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The Chemistry of Stadium Foods
Here at the ACS meeting in Boston, Newscripts was part of an elite group of reporters treated to a quick lesson in popcorn, ballpark hot dogs, and beer before a Red Sox game at Fenway Park. “The Chemistry of Stadium Food,” is part of an ongoing series of events on food chemistry at national meetings hosted by the ACS Office of Public Affairs.
Fenway Park and the Green Monster. Credit: Boston Visitors & Convention Bureau
The Boston event was held at Jerry Remy’s Sports Bar & Grill adjacent to the historic ballpark. Remy is the popular announcer for the Red Sox. The tutorial featured two leading food chemists: Sara J. Risch, founder of the food-consulting firm Science by Design, and Shirley Corriher, a cookbook author whose latest work is “Bakewise: The Hows and Whys of Successful Baking.” Risch and Corriher previously teamed up at the ACS meeting in Washington, D.C., to talk about the art of barbeque and at the meeting in San Francisco to talk about the sour in sourdough bread.
First up to bat in Boston, Risch gave a short warning about food safety in ballparks, given that a recent survey of ballparks found that most food-service vendors had poor health and safety ratings. Ballpark food service staffs tend to be minimum-wage workers or volunteers without training, Risch said. If the owners and managers of food kiosks aren’t diligent, there can be some public health issues with spoiled food—food could be undercooked, not properly refrigerated, or kept at an unsafe temperature for too long after it has been prepared.
For example, Risch says she would probably avoid sushi, oysters, or any raw foods in a ballpark—you can find just about anything on a ballpark menu these days, from iced coffee to hummus to veggie dogs. Fried foods are pretty safe, she noted, because they have been cooked at a high temperature, although the extra fat is a tradeoff. But you only live once. Continue reading →
What’s in a Name?
The ACS meeting in Boston is in full swing, with hundreds of technical sessions taking place. Glancing through the meeting program, you start to notice a few things about the session titles—some are functional, inviting, dull, puzzling, bizarre. It makes you wonder who comes up with the names for symposia anyway.
For the Boston meeting, the titles for the symposia in the Division of Computers in Chemistry (COMP) stand out as being a little different. For example: Novel Is So Passé, Just Say New Methods; Colloids: Gels, Sols, and Emulsions. You Know … Goo; and Materials, Polymers and Nanostuff. Newscripts decided to find out who was behind them.
The COMP titles are part of the wit and wisdom of computational biochemist Emilio X. Esposito, who operates consulting firm exeResearch, in East Lansing, Mich. I caught up with Esposito just as he was coming out of a marathon ACS Meetings & Expositions committee planning meeting.
Esposito, one of the division’s meeting organizers, says the catchy titles started out as his effort to better organize the COMP sessions, primarily to break symposia into smaller sessions that were more focused on a single topic. He started adding a little levity by including pop culture references and some word play in order to make the titles more informative and interesting.
For example, in Boston he used: We were Promised Jet Packs. They Found Out About These on the Way, as the title for a session made up of talks on methodology reviews–where the computational science was, were it is going, and what happened instead. He likens the theme to the old cartoon show The Jetsons, where the future George Jetson lives in a world of jet packs, flying cars, robot maids, and sundry automated gadgets and gizmos. “The future always promises us something, perhaps more than can be delivered, but along the way we discover much more and get sidetracked,” Esposito says. “We have jet packs now, but they aren’t exactly what we expected.”
For another session, he used: Peter McWilliams said: Life is Not a Struggle. It’s a Wiggle. This title was just cool, Esposito says, something he came across while looking for a reference to wiggle on the Internet. In molecular dynamics modeling, molecules seem to wiggle during simulations on the computer screen, Esposito says. He was trying to enhance that image. Esposito isn’t sure what the quote means, but it comes from the author Peter McWilliams. Continue reading →
A Toast To Tony
Chemistry professor Martyn Poliakoff of the University of Nottingham and his colleagues came up with a brilliant idea a couple of years ago to prepare a series of videos about the elements of the periodic table. If you haven’t checked out the Periodic Table of Videos, you should because they provide a lot of great information delivered in a fun and exciting way. Even if you are a seasoned chemist, you will still learn stuff.
There are only so many elements, though, so Poliakoff and friends expanded the video series to include seasonal chemical videos such as ones about the Chinese New Year and Christmas, as well as videos describing the chemistry behind viagra, the Shroud of Turin, and the Nobel Prizes, among other miscellaneous items. The team also has created a set of videos called The Sixty Symbols that provide an explanation of “the letters and squiggles” used by physicists and astronomers in their scientific writings.
One of the latest videos produced by the Nottingham crew is different–it’s an online tribute. Poliakoff takes time out to eulogize Tony Judt, an acclaimed British historian and Poliakoff’s close lifelong friend who recently died. The video is less about chemistry and more about the joy of living and the joy of discovery, which are intangible elements you won’t find on the periodic table.
Chem-E-Car Winners!
Northeastern University took top honors at the national Chem-E-Car competition held this week at the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) national meeting in Nashville. The team’s car, called “The Aluminator,” was powered by a hydrogen fuel cell and defeated 30 other shoebox-sized cars.
Northeastern's "Aluminator"
The Chem-E-Car competition, first held in 1999, is a fun and practical way for chemical engineering students to apply their knowledge of ChemE principles while helping build interest and expertise in alternative fuels. Each year students design and build a car, then just before the competition begins they are handed the specifications for the race. In this year’s event, students were challenged to transport 250 mL of water 77 feet. Each team gets two chances to tweak its car’s power system to meet the race specs, with the team’s final score being its best attempt at meeting the established distance. Northeastern University came the closest to the finish line and received the top prize of $2,000.
Finishing second and taking home $1,000 was the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez, using a decomposition reaction of hydrogen peroxide and potassium iodide. Third place and $500 went to Louisiana State University with its car powered by the acid-base reaction of citric acid with sodium carbonate.
Start thinking about next year.
Puerto Rico's "Coki Turbo"
LSU's "Swamp Thing"
Poster Ingenuity
In a sea of posters at a chemistry conference it is hard to stand out from the crowd. But graduate student Natalia Shustova of Colorado State University managed to do so at the combination 19th International Symposium on Fluorine Chemistry/3rd International Symposium on Fluorous Technologies this week with a 3-D presentation. Shustova’s research is on encapsulating metal atoms inside fullerenes that have fluorinated groups on the surface. She made a hemispheric fullerene model out of colored poster board, leaving the fullerene structure’s hexagons in place but cutting out the pentagons. In that way the scandium atoms trapped inside the fullerene, represented by balloons, were visible. She placed the details of her research on pieces of paper mounted on the hexagons. In the photo, Shustova chats with Konrad Seppelt of Free University of Berlin.
Time Out
Organizers of the fluorine conferences taking place in Grand Teton National Park this week did a lot of thinking ahead when planning the technical sessions. Fluorine meetings tend to be a bit relaxed, and fluorine chemists a bit verbose, with speakers running over their allotted time and ensuing discussions dragging things out even further. But with so many lectures on the schedule, the organizers knew they had to keep speakers on time.
Typically a session chair at a conference will give a little warning to the speaker or stand up when their time is running out. At the fluorine conferences the organizers are trying a different approach: electronic timers. A clock is set by a conference staff member at the beginning of a talk, so that the speaker sees exactly how much time they have remaining. A beeper goes off with five minutes remaining, and again when time runs out.
Continue reading →
Fluorine With A Flourish
This week the 19th International Symposium on Fluorine Chemistry and the 3rd International Symposium on Fluorous Technologies are taking place jointly at Jackson Lake Lodge in Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming. Imagine taking a premier collection of scientific presentations and holding them in a vacation setting, and that is what we have here.
Some 300 of the world’s leading fluorine chemists are in attendance, representing 24 different countries. Besides great chemistry, what drew these scientists to the conference is the backdrop of the Grand Teton Mountain Range. The mountains are a constant presence, mesmerizing. People flock to the front of the lodge and just stand in the Rocky Mountain sunshine and rarified air and stare. It doesn’t matter if you have stared at the Tetons before; you can’t help coming back for more.
Then there is the threat of wildlife at any moment—grizzly and black bears, moose, elk, pronghorn antelope, and wolves. Even on the first night of the conference a brown bat got into the lodge and swooped over people’s heads. Of course big animal sightings are rare and most people settle for watching squirrels and song birds. Then they look up at the Tetons again.
Continue reading →
Pittcon Shuffle: No Thinking Required
Another Pittcon has come and gone. Despite the economic woes of the world, total attendance for the week was about 18,000. That’s less than usual in recent years, but it is hard to say if it is a continuation of the ongoing downward trend for Pittcon or not–specialized instrumentation meetings have been siphoning away Pittcon regulars. Still, the array of instruments, lab supplies, and gizmos on display on the expo floor was as plentiful as ever. And it did not appear that many companies that signed up to display their wares pulled out at the last minute.
Pittcon attendees like me who crawl up one aisle of instruments and down another hit a zone after awhile–the Pittcon shuffle, we’ll call it. One booth after another becomes a blur, you lose the ability to decide if you want to stop to check out something or just keep shuffling, one foot after the other over thin carpet, thick carpet, faux wood flooring, concrete–it doesn’t matter. Not even bowls of candy or a cute tchotchke fazes you after 
awhile. By the way, my favorite trinkets this year: CEM’s crazy Dave beany hat and calendar, and Shimadzu’s Mr. Roboto 1 GB memory stick.
If one could generalize and say there were any noticeable trends this year, it was that there appeared to be fewer new products unveiled. That doesn’t bode well for the economy, if it is true that technological innovation is a driver of future economic growth. Continue reading →
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