A. Scattergood

David Chang at UCLA

So what did David Chang pass around at last night's UCLA science and food lecture? After Rene Redzepi handed out seaweed ice cream at the previous lecture, expectations were perhaps higher than they'd be at a normal university event, where people do not generally get experimental snacks. The Momofuku chef, who gave a talk entitled "Microbes in My Ramen?" with fellow Momofuku cookbook author and Lucky Peach writer Peter Meehan and Momofuku lab's Daniel Felder, instructed the crowd to eat samples of pistachio miso and powdered MSG.

"You basically ate the same thing," Chang told the audience, then launched into what might best be described as an apology for MSG, or monosodium glutamate, the oft-maligned ("I just think it's psychosomatic") stuff that is held responsible for "Chinese restaurant syndrome." An evening with David Chang is many things, but sedate is not one of them.

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via Fast Company

Super Slick Ketchup Bottles

What a time to be alive: It appears that the reign of terror caused by stubborn condiments is finally over. Soon we might no longer have to struggle pounding on a bottle of Heinz and waiting for a dollop of ketchup to come out, all thanks to six MIT researchers who claim they've solved the problem as part of an entrepreneurial design competition.

The result is a bottle lined with "LiquiGlide," a nontoxic coating slippery enough to cause ketchup, mayonnaise, mustard -- or any condiment in a plastic or glass bottle, for that matter -- to slide out easily when held upside down. This isn't just big news for people looking to top off their hamburgers; it also could help reduce the more than 1 million tons of food waste each year and make food containers more efficient to recycle.

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courtesy Amy Rowat

Professor Amy Rowat

If you've been attending UCLA's Science & Food lectures, which began in April and continue through next month, you'll know who Professor Amy Rowat is. She's the one who put the series together, whose happy task it was to find sand fleas and an old electric blanket for Rene Redzepi and Lars Williams (from Noma and the Nordic Food Lab, respectively) for their recent presentation, and who will be introducing David Chang (Momofuku) tonight at Moore Hall. Before Rowat brought the series here, she organized similar lectures at Harvard, bringing Ferran Adrià and company to Cambridge.

At first Dr. Rowat might seem like an unlikely champion of modernist cuisine. She's a professor of integrative biology and physiology at UCLA, with a Ph.D. from the University of Southern Denmark. She's also young, Canadian and bakes a mean pie. Or, as Jonathan Gold described her the other day: Imagine Zooey Deschanel with a physics doctorate. We caught up with her recently, over coffee at Espresso Profeta in Westwood, to talk about how she got into this in the first place, her take on emulsions, and where to get a centrifuge. Turn the page.

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Courtesy POM Wonderful

POM's line of products

First the Federal Trade Commission took on those butt-shaping shoes that were supposed to help you get a Kim Kardashian derriere, now a federal judge has upheld a complaint by the FTC that the healthful claims surrounding POM Wonderful juice products are deceptively unsubstantiated.

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Anne Fishbein

Beef ribs at Smoke City Market

Finally, the scientific reason that we associate Ron Swanson with manliness, other than the mustache and the whiskey: According to a study in the Journal of Consumer Research, there is a "strong connection between eating meat -- especially muscle meat, like steak -- and masculinity." Because of that connection, the researchers say, men are more wary of trying vegetarian products.

Researchers analyzed whether Western cultures associate meat with masculinity. Unsurprisingly, they found that certain foods, like meat and milk, are associated with specific genders, and that meat was rated as more masculine than vegetables. Overall, people perceive meat eaters as being more masculine than non-meat eaters. More interesting, perhaps, is that though the study was conducted in both the United States and Britain, the authors of the paper also examined 23 languages that use gendered pronouns and found that meat was most often associated with the male gender.

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Flickr/Perry McKenna

corn

We all know corn syrup can make you fat, but dumb too? According to a UCLA study published in the May 15 issue of the Journal of Physiology, regular intake of high fructose, such as that found in corn syrup, can negatively impact memory and learning ability -- in as little as six weeks.

Researchers tested the ability of maze-trained rats to find their way to the finish after having been dosed with corn syrup for six weeks. The rats moved slower and their brains showed a "decline in synaptic activity," said Fernando Gomez-Pinilla, professor of neurosurgery, integrative biology and physiology at UCLA, in a press release.

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R.E.~/Flickr

Cup of coffee

"In our busy lives, almost all of us have to walk with a cup of coffee. While often we spill the drink, this familiar phenomenon has never been explored systematically." And so begins the abstract for a paper entitled, "Walking with Coffee: Why Does It Spill?" in which researchers in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara set out to determine why, exactly, coffee tends to splash out of your cup no matter how gingerly it's held as you walk from kitchen to table. The answer, researchers discovered, lies in how well you take your coffee in stride.

As ScienceNow explains, "A fluid's back-and-forth movement has a certain natural frequency, and this is determined by the size of its container." And to determine the frequency of coffee as it swishes in a typical mug, researchers asked test subjects to walk with a cup of coffee, sometimes while staring straight ahead and other times while looking at the mug. Cameras and sensors were set up to keep track of the subjects as they walked, and the coffee as it spilled.

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Guzzle & Nosh/Flickr

Beer flight

Call it ancient ale: Researchers from the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland may be able to re-create 19th-century beer using live bacteria retrieved from bottles found in a shipwreck near the Åland Islands. The unnamed ship hit the bottom of the Baltic Sea sometime in the 1840s and was discovered in 2010; in addition to bottles of beer, the ship also was carrying coffee and spices.

Researchers were able to identify the "beautiful pale golden liquid" in the bottles as beer based on the "presence of malt sugars, aromatic compounds and hops typical of the beverage." A chemical analysis revealed the beer's tasting notes: "Hints of rose, almond and cloves."

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k4dordy/Flickr

Spilled pasta

Depending on how you were raised, food dropped onto the floor was subject to the three-second rule, the five-second rule, the one-minute rule, or the before-the-dog-gets-it rule. That homespun yarn of a law, though, may not necessarily stand up under the rigors of actual scientific research. A few years ago, Harold McGee looked at tests conducted by Clemson University researchers in which slices of bologna and bread were placed on salmonella-laced surfaces to determine how quickly each item picked up the bacteria. Suffice to say, the longer the items stayed in contact with the surface, the more bacteria they collected. More recently, researchers at Manchester Metropolitan University conducted their own experiment on behalf of household products company Vileda to test the three-second rule and found that certain foods were more likely to pick up the bacteria than others.

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Flickr/jessicafm

Licorice -- a sweet diabetes treatment?

The cure for diabetes might be ... candy?

Scientists have discovered that licorice root, the raw material for licorice candy, may be effective in treating Type 2 diabetes, the Atlantic reports.

A research team at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin, has identified a group of natural substances in licorice root called amorfrutins. Using a mouse model, the scientists found that amorfrutins reduce blood sugar levels and inflammation that would otherwise be present in the mice suffering from diabetes. As an added bonus, ingesting the amorfrutins prevented the development of a fatty liver, a common side effect of diabetes and an excessively fat-rich diet.

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