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True wine aficionados might turn up their noses, but canned wines are growing in popularity, particularly among younger crowds during the summer months, when style often takes a back seat to convenience. Yet these same wines can go bad rather quickly, taking on distinctly displeasing notes of rotten eggs or dirty socks. Scientists at Cornell University conducted a study of all the relevant compounds and came up with a few helpful tips for frustrated winemakers to keep canned wines from spoiling. The researchers outlined their findings in a recent paper published in the American Journal of Enology and Viticulture.

“The current generation of wine consumers coming of age now, they want a beverage that’s portable and they can bring with them to drink at a concert or take to the pool,” said Gavin Sacks, a food chemist at Cornell. “That doesn’t really describe a cork-finished, glass-packaged wine. However, it describes a can very nicely.”

According to a 2004 article in Wine & Vines magazine, canned beer first appeared in the US in 1935, and three US wineries tried to follow suit for the next three years. Those efforts failed because it proved to be unusually challenging to produce a stable canned wine. One batch was tainted by " Fresno mold "; another batch resulted in cloudy wine within just two months; and the third batch of wine had a disastrous combination of low pH and high oxygen content, causing the wine to eat tiny holes in the cans. Nonetheless, wineries sporadically kept trying to can their product over the ensuing decades, with failed attempts in the 1950s and 1970s. United and Delta Airlines briefly had a short-lived partnership with wineries for canned wine in the early 1980s, but passengers balked at the notion.

Enlarge / A selection of the Fitzwilliam Museum coins that were studied, including coins of Charlemagne and Offa. (credit: The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge)

Sometime around 660 CE, silver coinage replaced gold as the dominant form of currency in northwest Europe. But what was the source of all that silver? According to a recent paper published in the journal Antiquity, silver for the earlier post-Roman coins during this period came from Byzantine silver plate, while silver for the later coins most likely came from mines located in Melle, Aquitaine.

“This was such an exciting discovery," said co-author Rory Naismith , a medieval historian at the University of Cambridge. "I proposed Byzantine origins a decade ago but couldn’t prove it. Now we have the first archaeometric confirmation that Byzantine silver was the dominant source behind the great seventh-century surge in minting and trade around the North Sea.”

There are a number of high-tech tools that can be used to learn more about historic currencies. For instance, Michael Wiescher, a nuclear physicist at the University of Notre Dame, has combined XRF scaling with PIXE mapping of Roman denarii to test the currency's quality and learn more about the production techniques. Working with his undergraduate students, he has also used electron spectroscopy to measure the silver content of each coin and learn about how the impurities were distributed.

Enlarge / Active geology could have helped purify key chemicals needed for life. (credit: Christof B. Mast)

In some ways, the origin of life is looking much less mystifying than it was a few decades ago. Researchers have figured out how some of the fundamental molecules needed for life can form via reactions that start with extremely simple chemicals that were likely to have been present on the early Earth. (We've covered at least one of many examples of this sort of work.)

But that research has led to somewhat subtler but no less challenging questions. While these reactions will form key components of DNA and protein, those are often just one part of a complicated mix of reaction products. And often, to get something truly biologically relevant, they'll have to react with some other molecules, each of which is part of its own complicated mix of reaction products. By the time these are all brought together, the key molecules may only represent a tiny fraction of the total list of chemicals present.

So, forming a more life-like chemistry still seems like a challenge. But a group of German chemists is now suggesting that the Earth itself provides a solution. Warm fluids moving through tiny fissures in rocks can potentially separate out mixes of chemicals, enriching some individual chemicals by three orders of magnitude.

It's well-known that Benjamin Franklin was a Founding Father who enjoyed a nice tipple or two (or three). One of his favorite alcoholic beverages was milk punch , a heady concoction of brandy, lemon juice, nutmeg, sugar, water, and hot whole milk—the latter nicely curdled thanks to the heat, lemon juice, and alcohol. It employs a technique known as "milk washing," used to round out and remove harsh, bitter flavors from spirits that have been less than perfectly distilled, as well as preventing drinks from spoiling (a considerable benefit in the 1700s).

Some versions of milk punch also incorporate tea, and in the mixed drink taxonomy, it falls somewhere between a posset and syllabub . The American Chemical Society's George Zaidan decided to delve a bit deeper into the chemistry behind milk washing in a new Reactions video after tasting the difference between a Tea Time cocktail made with the milk washing method and one made without it. The latter was so astringent, it was "like drinking a cup of tea that's been brewed for 6,000 years," per Zaidan. In the process, he ended up stumbling onto a flavorful new twist on the classic espresso martini (although martini purists probably wouldn't consider either to be a true martini).

There isn't anything in the scientific literature about milk washing as it specifically pertains to cocktails, so Zaidan broke the process down into three simple experiments, armed with all the necessary ingredients and his trusty centrifuge. First, he combined whole milk with Coke, a highly acidic beverage that curdles the milk. Per Zaidan, this happens because of the casein proteins in milk, which typically have an overall negative charge that keeps them from clumping. Adding the acid (Coke) adds protons to the mix so that it is electrically neutral (usually at a pH of 4.6).

Enlarge / Chicatana ants have a nutty, fatty flavor. They are consumed in parts of Mexico to add texture and flavor to dishes. (credit: Changqi Liu)

Edible insects, like ants, are considered a delicacy in many cultures, as well as being very nutritious and an environmentally sustainable source of protein. But many of us have a longstanding aversion to consuming insects. In hopes of changing that aversion, chemists at San Diego State University (SDSU) have analyzed the flavor profiles of different ant species and found that not all edible ants taste alike, according to their presentation at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in New Orleans.

Several years ago, the French chef David Faure created an insect-based tasting menu at Aphrodite, his Michelin-starred restaurant in Nice. Adventurous diners could sample "crickets in a whiskey bubble with cubes of French toast and pears" or "squares of peas, carrot foam, and mealworms." The Michelin critics didn't share his enthusiasm for insect haute cuisine and took away his Michelin star in 2014. Aphrodite closed its doors for good in 2016.

Faure's gambit might have failed, but a 2018 study suggested that he had the right idea about appealing to Western diners' love of luxurious indulgence, presenting the fare as an exotic delicacy rather than as an environmentally sustainable protein source. (Food production accounts for as much as 25 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, with much of that due to livestock. Farming insects could reduce those emissions significantly.)

Enlarge / Brewing kombucha tea. Note the trademark gel-like layer of SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast). (credit: Olga Pankova/Getty Images)

Kombucha tea continues to grow in popularity as a healthy alternative to alcoholic beverages—and chemistry can help commercial and amateur brewers alike get faster and better results with their brews, according to a presentation yesterday at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in New Orleans.

“Brewers typically see making kombucha as an art more than a science,” Jeb Kegerreis, a physical chemist at Shippensburg University, said of the research . “So when we are doing a consultation, we also walk the brewer through the biochemistry of what’s happening during fermentation.”

As we've previously reported , you need just three basic ingredients to make kombucha . Just combine tea and sugar with a kombucha culture known as a SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast), aka the "mother," also known as a tea mushroom, tea fungus, or a Manchurian mushroom. It's basically akin to a sourdough starter. A SCOBY is a firm, gel-like collection of cellulose fiber (biofilm), courtesy of the active bacteria in the culture creating the perfect breeding ground for the yeast and bacteria to flourish. Dissolve the sugar in non-chlorinated boiling water, then steep some tea leaves of your choice in the hot sugar water before discarding them.

Enlarge (credit: MirageC )

The race is on to generate new technologies to ready the battery industry for the transition toward a future with more renewable energy. In this competitive landscape, it’s hard to say which companies and solutions will come out on top.

Corporations and universities are rushing to develop new manufacturing processes to cut the cost and reduce the environmental impact of building batteries worldwide. They are working to develop new approaches to building both cathodes and anodes—the negatively and positively charged components of batteries—and even using different ions to hold charge. While we can't look at every technology that's in development, we can look at a few to give you a sense of the problems people are trying to solve

Cleaner manufacturing

The California-based company Sylvatex has developed a water-free, efficient process for manufacturing cathode active material (CAM). “This process innovation reduces the total cost of CAM by 25 percent, while using 80 percent less energy and eliminating water use and sodium sulfate waste streams,” said Virginia Klausmeier, CEO and founder of Sylvatex.

Enlarge / Scientists at the University of Nottingham have discovered how to create different colors of blue cheese. (credit: University of Nottingham)

Gourmands are well aware of the many varieties of blue cheese , known by the blue-green veins that ripple through the cheese. Different kinds of blue cheese have distinctive flavor profiles: they can be mild or strong, sweet or salty, for example. Soon we might be able to buy blue cheeses that belie the name and sport veins of different colors: perhaps yellow-green, reddish-brown-pink, or lighter/darker shades of blue, according to a recent paper published in the journal Science of Food.

“We’ve been interested in cheese fungi for over 10 years, and traditionally when you develop mould-ripened cheeses, you get blue cheeses such as Stilton , Roquefort , and Gorgonzola , which use fixed strains of fungi that are blue-green in color," said co-author Paul Dyer of the University of Nottingham of this latest research. "We wanted to see if we could develop new strains with new flavors and appearances."

Blue cheese has been around for a very long time. Legend has it that a young boy left his bread and ewe's milk cheese in a nearby cave to pursue a lovely young lady he'd spotted in the distance. Months later, he came back to the cave and found it had molded into Roquefort. It's a fanciful tale, but scholars think the basic idea is sound: people used to store cheeses in caves because their temperature and moisture levels were especially hospitable to harmless molds. That was bolstered by a 2021 analysis of paleofeces that found evidence that Iron Age salt miners in Hallstatt (Austria) between 800 and 400 BCE were already eating blue cheese and quaffing beer.