The Frumious Bandersnatch

Recently, I found out that my friend, Justin Van Gend, has a little gallery of his own on the intraweb. Most of his artwork I have already seen in person, but for those of you who aren't capable of this there is still hope of seeing his work. It's pretty cool stuff, I must say. The one with the guy's head that is peeling off and has some ambiguous mechanical parts shooting out of the back of his head is my favorite I think. So here's a taste:

And here's the link:
http://frumiousbandersnatch.carbonmade.com/

Apparently, he's available for freelance, so if you ever wanted to hire him, he'll be on the case. Quite a talented young man, that Justin.

Sights and Sounds of Ghana

As I begin moving away from chemistry and the senses, I will provide at least one more journey for your perceptive mechanisms. This is a video I put together from different short 10-30 second samples throughout the day while I lived in Ghana for a semester. I would like to add one recommendation: listen only first. Don't watch it the first time through. Hear the sounds and let your imagination tell you the rest of the story. Maybe when you see the video the next time around you realize, "Eh, that's exactly what I thought it was." Or, "What? That's not ninja hunting a dinosaur! I prefer my eyes-closed version much better."
This is the story of a day in Ghana.
Some sort of video link.

Miracle Berry Experiment

Hello. While my chemistry of the senses class may have finished, my quest of sharing interesting things has not, and I've returned to tell you about my magical journey to miracle berry land. Recently, my younger brother, Brandon Rivera-Melo, purchased some wacky berries online after reading about them. Naturally, when he saw something this legitimate-looking on the internet he wasted no time in buying them off of the old Amazon river. The brand name is mberry.
So I visited him one weekend at his dorm in Northwestern University in Evanston. His friends were also there, and we each took a half tablet of these so-called miraculous berries. We had come prepared with a plethora of fruits and other foods. Here is what I found:

• Tequila, a drink I normally find not only repulsive, but painful, was a recommendation made by the packaging of the miracle berries. I tried some beforehand, and it was just awful. It created that warm, drooly feeling you get when you drink that kind of crap. After the miracle berries, it tasted like a bottle of horrendous bile. I was disgusted to the point of pushing it away and saying, "Nathy no likey. No more."
• Strawberries, when timed right, can be one of the most delicious and hassle-free fruits on this green earth. I love them. Everyone does, except for those who are allergic, and even they probably would if they didn't break out in hives. After the berries they had a more sugary taste. I even got some cotton candy flavor from them. Still delicious, but not much of an improvement.
• Lemons, a sour citrus fruit that is used mostly in cooking and adding a light citric flavor to water, is not typically enjoyed by itself. They are just too sour for most people, and then they activate your salivary glands like no other mother. However, after the half berry tablet, things changed. It tasted sweet and delicious. It was like eating candy, and I didn't secrete saliva all over the inside of my mouth. It was just a great tasting lemon. Fantastic. Now we're getting somewhere.
• Dill cheese, a type of cheese with the dill spice inside, was also available. It didn't really taste like anything when I ate it. In fact, all I could sense was the dill, and that was only through the miracle of smell. So, cheese, not so interesting. Alright, moving on.
• Gummi Bears, an already perfectly sweet "food," tasted just like they already do. Ok, what were those doing here anyway? Waste of a taste.
• Grapefruit, a fruit that a lot of people don't like for some reason, is sitting in a bag with other various fruits. I grab it out and peal it. Now, I'm a man who can actually enjoy the sweet taste of grapefruit. It's really something I like, and after these berries it became a little bit more bitter. It reminded me of that alcohol/fermented taste. It had become worse. Strange berry, what are you up to this time?
• Limes, the green cousin of lemon, have pretty much the same story as lemons, but they have their own distinct taste. Well, like with lemons, they were equally delicious. I was really into those lemon segments. I was all like, "Omm, yommm,mmm,mmnnn." I practically ate the whole thing. Well done, Miracle Bs.
• Stout beer, is a beer, and therefore cannot be trusted. For good reason! This was a nasty experience for both the beer and I. It wasn't good before, and it certainly wasn't better after. It's not something on my list of "drinks which taste good."
• Passion fruit, an obscure tropical fruit, is one of the most underrated fruits in existence, next to cocoa fruit (the pulp). It's a hollow fruit with edible seeds and extremely sweet pulp. Normally it's a great-tasting fruit. After the berries, it was almost too much. It overwhelmed the tongue and sent my mouth to the moon on a rocket of pleasure powered by delicious juice fuel. No wonder it's called passion fruit. It was probably (and for me certainly is) an aphrodisiac. As a side note, the below example of passion fruit would suggest you cut it in half. You're going to lose all the precious fluids this way and drip all over the place and look like an idiot with passion juice all over your pants. Try explaining how you got passion juice on your pants to your mother. My recommendation? Do it like your cavemen ancestors did: smash it open, leaving a jagged hole in the top and scoop out the succulent contents. A definite winner in my book, which has not been published yet.

One passionate fruit, please.

And those are the results. Try some for yourself because you may experience something slightly different. My advise would be that a full tablet (versus the half that I took) may have more pleasing results, but some reviews have said a full tablet is unnecessary. I say go for it. Google it and see what you think. You could even tell me about it in a comment!

Cheese It, Boys!

Cheese I ate today. I'm a fanatic of that one in the lower left,
a specialty of local cheese making expert, Barbara Jenness.

I ate some cheese today. Actually, it was quite a bit of cheese as far as variety goes. Have you noticed a trend when I discuss foods and beverages? They have all been practiced since ancient days and there are different varieties of them from all over the world. Bread, cheese, beer, chocolate, tea... Wine would fit nicely in this list.

And today the focus was on cheese. Fortunately we had a cheese whiz (thank you, thank you) come in and talk all about making cheese and different varieties. I payed special attention to this lady because one day I hope to make cheese myself and impress all my guests at a dinner. Yes, it is more of a hassle and more expensive to do this, but it's something I think we should all try at one point. Right? So let me go though the process of making cheese.

The Process of Making Cheese


Cheese, like all of the foods and drinks I've discussed (except for maybe tea), has its own special and intricate process of production. There are four main elements for making cheese:

1. Milk - Well, that one was kind of obvious. It needs to be acidified and curdled, which involves the next two.
2. Culture - Yes, you need some sort of rich heritage made up of peoples, arts, ideas, language. Psych! Not that kind of culture. I'm talking about the bacterium kind. Replacements include buttermilk, vinegar, and lemon juice.
3. Rennet - I'm sorry, could you rennet by my again? I said, "Rennet." This is the agent which actually curdles the milk. I'll discuss these elements more in depth later.
4. Salt - That's right. You need to add a small amount of salt to your concoction, and now you're ready to cheesemake!

Let's discuss each element further though, shall we?

Milk

They sure can drink though!

Or melk, as some say it (incorrectly, even though  it's one of the few words in the English language that's pronounced exactly like it's spelled). This is the most important ingredient to producing cheese by far. The others can be replaced, but once you take the milk away it is no longer possibly cheese. You can get milk from all sorts of different mammals, but the main ones are goats, cows, sheep, and bats. Oh, did I say bats? Heck not! Don't use that nasty bat milk. You sicko! Other milks not to use: Kangaroo, mouse, moose, lion, rabbit, pig, skunk,  whale, rhinoceros, porcupine, baboon, prairie dog, dugong, or wolverine. Yeah. I bet you never thought of some of those animals as milk makers. They all are, and for some reason, the US chooses to use cow milk a whole lot, even though it's less efficient than goat milk. Real mozzarella is actually made from water buffalo milk (I thought they only produced water). I've heard tell that goat milk is a great choice for cheese making. And the way the milk will taste is strongly based on the animal's diet. A goat consuming more grains will produce a milk that tastes different from the same goat feeding on mostly grass. Who knows what sort of wacky milk creations you can make? And we haven't even gotten to the cheese yet? Some pointers I got from Barbara Jenness (which is actually where I got most of this information) is that the milk should not be pumped, which I agree with for the sake of the poor lactating animal, and that it should be handled gently to preserve the delicate chemical make up of milk. And lastly, make sure you begin with fresh milk. The curdling and stuff will come later.

Culture

There are hundreds of species of bacteria you could use to acidify milk. The Average Cheese Making Joe (ACMJ) will probably not use culture, but people who make cheese for money or even a living will use bacteria. This is not to say that big cheese companies (pun originally unintended) use culture. But you know big companies. Now, for someone like me, an ACMJ, procuring a special strain of bacterium might not be worth the trouble. Not to fear. As I mentioned before, lemon juice, buttermilk, and vinegar can all acidify your milk. Try different things for different cheeses!

Rennet

Adding rennet to the mix.

By far the most obscure element to creating cheese, it can curdle the milk, and you're going to eat the curds. Oh yes you are. Now, where does rennet come from? You have to extract it from the fourth stomach chamber of a calf that hasn't been weaned from its mothers milk yet. Or pay someone to do that for you. You can probably buy it at your local grocery store, but the people that work there might not even know what it is. Did you? So I don't know. Look around. What I'm wondering is how we got this stuff in the first place. I mean, we've been making cheese for a while now. Have we always been extracting this rennet from calves? How would we have known? I'm thinking milk just curdled over time. The rennet makes it go faster then. Ok, settled.

Salt

Add a pinch of salt or two. There's not a whole lot to comment about. There's definitely a reason besides flavor to add salt, but I can't quite remember. Something about chemicals...?

Process of Cheese Making

Alright you ACMJs, get ready for some impressive cheese that will awe your friends at your next social occasion when you tell them, "Oh that? I made that. Yeah, no bigs. I make cheese. What of it?"

Step 1: Watch this video and do everything it says.
Step 2: Serve to your friends.
Step 3: Recite that quote from above.

And a last note about cheese: There are three important factors when dealing with cheese: Time, Temperature, and pH. When the milk's in the pot, the temperature should be anywhere from 70 - 90 degrees. It depends on which cheese you're going for. Look up each cheese's specific temperatures. The same goes for pH, but you're aiming for about 6.6, give or take 0.4 or so. The time refers to aging the cheese. You'll find that the more you eat cheese, the more you'll know about when you like eating it. Some cheese eaters like to eat bleu cheese when it's aged to the maximum. You may find you like eating a certain type of cheese very young. As you become a more experience cheese eater (or cheater, for short) you'll discover more about the way you prefer when and how your cheese is served. Enjoy.

Chili Children

Making Chili

Today I made some chili using nothing more than a couple slices of diced onions, some green peppers, most of a can of black beans, diced tomatoes from a can, some olive oil, a pan, two hot plates, two outlets (complete with endless electricity), a stirring spoon, salt, and various other ingredients. That's seriously all you need. Oh, and a pot. That's it. So I made some delicious chili and ate it with some chips. How splendid. I tried other creations, such as my neighbor's salsa, and it was very nice. They added some spicy peppers to the mix, and that was very nice. It was on its way to being a truly excellent salsa. Well done, chaps. Very nice!

Secret Agent Spice

A dictionary definition of pungent

Spicy food can be miserable.

Capsaicin belongs to the vanilloid family. It has a special binding property that makes it burn you. Burn you hard. It also has a heavy molecular weight compared to other molecules in the vanilloid fam. Drinking water to cool yourself down won't do much for you because of capsaicin's lipid properties. It is hydrophobic and will not dissolve in water. Using something high in lipids, like milk, would do the trick. Or ice cream! I've made the mistake of eating one of those peppers before, but I did come out of it with a cool shirt. A Scoville Unit indicates the amount of capsaicin present. You'd find anywhere from 2,500 to 8,000 units in a Jalapeño pepper. In the habañero pepper that I ate (picture above) there were about 100,000 to 350,000 Scoville heat units present. Here are photos of the three hottest peppers out there:

Bhut Jolokia 855,000–1,359,000 SHU

Naga Viper Pepper - 855,000–1,359,000 SHU

Red Savina Habañero - 580,000 SHU

So I read an article about spiciness and all that, and I really don't think the creams it mentioned would work all that well for getting rid of the pain caused by spicy foods. But when you are really in pain from something spicy, I think getting any help at all is more than welcome. I think it's interesting that humans are drawn at all to spicy things. I mean, I am too, but naturally the effect of capsaicin is the equivalent to a thorn. It's an irritant. Animals don't even like this sort of thing. But then, humans are pretty strange.

There was a table in that article where the difference between capsaicin and dihydrocapsaicin was just one double bond between the carbons in capsaicin. The difference between capsaicin and homocapsaicin (which means "same as capsaicin") is the direction of the carbon after the double bonds. Capsaicin is thought to be a double-edged sword because it has both chemotherapeutic properties, but also cancer-causing properties. This chemical is thought to make you use burn more calories and thus not acquire fat.

Aroma Therapist

Sales and Smells

Smells are everywhere. Now, I found out about aroma marketing, and it's this crazy concept that companies and stores are buying into. You release scents at a store and try to draw in customers. It lures you in and you may already be emotionally swayed to buy something. Personally, I think it's a sweet strategy to get people to buy stuff. That idea of getting into people's emotions to get them to buy stuff is ingenious. Beautiful. Now, does it work? Well, I wouldn't say that it works on me, but then again, who would admit that? I don't think anybody knows if it works on them. As to why most people don't know about its effects on them, I'd say it comes from the very nature of the marketing and how it targets the subconscious. But apparently it works pretty well because there are more than one of these companies that specializes in aroma manipulation. It certainly is a very creative approach on marketing. It's about time we had this. I'm just waiting for smellovision and smellophones to come on to the market. That will be difficult to adjust to at first, but eventually people will love it. I'm totally serious. Listen, if we make it past December 21, 2012, then we will be seeing all sorts of smellectronic devices. It will be rad.

How Exactly Does Smelling Function?

So here's the skinny on how we smell (though I've explained this before in my blog): It starts with an odor molecule. Humans are able to detect over 10,000 different odor molecules. If one of these odors manages to fly up into your nose it may just contact an olfactory receptor neuron. You have millions of these, and each one has cilia jutting out of them. The celia contain receptors, which are the proteins that change when odor molecules bind to them. See? You're getting it. So neurons have receptors. Ok, when the molecules bind to the receptors, the receptors change shape, which causes an electrical signal to be sent to the brain. Your brain gets a message saying "fish alert, fish alert!" and you interpret it. Now, just because there are a bunch of different smell molecules doesn't mean that each smell has its own molecule. The smell of certain shampoos are actually combinations of these molecule odors. So with over 10,000 thousand the amount of possible smells are nearly endless. I mean, really. One day we should be able to experiment with creating different smells with a program. I can imagine it: Molecule #2968-2988 + molecule #24 + molecule #8838-8842. Now compute and give me a scent as to what that smells like.

Loss of Smell


Anosmia, the medical term for the loss of smell, is kind of a rare condition. Old people lose their smell from age because they are more susceptible to nasal infections which destroy their senses. Once it's gone it's gone. It is strongly tied to tasting, and eating food would be a much less rich experience. On top of that, odors like smoke and gas would go undetected, and those can be red flags to humans with any common sense (pun intended). You also don't know when you smell bad, so you'll just have to shower daily and use lots of deodorant, or ask someone close if you smell to know when to correct that.

Odor Preferences


Why do we like certain smells and dislike others? Why does that change for different people? These are probing proboscis questions, and here's what I understand: People aren't born with certain preferences. There is not sufficient data to back up the claims that we are. It's pretty much a preference based on association. You learn if you like a smell from a very young age. Some cultures have a general smell for home, and that might be the smell of the mother making a certain cultural dish. Then you're always going to like that smell of Caldo de Pollo boiling in the pot. I know I do, Mom. But some Indian food smells pungent and pretty gross to me. I remember when I was in 6th grade and I walked into my Indian friend's house. I really just didn't like that smell at all, and I wondered how the ones living there could tolerate it. Now I realize how. Your perception of the smell is really a big factor of what determines the like or dislike of a certain odor. That may sound redundant, but what I mean is that if you think something smells "artificial" or "natural," that may have a big effect on your overall judgment of the smell.