Isegoria

The New York Times calls Harold McGee, author of On Food and Cooking, Isaac Newton in the Kitchen, for his work combining “botany, history, animal husbandry, genetics, chemistry, thermodynamics, physiology and physics” into helpful cooking advice:

For example, although brining the turkey is now part of the Thanksgiving ritual for many cooks, Mr. McGee does not do it. “The bird does become juicier, but it’s just absorbing tap water, not the true juices that make a bird flavorful,” he said. “And the drippings become so salty that you can’t use them.” He says that his own experiments with turkey, though far from complete, show that drying the bird out, rather than infusing it with water, is more likely to make it flavorful and juicy with crisp skin. He unwraps his turkey a day or two before cooking, letting it air-dry in the refrigerator, and then cooks it at high temperature.
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But the skin was only golden, not as brown and crisp as we wanted. “Crispness is a matter of heating and dehydrating the proteins,” Mr. McGee said, as he fired up an industrial-size blowtorch and began methodically stroking its blue flame over the turkey. Dissatisfied with the slow results, he switched to a heat gun, whose red-hot coils seemed to give a more concentrated heat. The skin turned from gold to clear and then to bronze, the juices visibly running out of it and through the turkey. “Caramelized has become a popular word since I wrote the first book,” he said. “But everything browned is not caramelized.”

Caramelization, he explained, is what happens to sugar — simple sucrose molecules — exposed to high heat. But the browning that takes place in savory foods like onions, potatoes, celery and turkey skin is a “Maillard reaction,” the explosive meeting of a carbohydrate molecule (which may or may not be a sugar) and an amino acid in a hot, dry environment.

Maillard reactions take place when coffee or cocoa beans are roasted or when a bread crust turns brown. Mr. McGee said: “Maillard reactions contribute even more to the pleasures of eating than caramelization does. But of course it doesn’t sound as good on a menu.”

The alluring scent of Maillard reactions filled the kitchen as Mr. McGee’s pie crust began to brown. Although it is almost impossible to do anything truly new in the kitchen — as Mr. McGee notes, it often turns out that even the most complex flavor combinations were routinely used by Roman cooks — his pie crust method seems revolutionary. “The goal of pie crust is to create thin, even layers of fat and flour,” he said. “That’s what makes them flaky. But the usual method isn’t really optimal for that.”

Instead of using his fingers to rub globs of fat into flour, then dribbling in ice water, Mr. McGee starts with square chunks of cold butter and a pile of flour on a board. With a rolling pin he presses and rolls the butter into the flour, flattening it into thinner and thinner flakes. Occasionally he scrapes the mixture into a bowl and freezes it for five minutes, to keep the butter from melting. Since the gluten is not activated until the water is added, there is no worry about overworking the dough, even though the process can take some time.

Finally, to add the water Mr. McGee fetched a plant mister. “I always found it was hard to get the water evenly into the dough” he said. “So I measured how many sprays of the mister it takes to get half a cup of water — it’s 150, by the way — and I use that to get uniform droplets.” Now working quickly, he lightly squeezed the mister over the dough 50 times, then turned the dough and folded it. After two repetitions the dough just held together. He divided it into two round discs and returned it to the freezer.

Hours later his careful work paid off in a golden-brown crust of unspeakable flakiness and buttery flavor: Mr. McGee’s method means that there is no need to add shortening to ensure a good texture.

The zany pranksters at vbs.tv thought they’d do a piece on scopolamine, which has legitimate medical uses, but which is also known as Colombian Devil’s Breath:

When VBS initially asked me to go down to Colombia to dig into this Scopolamine story, I was pretty excited. I had only a vague understanding of the drug, but the idea of a substance that renders a person incapable of exercising free-will seemed liked a recipe for hilarity and the YouTube hall of fame. I even spent a little time brainstorming the various ways I could transport some of it back to the states and had a pretty good list going of different ways to utilize it on my buddies.

The original plan was for me to sample the drug myself to really get an idea of the effect it had on folks. The producer and camera man had flew down to Bogota ahead of me to confirm some meetings and start laying down the groundwork. By the time I arrived a few days later, things had changed dramatically. Their first few days in the country had apparently been such a harrowing montage of freaked-out dealers and unimaginable horror stories about Scopolamine that we decided I was absolutely not going to be doing the drug. All elements of humor and novelty were rapidly stripped away during my first few days in town. After meeting only a couple people with firsthand experience, the story took a far darker turn than we ever could have imagined and the Scopolamine pranks I had originally imagined pulling on my friends seemed beyond naive and absurd. By the time we were wrapping things up and preparing to leave the country, I couldn’t wait to get as far away from Colombia and that drug as possible. Apologies for a fleeting moment of sincerity, but looking back, I’m pretty proud of the work we did down there. This story, and the people who tell it, truly deserve to be heard.

David Keith gives an intriguing talk on geo-engineering to slow global warming:

Environmental scientist David Keith talks about a cheap, effective, shocking solution to climate change: What if we injected a huge cloud of particles into the atmosphere, to deflect sunlight and heat? As an emergency measure to slow a melting ice cap, it could work. Keith discusses why geo-engineering like this is a good idea, why it’s a terrible one — and who, despite the cost, might be tempted to use it.

Robots don’t bug cockroaches — and they even seem to influence them:

Tiny robots programmed to act like roaches were able to blend into cockroach society, according to researchers studying the collective behavior of insects.

Cockroaches tend to self-organize into leaderless groups, seeming to reach consensus on where to rest together.

For example, when provided two similar shelters, most of the group tended to gather under the same one.

Hoping to learn more about this behavior, researchers led by Jose Halloy at the Free University of Brussels, Belgium, designed small robots programmed to act like a cockroach.

The robots didn’t look like the insects and at first the roaches fled from them, but after the scientists coated the robots with pheromones that made them smell like roaches the machines were accepted into the group, nesting together with the insects.

Given a choice, roaches generally prefer a darker place and the robots were programmed to do the same.

When given a choice of a darker or lighter shelter, 75 percent of the cockroaches and 85 percent of the robots gathered under the darker one.

Then, to see if the robots had really become part of society and could influence group decisions, Halloy and colleagues programmed them to prefer shelters with more light.

The result, the lighter shelter was preferred by the mixed group 61 percent of the time, while the cockroaches alone picked it just 27 percent of the time.

On the other hand, in 39 percent of cases the robots, despite being programmed to prefer a lighter shelter, joined the cockroaches under the darker one.

The findings were reported in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

Religious scholars mull Flying Spaghetti Monster at the American Academy of Religion’s annual meeting in San Diego this weekend:

An Oregon State physics graduate named Bobby Henderson stepped into the [Intelligent Design] debate by sending a letter to the Kansas School Board. With tongue in cheek, he purported to speak for 10 million followers of a being called the Flying Spaghetti Monster — and demanded equal time for their views.

“We have evidence that a Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe. None of us, of course, were around to see it, but we have written accounts of it,” Henderson wrote. As for scientific evidence to the contrary, “what our scientist does not realize is that every time he makes a measurement, the Flying Spaghetti Monster is there changing the results with His Noodly Appendage.”

The letter made the rounds on the Internet, prompting laughter from some and vilification from others. But it struck a chord and stuck around. In the great tradition of satire, its humor was in fact a clever and effective argument.

Between the lines, the point of the letter was this: There’s no more scientific basis for intelligent design than there is for the idea an omniscient creature made of pasta created the universe. If intelligent design supporters could demand equal time in a science class, why not anyone else? The only reasonable solution is to put nothing into sciences classes but the best available science.

“I think we can all look forward to the time when these three theories are given equal time in our science classrooms across the country, and eventually the world; one third time for Intelligent Design, one third time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, and one third time for logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence,” Henderson sarcastically concluded.

Kansas eventually repealed guidelines questioning the theory of evolution.

Here’s what the young scholars will discuss:

The title: “Evolutionary Controversy and a Side of Pasta: The Flying Spaghetti Monster and the Subversive Function of Religious Parody.”

“For a lot of people they’re just sort of fun responses to religion, or fun responses to organized religion. But I think it raises real questions about how people approach religion in their lives,” said Samuel Snyder, one of the three Florida graduate students who will give talks at the meeting next Monday along with Alyssa Beall of Syracuse University.

The presenters’ titles seem almost a parody themselves of academic jargon. Snyder will speak about “Holy Pasta and Authentic Sauce: The Flying Spaghetti Monster’s Messy Implications for Theorizing Religion,” while Gavin Van Horn’s presentation is titled “Noodling around with Religion: Carnival Play, Monstrous Humor, and the Noodly Master.”

Using a framework developed by literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, Van Horn promises in his abstract to explore how, “in a carnivalesque fashion, the Flying Spaghetti Monster elevates the low (the bodily, the material, the inorganic) to bring down the high (the sacred, the religiously dogmatic, the culturally authoritative).”

The authors recognize the topic is a little light by the standards of the American Academy of Religion.

“You have to keep a sense of humor when you’re studying religion, especially in graduate school,” Van Horn said in a recent telephone interview. “Otherwise you’ll sink into depression pretty quickly.”

But they also insist it’s more than a joke.

Indeed, the tale of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and its followers cuts to the heart of the one of the thorniest questions in religious studies: What defines a religion? Does it require a genuine theological belief? Or simply a set of rituals and a community joining together as a way of signaling their cultural alliances to others?

In short, is an anti-religion like Flying Spaghetti Monsterism actually a religion?

Joining them on the panel will be David Chidester, a prominent and controversial academic at the University of Cape Town in South Africa who is interested in precisely such questions. He has urged scholars looking for insights into the place of religion in culture and psychology to explore a wider range of human activities. Examples include cheering for sports teams, joining Tupperware groups and the growing phenomenon of Internet-based religions. His 2005 book “Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture,” prompted wide debate about how far into popular culture religious studies scholars should venture.

Lucas Johnston, the third Florida student, argues the Flying Spaghetti Monsterism exhibits at least some of the traits of a traditional religion — including, perhaps, that deep human need to feel like there’s something bigger than oneself out there.

He recognized the point when his neighbor, a militant atheist who sports a pro-Darwin bumper sticker on her car, tried recently to start her car on a dying battery.

As she turned the key, she murmured under her breath: “Come on Spaghetti Monster!”

Molecule raises hope in battle against muscular dystrophy:

US researchers have created a synthetic molecule that reversed a key symptom of muscular dystrophy in mice, a study said Thursday, raising hope in the battle against the debilitating disease.

The University of Rochester Medical Center researchers injected a component into mice that eliminated myotonia, a symptom which in people causes muscles to tense up and weaken, the study said.
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The synthetic compound, known as a morpholino, that was injected in the mice’s muscle cells revived their chloride channel, a crucial cellular mechanism that controls electrical activity in muscles, the study said.

After the mice were injected with the compound, which the university team designed with the biotechnology company Gene Tools, the symptoms all but disappeared and did not return for several weeks.

The chloride channel is essentially disabled in humans with the disease, making it difficult for a person to relax the muscles.