Thứ Bảy, 10 tháng 9, 2016
Maybe you do it for social justice, or environmental sustainability, a food allergy, or some other reason. For those of us who endeavor to eat conscientiously and in line with certain values — whatever the rationale — staying on the wagon, and knowing what we’re eating is what we’re told it is, can be difficult. Can we be sure that this scone contains absolutely zero gluten? That this “spring water” is free of contaminants? That the fish in the fridge hasn’t spoiled? In a word, no — not 100 percent. But thanks to technology, we’re getting considerably closer to near-complete assurance that our food is as safe and clean as advertised. Here are five gadgets invented to give those of us who “eat our values” a bit more peace of mind, whether we’re at home, out at a restaurant, in the supermarket, or at the farmer’s market. (Spoiler: you’ve probably got one of these in your pocket right now.) What it does: Detects gluten—even traces!—in foods. Forbes reported last week on a portable technology invented to test food for gluten—down to 20 parts per million (parts per million is the most common unit of measuring gluten, a protein, in foods). The scanner is called NIMA, and it was developed by a crack team from some of the country’s top schools and organizations to find even the smallest trace of gluten. The device costs $199, is getting a companion iPhone app, and will ship out to its first customers by the end of this year. What it does: Detects harmful chemicals present in food, water, and even pot. Could a device help us eat, drink, and even smoke cleaner? Tech startup CDx thinks so. The company already has devices on the market that allow users to test for contamination in marijuana and most recently water, but its soon-to-be-released, consumer-level substance analyzer—called MyDx2—will help consumers detect the harmful chemicals present in food, water, and yes, pot. What it does: Helps you determine whether foods are on the verge of spoiling. Ever been rooting through the back of the fridge and wondered, “Is this still good?” Wonder no more: FOODsniffer is here. FOODsniffer is a sensor that literally "sniffs" if your food is on the verge of spoiling. It couldn’t be easier: point a sensor toward a food product, like raw meat or fish, and the FOODsniffer companion app will perform a quick bio-organic test and give you an instant diagnosis: either “fresh,” “cook well,” or “spoiled.” What it does: Measures the sugar, calorie, and alcohol content of foods and drinks. SCiO is a USB sensor that instantly reads sugar, calorie, and alcohol content in foods and drinks. The technology behind the spectrometer has been used for years to test oil, chemicals, or sewage, but the Israeli-made SCiO is the first consumer-grade sensor that can give us the “molecular fingerprint” of the food we’re about to eat. What it does: Provides an instant answer pretty much any question you have about food or nutrition. That’s right, you’ve (most likely) got a pretty powerful tool for eating clean and safely right on your person. There are dozens — if not hundreds — of applications you can download to keep your diet on track. (In fact, Thrive Market’s was named one of Greatist’s best nutrition apps of 2016!) But beyond apps, a simple Google search can help determine how many calories a dish at your favorite restaurant has, whether a product is likely to contain an allergen or toxin, or which produce you should always buy organic. This article originally published at Thrive Market here 1: NIMA
2: MYDX2
3: FOODSNIFFER
4: SCIO
5: SMARTPHONE
Thứ Hai, 25 tháng 4, 2016
There’s something unsettling about 10^32 Kelvin. The deep, red-orange body of the hot sauce looks almost like Frank’s Red Hot, but menacing flecks of red, brown and yellow set it apart from your run-of-the-mill, diner table Cholula or Tabasco. Black-gloved hands stick a baster into the glass bottle of the 10^32 Kelvin hot sauce and suck up a bit of it, releasing a few drops onto a little cardboard tasting boat. Within those spicy drops swims habanero pepper, ghost pepper and the two hottest chili peppers in the world — the Trinidad moruga scorpion and the Carolina Reaper. GE's 10^32 Kelvin hot sauce. Yeah, it's hot. Image: Tyler essary/mashable To avoid looking like amateur, I plunge the whole thing into my mouth, getting it on my lips, tongue and gums. For a moment, the concoction of hellish peppers and unknown ingredients creates a delicious, smoky, savory flavor I could imagine slathering over ribs. After a couple seconds, the pain starts building. Quickly. 10^32 Kelvin is GE’s hot sauce tribute to “absolute hot,” the temperature at which scientists theorize all matter starts to break down. It was created in partnership with Steve Seabury of High River Sauces and Thrillist. The hot sauce is also a shout out to some of the work that GE does with creating engine parts. When manufacturing industrial jet engines, locomotives and turbines, GE needs to create parts that are both light and super strong, withstanding temperatures above 3,000 degrees. At SXSW in 2015, GE had a similar food-science project to show off — a high-tech BBQ smoker that gives you more BBQ data than most people know what to do with. Good Fellows infused 10^32 Kelvin with ice cream, which was actually pretty tasty. Image: jon lynn/mashable To herald 10^32 Kelvin’s release, GE brought the science of hot sauce to Heatonist, a hot sauce store situated in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. The entrance features shelves of different flavors; bright yellow bottles of pineapple habanero, pale-brown bottles containing manzana peppers, absurdly red bottles touting the infamous ghost pepper. Beyond them and behind a sliding wooden door, mouth-cooling treats, hot sauce-infused ice cream and people in lab coats mingle around the star of the evening. The science of hot sauce lies primarily in capsaicin, the compound found in chili peppers that gives them heat. This heat is measured with the Scoville scale, a relatively subjective spiciness scale that gives a good idea of how spicy different peppers are. For example, the jalapeño pepper averages around 5,000 Scoville heat units — a decent kick. Orange habanero peppers are about 70 times hotter, measuring between 150,000-350,000 SHU. That’s a big jump. The hotter peppers look absurd compared to the habanero, because they are absurd Those peppers look like a joke compared to the so-called "ghost pepper" (formally called the bhut jolokia), which can reach over 1 million SHU. And the Trinidad moruga scorpion ranges from nearly 600,000 to 2 million SHU. The hottest known pepper in the world, the Carolina Reaper, hits between 1.4 and 2.2 million SHU. That’s about 440 times hotter than a jalapeño. Individual peppers and bottles of hot sauce can range in heat quite a bit, because capsaicin amounts aren’t identical in each kind of pepper, just like how some strawberries taste sweeter than others. 10^32 Kelvin and its supermaterial packaging. Image: Jon lynn/mashable Whether the capsaicin amount curves high or low in this three-drop sample of 10^32 Kelvin, I know it’s going to hurt. And it does. After about two seconds of admiring its flavor, the sauce starts making my mouth tingle as a sharp pain spreads across the lower half of my face. It’s bearable for maybe 30 seconds, and then my eyes start to water and I can feel sweat start sprouting from my hairline. The pain keeps mounting, not unlike the feeling about 15 minutes after you finish getting a tattoo The pain keeps mounting, not unlike the feeling about 15 minutes after you finish getting a tattoo and your body decides to ask why you just let someone scrape a vibrating needle across your skin for so long. But worse. Much worse. The habanero and Carolina Reaper provide the brunt of the heat up front, but the ghost pepper and Trinidad moruga scorpion make it last for an unbearable 15 minutes or so. The only liquids in sight to wash the spice away are water and white wine, so I grabbed the white wine. The sweltering heat lasts for about 20 minutes, then the endorphins start to fill my brain with happy feelings. I feel a little dizzy, but that could be the wine I sucked down. When you ingest capsaicin, your body isn’t really a big fan of it. GE brought a thermal imaging machine to Heatonist that showed you what happens to your face when it meets the heat of 10^32 Kelvin. Normally, your whole face would read as pretty much the same temperature, but after eating a little hot sauce, you can see that my nose and mouth look blue — there’s been a temperature decrease. That’s because your body recognizes the awful things you’ve just put into your mouth and is preparing your stomach to handle it. Your blood moves from your mouth and nose down to your digestive system so your body can focus on getting through the next phase of eating spicy peppers. When you eat a ton of capsaicin, like an entire Carolina Reaper, the outer layer of your mouth can blister and your throat can swell. And of course, your digestive system panics and tries to push everything through as fast as it can — not a fun experience. Because capsaicin isn’t something you can really physically pick out of a hot sauce sample, GE used a scientific method to determine how much capsaicin is in 10^32 Kelvin compared to other hot sauces. With the guidance of GE research scientist John Nelson, I extracted capsaicin from the hot sauce by putting some in oil, thoroughly mixing it with a vibrating machine. Because the capsaicin is oil-soluble, it leaves the hot sauce and attaches to oil molecules. To separate the oil and the hot sauce, you take the mixture for a spin in a centrifuge, creating a layer of hot sauce and a layer of oil and capsaicin. I then extracted the oil and capsaicin and placed a drop of it into a spectrophotometer. Spectrophotometers send light waves through substances and measure how much light they absorb. Because capsaicin absorbs ultraviolet light, you can determine how much capsaicin is in a sample by how much ultraviolet light passes through it. An analysis performed by GE that shows the capsaicin amount in 10^32 kelvin compared to other hot sauces seen in the 280 nm wavelength. Image: GE Compared to more common hot sauces, 10^32 Kelvin obviously has a lot more capsaicin in it. GE made a graph of popular hot sauces and how they fared in the spectrophotometer. You can see in the ultraviolet wavelength of 280nm that 10^32 Kelvin beats out every sauce by a large margin. 10^32 Kelvin is now available to buy online for $20. To make sure it doesn’t do any damage (well, inadvertent damage), it comes packaged in "supermaterials" that GE uses in high-temperature industrial engines used in jets and turbines. Even for hot sauce pros, more than a couple drops of 10^32 Kelvin can make you sweat. It has crazy heat, but the flavor is fantastic. Plus, it has science to back it up. Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.The science of hot sauce
Setting my mouth on fire
What capsaicin does to your body
Measuring heat
Availability
