Search for ‘Nicola Twilley’ (5 articles found)

Smog meringues

… we spent Thursday afternoon mixing different chemical precursors, and then “baking” [meringues] under UV light to form a London peasouper, a 1950s Los Angeles photochemical smog, and a present-day air-quality event in Atlanta.

We chose these three places and times to showcase three of the classic “types” that atmospheric scientists use to characterize smogs: 1950s London was a sulfur- and particulate-heavy fog, whereas 1950s Los Angeles was a photochemical smog created by the reactions between sunlight, NOx, and partially combusted hydrocarbons. Present-day Beijing often experiences London-style atmospheric conditions, whereas Mexico City’s smog is in the Angeleno style.

Each city’s different precursor emissions and weather conditions produce a different kind of smog, with distinct chemical characteristics—and a unique flavour.

As it turns out, Arie Haagen-Smit, the man known as the “father” of air pollution science, was originally a flavour chemist who rose to prominence thanks to his work on pineapples. Nadia Berenstein, the flavour historian I interviewed for a recent episode of Gastropod, pointed me to a speech Haagen-Smit gave in the 1950s, explaining his shift in research from fruit flavours to smog science to a room full of his former colleagues. In it, he explains, “I am engaged at the present time on a super flavor problem—the flavor of Los Angeles.”

The glow pear

Radu Zaciu. “Die Glühbirne,” 2015.

German slang for light bulb is “die Glühbirne,” or “the glow pear.”

… at China’s National Engineering Research Centre for Agricultural Product Logistics in Jinan, sandwiched between the “Time/Temperature/Tolerance Laboratory” and “Small-size Instruments Storage,” the curious cryo-tourist can visit “The Room of the Sleeping Fish.” As I describe in a forthcoming issue of Harvard Design Magazine, the Centre’s scientists have developed a way to ship live fish out of water, by using refrigeration to induce a sort of suspended animation.

According to the technician in charge of the process, the fish are sent to sleep by gradually lowering the temperature of the water, half a degree at a time over the course of twenty-four hours, to just above freezing. In this sluggish state, a fish can be rolled up, popped in a clear plastic poster tube, and mailed to anywhere in China. As long as they arrive at their destination within three days, the Centre’s Director explained, they will simply wake up and start swimming again as soon as you slide them out of the canister.

Nicola Twilley’s eel registration card with the Cross-Species Adventure Club.

The shape of cheese to come

Later: thoughts on McNugget morphology

Pudding container shape 460

IMAGE: In an extremely small 1991 study, C. J. Overbeeke and M. E. Peters of the Delft University of Technology gathered preliminary evidence to show that people can match the complex 3D shapes of dessert containers to specific pudding flavours and types, and thus, in turn, that designers can express the taste of a dessert in the form of its packaging. Photograph from their paper, “The Taste of Desserts’ Packages,” published in Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1991, 73, 575-583.

Building on both anecdotal evidence from chefs and synaesthetes, as well studies of chocolate selection boxes (milk chocolate is typically matched with round shapes, while dark chocolate is perceived as more angular), beer and its serving glasses, and even three-dimensional dessert pots (with significant implications for the packaging of vanilla pudding and tiramisu), Spence and his co-authors asked their test subjects to rate a range of British cheeses on a soft to spiky scale.