects in StatsMadeEasy, particularly those with engaging videos. My first selection goes to Dakin Nolan, Erick Hoon and Jared Wilson for their “DOE Soda and Mentos Experiment”. They studied the “heterogenous nucleation of gases on a surface” caused by type of soda, its temperature and volume versus the quantity of Mentos. See the results in the video (“the moment you’ve all been waiting for”). Do not miss the grand finale (“The Masterpiece”) that shows what happens if you mix 15 Mentos in a 2-liter bottle of hot Diet Coke.
It’s hard to say how high the cola spouted in the blow out at the end, but it must have made a big sticky mess of the surrounding area. At similar conditions but at a more prudent maximum of 3 Mentos (the highest level actually tested in the DOE), Design-Expert predicts a peak of 310 inches—an impressive 25 feet of magma.
Further work will be needed to optimize the dosage of Mentos. Perhaps 15 of the sugary oblate spheroids may be overkill. There’s always room for improvement, as well as more fun, making volcanoes.
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.
Archer’s Big Bounce Experiment
I am a big fan of University of Minnesota Athletics—even more so now after they sponsored a Science of Basketball project for grade schoolers. My 9-year-old grandson Archer jumped at the chance to put a variety of basketballs to the test with my help. For the results, see the video we submitted to the UMn judges.
Archer’s findings–wood being better than rubber for bounce–stand out in graphics generated with Design-Expert software.
Archer enjoyed doing this science project. I feel sure it helped him understand what it takes to design an experiment, do it properly and analyze the result. My only disappointment is that the high-tech cell-phone app for measuring height, which I used for my experiment on elastic spheres, failed due to too much echo in the gym, most likely.
However, I discovered another intriguing basketball-physics experiment at the Science Buddies STEM website. It determines where a bouncing ball’s energy goes . This requires deployment of an infrared-temperature gun with a laser beam. Awesome! Archer will like that (if he can wrestle the laser gun away from me).
Groundhog Day: Looking forward to spring and the arrival of robins
Puxatawney Phil saw his shadow this morning, thus forecasting 6 more weeks of winter. Most people in the USA took this as a bad sign that spring will not come early—the prediction when Phil does not see his shadow. However, we hardy Minnesotans do not mind 6 more weeks of winter whatsoever.
A sure sign of spring comes with the sighting of the first robin in my yard—typically later than Phil’s more pessimistic forecast. I looked for statistics on the annual migration of robins from the USA National Phenology Network but, though this bird is their most frequently observed animal with over 190,000 records, nothing came up readily on dates of first sightings in my region of the country.
In any case, I will be very happy if the robins do beat the 6-week forecast for spring as they did in 1996 per this report—arriving in Minneapolis on March 12th of that year. Until then, I can only enjoy this lovely video of American robins produced by Lesley the Bird Nerd who grew up north in Ontario—the next stop in the bird’s spring migration after Minnesota.
What got me thinking so early in the year about robins was a report in the Royal Society last week on “The limits of egg recognition: testing acceptance thresholds of American robins in response to decreasingly egg-shaped objects in the nest”. Check out the bizarre fakes—robin-egg blue, of course—pictured here . Evidently it’s not the shape that matters, for example, a pointy eight-sided egg stayed in the nest, but, rather, the size. Those that looked big enough to be put in by a cowbird, a parasitic species, got tossed out. The robins also rejected eggs that were too thin.
“They seem to be quite hesitant about rejecting eggs when the variable that we changed was not natural,” Dr. Hauber said, referring to the angular, pointed eggs. “Robins don’t know what to do with it, because they’ve never evolved to respond to it.”
Quote reported by New York Times in their interview of lead-author Mark Hauber, a professor of animal behavior at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
I am tempted to dig up the collection of Dungeons and Dragons dice left behind by my two sons after they moved out and put them out in the bird house this spring to see what happens. Just joking—I like robins too much to do anything so inhospitable. It is very weird, though, that they are so bird brained about egg shapes.
Killer reveals contents of International Shark Attack File
Posted by mark in Nature, Uncategorized on January 26, 2021
I will bet the caught your attention. It did mine but for reasons more benign than indicated by my sensational blog title: The report comes from an outdoors columnist for Florida’s Treasure Coast Newspapers named Ed Killer. He passed along the latest statistics on shark attacks released Monday by the Florida Museum on Natural History. It turns out that “interactions” with these dreaded aquatic carnivores decreased by nearly 10% to 129 worldwide in 2020. Unfortunately, deaths increased to 13, up by 2 from 2019, including the first ever in Maine. Australia led the world for shark fatalities and came in second to the USA for bites.
“When a surfer gets bit in New Smyrna Beach [Florida], it’s often by a blacktip and requires some stitches to recover from. But when a surfer gets bit in Australia, it’s by a 2000-pound 15-foot-long great white shark. A nibble from a white shark can take off a leg.”
– Gavin Naylor, Director, Florida Program for Shark Research*
All this talk about sharks makes me feel a lot better being homebound in Minnesota for the time being. In 1975 my wife and I moved to California just in time for the premier of Jaws at the local drive-in movie theater. I suffered twitchy-legged nightmares for some time afterwards imagining a great white shark lurking at the foot of my bed. Watching this Danish advertisement provides an antidote my now-revived shark fears.
*See details on the data science behind their The International Shark Attack File (ISAF), and a fascinating animated graphic showing attacks by location worldwide over 50 years, here.
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
Experiment reveals secret to maximizing microwave popcorn—Part one: Setup
Posted by mark in design of experiments, Uncategorized on December 27, 2020
Energized by a new tool in Design-Expert® software (DX) for modeling counts (to be discussed in Part 2—Analysis of results), I laid out a design of experiment (DOE) aimed at reducing the number of unpopped kernels (UPK) from microwaved popcorn. I figured that counting the UPKs would be a far more precise measure of popcorn loss than weighing them, as done in this prior study by me and my son Hank).
My new experiment varied the following two factors in a replicated, full, multilevel, categorical design done with my General Electric (GE) Spacemaker microwave oven:
A. Preheat with 1 cup of water at 1 minute on high, No [L1] vs Yes [L2]
B. Timing, GE default [L1] vs GE++ [L2] vs Popcorn Expert app [L3]
I tested the preheating (factor A) before and found it to be unproductive. However, after seeing it on this list of microwave ‘hacks’, I decided to try again. Perhaps my more precise measuring of UPK might show preheating to be of some help after all.
The timing alternatives (factor B) came about when I discovered Popcorn Expert AI Cooking Assistant for systematically applying the #1 hack—the two-second rule: When this much time passes between pops, stop.
By the way, I also tried the third hack—pouring the popcorn into a covered glass bowl, but that failed completely—causing a very alarming “SENSOR ERROR”. It turns out that the GE Spacemaker uses humidity to determine when your popcorn is done. The plastic cover prevented moisture from escaping. Oops! Next time I try this it will be with a perforated lid.
While researching the user manual for the first time since buying the Spacemaker 15 years ago (engineers rarely read instructions) and learning about the humidity angle for the first time, I also found out that pressing 9 twice after beginning the popcorn cook added 20 and then 10 more seconds (++) at the end.
The original experiment-design of 12 runs (2×3 replicated) was laid out in a randomized recipe sheet by DX, all of them done using 3 ounce bags of Jolly Time, Simply Popped Sea Salt microwave popcorn. Due to a few mistakes by the machine operator (me) misreading the run sheet, two extra runs got added—no harm done: more being better for statistical power.
Part 2 of this two-part blog will delve into the analysis details, but it became readily apparent from a one-to-one comparison that the default popcorn setting of my GE microwave came up far short of Popcorn Expert for reducing UPK. However, the “++” adjustment closed the gap, as you will see.
To be continued…