The Willetts on Wine: Wine – it’s what’s for dinner
Continuing the run-up to the release of the spring issue of Fine Lifestyles Regina, here’s “The Willetts on Wine,” the wine column penned by my wife, Margaret Anne, and myself, from winter issue of FLR, in which it premiered. Eventually there’ll be a dedicated Willetts on Wine website to replace the old Blogger blog we haven’t updated in forever. But for now…enjoy!
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It seems like cooking dinner these days is a high-wire balancing act. You’re expected to perfectly balance protein, veggies and carbohydrates while also serving up fresh (preferably local) ingredients, delectable tastes, and tantalizing textures.
Throw in the expectation of a perfect wine match, and the whole act may end in disaster (there’s no safety net for dinner-party hosts!).
If your personal knowledge of wine is limited to the fact that some of it is red and some of it is white, then maybe it’s time you got some expert advice.
There are lots of wine reference books, but one of our favorites is Harmony on the Plate by Shari Darling (no, really, that’s her name!). Her advice can be summed up by two basic tips, either of which can lead to an excellent food/wine match: 1) match like flavours with like (but make sure the wine’s flavor characteristics are stronger than the food’s), or 2) when in doubt, remember that opposites attract.
Sometimes, though, you don’t have the time or energy to worry about the perfect match. When we feel that way, we reach for one of our reliable standbys. If we’re in the mood for a white, that’s likely to be a Viognier. The floral aromas and fruity peach and apricot flavors marry well with almost any food, and Viogniers are much easier to find than they once were. Our go-to choice? The Clay Station Viognier from the Lodi foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada.
On the lighter end, check out Rieslings. Their crisp taste and light body make them good matches with a variety of foods, from fish to fowl to smoked pork. They can even go well with strongly flavored and scented spicy foods with lots of acid and heat.
While you can find Rieslings from Australia, the U.S. and Canada, start with wines from the country most famous for the variety, Germany. Even if you find their wines too sweet for your taste when drunk alone, you may find they’re just the thing to match with food.
For a red, we more and more often turn to the Spanish section of the liquor store. Many Spanish wines feature a great balance of fruit and earthiness that goes well with the rich, flavorful cuts of meat we place on our plates today. You’ll find many of the vintners have already aged the wine for you, so that you can pick up a 2001 vintage right off the shelf. The Marqués de Cáceres reds, from Crianza to Reserva to Gran Reserva, are ready to go when you are.
With the festive season approaching, the need to find a great wine to match great food will grow. Surely, with all the varied flavours at the Christmas table—especially that scrumptious turkey!—a big Chardonnay or maybe one of those Rieslings we just recommended would be the way to go?
Our advice? Forget everything we just said. Holiday flavours are so complex that matching them is a terrific challenge. Many a fine bottle of wine has crashed and burned alongside our turkey or ham dinners.
But don’t give up! There is a grape that offers a way out of the holiday wine-matching dilemma: the finicky, hard-to-produce heartbreak grape known as Pinot Noir. The challenge here is finding a Pinot that tastes like it’s worth the money.
Here are two choices to consider, both fruit-forward New World-style wines: Greg Norman’s Pinot Noir from Santa Barbara, California, and the Prospect Pinot from the Okanagan. As a bonus, both will also go great with salmon if you’re planning a non-traditional Christmas dinner.
Right after Christmas, of course, comes New Year’s. Champagne, Cava, Sekt…whatever you call it, sparkling wine is a tradition well worth keeping as the old year gives way to the new. Although our recommendation is French, it’s not Champagne: it’s the Saint Odile Cremant from Alsace. Not as hard on the holiday-depleted wallet, and with many more nuances of toasty yeast and fresh lemon than its counterparts at this price point can boast.
Try it! And not just on its own: its fizzy freshness effectively counters the typically salty seasoning of New Year’s appetizers. It even goes with salt and vinegar potato chips!
You don’t have to spend a fortune to get your high-wire food-and-wine act together, at the holidays or any other time. There’s more wonderful wine available in Regina than ever before, something for every taste, every budget—and every recipe you attempt.
And with every issue of Fine Lifestyles Regina, we’ll be here to point you toward more of it.
Cheers!
Edward and Margaret Anne Willett drink wine, buy wine, taste wine, write about wine, conduct wine tastings, belong to three different wine clubs, and have more corkscrews than they can count.
Our readers recommend…
Leah McDonald
Terre Dei Volsci Velletri Rosso Riserva
A crackling fire, a good book and a glass of wine make Regina’s cold winter nights enjoyable. Terre Dei Volsci Velletri Rosso Riserva is an Italian blend of Cesanese, Sangiovese, Montepulciano and Merlot grapes. It has a rich, dark colour, with complex tastes and a good nose (more Merlot than anything else.) Good by itself, it also complements a roast, steaks, lasagne, or spaghetti with a rich red sauce. Regina’s new Willow Park Wines & Spirits will special-order it from Alberta.
Leah McDonald is a Regina schoolteacher and past president of the German Wine Society.
Charles Eisbrenner
Ex Nihilo Riesling
The Okanagan creates great wines! Two Okanagan Rieslings won gold medals at recent Riesling Du Monde competitions. The judges’ comments: “Beautiful colour, rich aromas and superb complexity, a Riesling of pleasure!” Even more of a pleasure: you can actually purchase one of these winners, the Ex Nihilo 2007 Riesling, here in Saskatchewan. This fall, I tasted the 2006 and 2007 vintages at the Ex Nihilo Winery. I preferred the 2006; the 2007 needs more time in the bottle.
Charles Eisbrenner is a Regina IT consultant, gourmet cook, and passionate oenophile.
Mike and Karla Sillinger have been everywhere…but Regina is home
The Spring 2010 issue of Fine Lifestyles Regina, for which I’m the editor, is just around the corner. In honour of that, here’s my cover story from the Winter issue, which featured former NHL player Mike Sillinger.
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Mike Sillinger holds the National Hockey League record for playing with the most teams—12 in all. He was traded nine times, another record.
All of which means that in 17 years as a professional hockey player, he moved around—a lot.
In fact, the list of teams he played for after being drafted from the Regina Pats by the Detroit Red Wings back in 1990 sounds like that old Geoff Mack song, “I’ve Been Everywhere.”
Mike could sing, “I’ve been to Detroit, Anaheim, Vancouver, Philadelphia, Tampa Bay, Florida, Ottawa, Columbus, Phoenix, St. Louis, Nashville, New York…I’ve been everywhere, man!”
When he retired in August, Mike could easily have moved back to any of those places—or, indeed, anywhere at all. It says something about both him and Regina that he and his family chose instead to come back here.
“We had a taste of living on the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, in the desert, the Midwest, but we never got a chance to dig our heels really good into any of those places,” says Mike’s wife, Karla, who, like Mike, was born and raised here.
“The last five years we were tossing the idea back and forth, ‘Where were we going to end up?’” But, she says, “We’d come home in the summertime and it seemed we were happiest here.
“A great place to raise a family”
“It’s a great place to grow up and a great place to raise a family,” she adds, and that’s an important consideration, since the Sillingers have three boys, Owen, 12, Lukas, nine, and Cole, six.
The boys have wanted to come back to Regina in the winter ever since the family spent Christmas here in 2004—made possible because of the NHL lockout that year. “The kids loved it,” Mike says. “They’d never seen Regina with snow. This is what they’ve asked for every year, and they have it now!”
All three boys are now enjoying their first full year at Jack MacKenzie School, and (of course) playing hockey. “Owen plays Tier 1 Pee Wee, Lukas plays Tier 1 Atom, and Cole thinks he should play both,” Mike says with a laugh.
Mike and Karla, of course, have seen plenty of snow in Regina, having both grown up in the city’s north end.
They met while Mike was playing for the Regina Pats, recording three consecutive seasons as the Pats’ top scorer. “I was thumbing through the newspaper, and was intrigued by this hockey player,” Karla says. “We met through a mutual friend, and I said, ‘This is the guy I’m going to marry.’ That’s how it happened.”
But although she might have been thinking marriage right from the beginning, Mike wasn’t. “I thought she was a beautiful girl and we got along, but that’s not what was on my mind at age 17 or 18 years old, while I was playing with the Pats,” he says. “It wasn’t until a couple of years later, when I went and played in the Detroit organization, and we had a long-distance relationship, that I think I realized I had a good girl back in Regina. The following year we got engaged.”
They were married in 1994, and even though they only made it back to Regina during the summers for the next few years, they bought their first home in the city in 1997. They’ve had one ever since.
“We lived in a home in the summer time for 10 years in Westhill, then we bought a home in Lakeridge and owned it for two years,” Mike says. Now they’re in Windsor Park. “We thought we’d try the East End. This end of town I really enjoy.”
Injuries end career
Still, it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that they’d return to Regina at the end of Mike’s career. The way his career ended influenced things.
Mike’s final team was the New York Islanders; he played the 1,000th game of his NHL Career with the Islanders against the Tampa Bay Lighting on November 1, 2007, his family joining him on the ice for a special pre-gamer ceremony. But that season was cut short by a hip injury that required surgery in February, 2008. The following season, he had further hip problems, undergoing surgery again last February and missing the rest of the season. On August 26, he announced his retirement.
It was a “difficult way” to end his career, Mike says, and helped him make up his mind to get out of New York. “While I was having my last surgery, Karla and I decided, ‘Let’s put the house up for sale’—in the worst possible market ever.” Despite the poor market, the house sold by June, and Mike and Karla headed for Regina.
Not only would Mike have felt awkward remaining in New York after the way his career ended, they’d never felt comfortable there. “New York was a big change,” he remembers. “We’ve always enjoyed living in the Midwest. Easy going, easy living, no rush, no hustle. We always envisioned ourselves living in a Columbus or Saint Louis. It reminded us of back home.”
But instead of just moving someplace that reminded them of “back home,” they actually moved back home
“Everyone thought we were crazy,” Mike admits. “But when I have buddies come to town and take them up to my place at Pasqua Lake, they’re in awe. They never envisioned a place like that so close to Regina. They just think it is beautiful.”
“It may seem glamorous to have lived in all of those places, but we can never call any of those places home,” is how Karla puts it. “It’s a comfortable feeling when you can go to the grocery store and wave at people…You take for granted the friendliness that you’re accustomed to when you come back to small city like this.
“We’ve been in some cutthroat places, where you don’t get the please and thank you…some really stressful places,” she continues. “They’re great to be in for a bit, but we have three kids involved in hockey, we’ll be involved in minor hockey for a lot of years. You take for granted here that you don’t have to travel for half an hour or an hour and take a flight to a hockey tournament.”
Mike’s new job
That’s not to say that all the travel has ended for Mike—far from it. Almost immediately upon his retirement, he took on a new job as director of player development for the Edmonton Oilers.
“I probably travel the same amount as if I were playing the game,” he says, noting he’d just come back from Sweden. “It takes up a lot of my weekends. My job is, I’m in charge of the drafted players in the organization. They range anywhere from 18 to 22, 23 years old. A lot of college kids. I have good reads on these players, and I have to mentor them, teach them how to be an ultimate pro. I’m a player who’s been there, done that, been in all different situations.
“There’s such a variety of them,” he goes on. “My main focus is the 22 or 25 players who are going to be top prospects. There’s such a small window of opportunity for these players to make it. After I was drafted I didn’t know what I was doing, good or bad. Fortunately I had lots of great teammates.
“It’s my job to be these guys’ mentor and follow them along. Our scouting staff still watches these guys, but I want to make sure they have the opportunity to make it to the National Hockey League. If you’re drafted into the organization, you’re drafted for a reason.”
Mike didn’t expect to go straight to work after retiring. “I never planned to do anything,” he says. “I was just going to kick back. When the Oilers approached me—and I retired and I had this job all within a week—I had people call me from the media, saying, ‘I thought you weren’t going to do anything!’
“And I wasn’t! I was going to hang out in Regina and coach my kids’ hockey and watch them grow. But when this opportunity presented itself, Karla and I both thought that if I was to pass it up and it was November and December, we’d be wondering what the Oilers wanted me to do.
“It almost seemed too good to be true. I wasn’t expecting to be hired that quick. But pretty much my interview the end of August was, ‘Now that you’re retired, I’m going to offer you a deal, and I need you in Edmonton next week!’”
“That’s what you wanted,” puts in Karla. “You didn’t want to find something, you wanted something to find you.”
Mike agrees.
“I was flattered to be contacted by the Oilers,” he says.” It’s a team I never played on, but here I am working for the Oilers, seven or eight hours down the road. It’s almost like it was meant to be.
“I figured I won’t know if I’m going to like it unless I try it,” he continues, and so far, “the Oilers have been nothing but first-class. I can work out of Regina, and still stay connected to the NHL. They’re very understanding that I have a family. They want me to do my job and do it correctly, but if my son has a tournament, they’ll say, ‘Go ahead, go with your boy to his tournament.’”
Family comes first
It’s important to Mike to be able to spend time with his boys, even if he isn’t coaching them as he thought he might be this winter. “It’s not about coaching minor hockey, it’s their lives I don’t want to miss!”
With three boys playing hockey, the family spends a lot of time at rinks. The boys are very “sports-oriented,” Mike says, not only playing hockey and lacrosse but enjoying watching Roughrider games and Regina Pats games. “Every time I have to go to a Pats game, they always says, ‘Can I come? Can I come?”
Mike and Carla both work out at Level 10 Fitness. They like to dine out at places like Crave, Rock Creek and the Roof Top. Mike mentions The Tap and the Press Box as two pubs he favours if he’s going off to watch football or hockey. The Keg and Earl’s rate a mention, too. But, says Mike, “We’re mostly home bodies.”
And that, ultimately, is why Mike and Karla Sillinger have chosen Regina over all the other places they could be living.
“We’re back here,” says Mike, “because home is home!”
It’s on the tip of my tongue…
How often has this happened to you?
“So I was talking to…to…oh, you know, that guy, the one in the head office, big hair, bad teeth, only listens to Perry Como records…geez, why can’t I remember his name? It’s on the tip of my tongue!”
It’s a common phenomenon, and it’s not just people’s names. Sometimes you can’t think of the name of a place, or a food, or a car, or…just about anything. You can feel that the information is in your head, but you can’t shape it into a word.
It may be a well-known phenomenon, but it isn’t well-understood. However, new research may have shed a little light on the mechanism involved.
One leading explanation for tip-of-the-tongue torment is that when we’re trying to think of a specific word, some other, similar-sounding word pops up in the brain instead and blocks our ability to access the correct one. This is called “phonological blocking,” and it was that idea that the new research was designed to test.
Interestingly, though, the researchers didn’t turn to people who speak with their tongues, but people who speak with their hands: fluent speakers of American Sign Language.
Karen Emmorey, director of the Laboratory for Language & Cognitive Neuroscience at San Diego State University, is interested in the similarities and differences between signed language and spoken language. Other of her recent research has shown, for example, that when a gesture is used for sign language, a different part of the brain is activated than when that same gestture is used for pantomime: in other words, the brain distinguishes between a gesture that has linguistic meaning and a gesture that’s just a gesture.
Emmorey knew previous research has shown that bilingual people have more tip-of-the-tongue moments than unilingual people do. The phonological-blocking explanation of this would be that those with two languages in their heads have twice as many words to get in the way of other similar-sounding words.
She reasoned that if that explanation were correct, then the general rule that bilingual people have more tip-of-the-tongue moments shouldn’t hold true for those who were bilingual in both English and sign language, because obviously half the words in one language not only don’t sound the same as the words in English, they don’t make a sound at all!
In sign language, tip-of-the-tongue moments are called tip-of-the-finger moments. Just like tip-of-the-tongues, tip-of-the-fingers occur spontaneously, often involve proper names, and frequently include partial access to the word. In speakers, this frequently means you can remember the first sound of the word but not the rest of it. In signers, that may mean they can remember the sign’s hand shape, location and orientation, but not its movement.
Unfortunately for the phonological-blocking contingent, Emmorey discovered that those bilingual in English and ASL had tip-of-the-tongue…or, in the one case, tip-of-the-finger….incidents pretty much as often as people bilingual in English and Spanish.
That would seem to indicate that phonological blocking is not the mechanism underpinning tip-of-the-tongue moments at all.
If you’re going to throw out one explanation, you need to suggest another one, and Emmorey has done so. She believes tip-of-the-tongue/tip-of-the-finger moments are due to forgetfulness, brought about by infrequency of use. In other words, the less often you use a word, the harder it is for your brain to come up with it when needed, she suspects.
That would explain why all bilinguals, whether they use two spoken languages or one spoken and one unspoken, have those moments more often: all the words they know are used less frequently than the words known by someone who only speaks one language.
It’s just a possible explanation at this point, of course. To see if it holds water, there’ll have be additional…um…
Oh, you know, starts with “r,” that thing scientists do in laboratories, involves experiments…
Research! That’s it.
Now why couldn’t I remember that?
Terra Insegura is an Aurora Award finalist!
J
ust heard this morning that Terra Insegura, my sequel to last year’s Aurora Award-winning science fiction novel Marseguro, is a finalist for this year’s Aurora Award for best science fiction or fantasy novel in English. Sounds like they had a record number of nominations, too, so that makes it even sweeter.
The other finalists are Wake, by Robert J. Sawyer, Steel Whispers by Hayden Trenholm, Druids by Barbara Galler-Smith and Josh Langston, and The Amulet of Amon-Ra by Leslie Carmichael. I know every one of these authors. It should be a great evening at KeyCon in Winnipeg in May when the winners are announced.
Voting will begin soon, once the complete shortlist has been announced. Keep on eye on the Aurora Award website.
Fred Morrison’s wonderful invention, the Frisbee
Fred Morrison died on Tuesday at the age of 90, one of those people you may never have heard of, but really should have.
Morrison invented the Frisbee.
Since millions of these and other flying discs have been sold since the 1950s, it’s perhaps a bit humbling to discover, though, that even though throwing a Frisbee well is a skill that can be acquired, nobody has pinned down all the details of the science involved.
Morrison, born in Richfield, Utah, said the inspiration for the Frisbee went back to a Thanksgiving Day picnic in 1937 when he and his girlfriend (and future wife), Lu Nay, began throwing the lid of a popcorn tin back and forth.
They soon found that a tin cake pan flew even better, and shortly after that started selling “Flyin’ Cake Pans” on the beach at Santa Monica, California, for 25 cents each.
Morrison flew P-47 Thunderbolts during the Second World War, no doubt developing a new appreciation of aerodynamics, and shortly after the War, in 1946, created his first flying disc, the Whirlo-Way. In 1948, with backing from another former pilot, Warren Franscioni, he began molding what he then called the “Flyin’ Saucer” in plastic.
In 1955 he and his wife began producing their own discs with a deeper, thicker rim, calling them “Pluto Platters.” Wham-O bought the rights in 1957, and changed the name to Frisbee (which Morrison didn’t like), the name apparently based on the pie tins from the Frisbie Pie Company that students from East Coast colleges had long been flying.
A Wham-O designer, Ed Headrick, added the flight ridges to the top of the disc in 1964, improving its stability and speed.
So…how does a Frisbee fly, exactly?
Like an airplane wing: it generates lift by creating a difference in air pressure between its top and bottom sides. The top of a Frisbee is slightly convex, and the bottom is flat. That forces the air flowing over the top of the disc to move faster than the air flowing beneath it. Faster-flowing air has a lower air pressure, and so the higher-pressure air underneath forces the disc up. This is known as Bernoulli’s principle.
But a Frisbee is also very different from an airplane wing. Its curved rim disrupts the airflow on the bottom of the disk, creating turbulence. This means the airstream at the back of the disc tends to move much more slowly than the airstream at the front, creating an imbalance in pressure…which is why Frisbees often turn over in flight.
The other big difference between a Frisbee and an airplane wing is that the Frisbee is spinning. This is why the Frisbee, when it does turn over, tends to turn onto its side, rather than flipping front to back: spinning objects, through something called gyroscopic progression, tend to show the effect of a force in a spot perpendicular to where the force is applied.
At the same time, though, spinning helps the Frisbee stay stable. A spinning object resists being tipped. This “angular momentum” is why a moving bicycle, with its spinning wheels, is stable, but a stopped bicycle is not.
Some of the subtleties of a Frisbee’s flight, such as why it can make slight turns at the end of its flight, are still not well-understood. In the past few years, researchers have put Frisbees on a motorized rod and spun them in a wind tunnel to try to learn more, and have discovered that how fast a Frisbee tips over in its flight depends on the angle of attack (you want to tip it slightly upward as you throw it) and how fast it spins relative to its airspeed. A really dedicated and mathematically minded Frisbee thrower could, using the results of this study, figure out exactly what angle the Frisbee should be thrown at to make it go as far as possible or stay in the air as long as possible.
This kind of work has more “practical” applications: space probes, for instance, are often spun to improve stability, and Frisbee studies have figured into work on their design.
But who cares? Morrison’s invention has brought more happiness to more people over the years than any number of “practical” inventions. And for that, he deserves your thanks next time you spend a sunny afternoon on the grass with a Frisbee.
Actually, he deserves your thanks twice: once for yourself, and once for your dog.
A reminder about Aurora Award nominations
The deadline for nominating works for a Prix Aurora Award is fast approaching. Today is the day when mail-in ballots must be postmarked by, and the deadline for online nominations is February 15.
The Aurora Awards, for the best Canadian works of science fiction and fantasy, are nominated and voted on by fans. Any Canadian citizen or permanent resident can nominate up to three works or individuals in a range of categories in both English and French. The five works with the most nominations go on the final ballot and are voted on by members of CanVention, the annual national SF convention. It costs nothing to nominate but there is a fee for voting on the final ballot. The mail-in and on-line nomination forms are here.
My novel Marseguro (DAW Books) won the Aurora Award for best long-form work in English last year, and its sequel, Terra Insegura, is eligible this year. You can read the first two chapters of Terra Insegura (or listen to me read them) online here.
If you consider my work worthy of a nomination this year, and you’re a Canadian citizen or permanent resident, I hope you’ll take the time to do so. But I hope you’ll also take the time to nominate others. There’s a partial list of other eligible work at the Canadian SF database.
Remember, nominating is free! And it only takes a couple of minutes.
Spray-on liquid glass
“Spray-on liquid glass” sounds like a product you’d see advertised at two o’clock in the morning in an infomercial.
It sounds even more like a 2 a.m. infomercial product when you see headlines about it that claim it is “about to revolutionize everything.”
Maybe it’d sound more impressive if I used its more formal name, which is “SiO2 ultra-thin layering,” but that’s hard to type, so I’m going to stick with “spray-on liquid glass.”
Besides, that’s exactly what it is: an extremely thin layer of glass that can be sprayed onto…well, just about anything.
Though it was invented in Turkey, the patent for spray-on liquid glass is held by the German company Nanopool.
It consists of almost pure silicon dioxide, a.k.a. silica, extracted from quartz sand. Water or ethanol is added, depending on what kind of surface is to be coated: the water-based versions are good for absorbent surfaces such as stone, wood and fabrics, while the ethanol-based versions are suitable for metal, glass, plastic and painted surfaces. There are no other additives: a bottle of liquid glass contains only water or ethanol, and molecules of silica. And not too surprisingly (since silica is the most abundant mineral in the Earth’s crust), the coating is non-toxic and environmentally harmless.
The glass binds to the surface through quantum forces that come into play at the extremely small scale of these tiny glass particles. The coating is only about 100 nanometers thick–that’s only 1/500th the width of a human hair.
An article in the June, 2009, issue of the U.K. magazine Cleanroom Technology has a pretty complete list of the coating’s benefits.
First of all, it’s flexible, meaning it can be used to coat, not just hard surfaces like countertops and sinks, but fabric, conveyor belts, medical devices such as endoscopes, and more.
It’s highly durable, able to withstand tens of thousands of cleaning cycles, and heat tolerant, unaffected by temperatures as low as -150 C and as high as 450 C. It also resists both acid and alkaline substances.
It doesn’t kill bacteria, but it also doesn’t provide them with a friendly surface to attach themselves to and multiply. Wash a coated surface with hot water, and the bacteria are wiped away more effectively than you can achieve with bleach on an uncoated surface (as tests in an Austrian cheese-packaging plant have proven).
It’s so thin that it’s invisible to the human eye and can’t be felt; while it’s slippery at the micro level, at the macro level (our level), it isn’t. In fact, since bacteria can be so easily cleaned off of it, a coated shower floor would probably be less slippery, because of the lack of bacteria-produced biofilms.
The stuff is easy to apply: even large areas such as floors, walls and windows can be coated with it in minutes, and no special equipment is needed. And finally (and even more amazingly), it’s cheap: the cost to cover a square metre ranges from about 40 cents to $1.80.
Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? Surely it must be full of little tiny glass particles that are going to get into our lungs and cause asbestos-fibre like problems?
Nope. The coating contains no discrete or potentially harmful engineered nanoparticles.
Spray-on liquid glass is already available in Germany for domestic use, for about $8.50 a bottle. In the home, it could conceivably make existing cleaning products obsolete, since hot water would do the job chemicals are doing now. It could be used in the oven, bathrooms, tiles, sinks, and on almost any other surface, and the coating is expected to last about a year with normal use.
Outside, the uses are endless. A silk shirt coated with it would shrug off a spilled glass of red wine. Stone coated with it could be more easily cleaned of graffiti. Seeds sprayed with it are protected from fungal and bacterial attacks and germinate and grow faster than untreated seeds. Wood treated with it has survived undamaged after being buried in a termite mound for nine months.
A Lancashire hospital has had “very promising” results using it as a coating for everything from equipment to medical implants, catheters, sutures and bandages.
It sounds amazing.
But it also still sounds like a 2 a.m. infomercial product.
I guess time will tell.
Fuel from germs
For years, we’ve been turning crops such as corn, wheat and sugar beets into fuel, using yeast to convert sugar into alcohol.
But there’s an obvious problem with this. That stuff we’re turning into fuel is also food for humans and feed for animals.
(And as an aside, how come we always call it “animal feed” as opposed to “animal food”? And why don’t we ever refer to “human feed”? Hmm?)
A lot of the plant is wasted when you grow crops for fuel or food. The leaves and stems, with their tough cell walls made of cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin, are more of a nuisance than anything else. Wouldn’t it be great if there were a use for what is now plowed under or burned?
There is, or there soon will be, thanks to research aimed at using bacteria to convert this “lignocellulosic biomass” into fuel in its own right.
A just-published article in Nature reveals the state of the art. Titled “Microbial production of fatty-acid-derived fuels and chemicals from plant biomass,” it describes the successful engineering of the common bacterium Excherichia coli–better known as E. coli and generally in the news when it contaminates water or meat and makes people sick–into a producer of biodiesel.
One of the co-authors of the research study is Jay Keasling, chief executive officer for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI). “We’ve got a billion tons of biomass every year that goes unused,” he says, adding that fuel produced from that biomass could make up for as much as half of U.S. oil imports, turning “the U.S. Midwest into the new ‘Mideast’.”
That’s not hyperbole: by one estimate, lignicellulosic biomass could produce more than 7,500 litres of renewable petroleum per acre.
The researchers modified the E. coli genome, inserting genetic code for the production of an enzyme called hemicellulase, which can break down hemicellulose into smaller sugar molecules which E. coli can then turn into fatty acids.
E. coli normally produces only as much of the fatty acids as it needs for its own cell membranes. But the researchers’ E. coli were further modified so that the fatty acids just kept coming, turning each bacterium into a microscopic biodiesel factory.
The process takes place in fermentation vats, into which the bacteria expel little drops of oil. Turn off the impellers, and the oil floats to the top, where it can be skimmed off.
Even better, by tweaking the process, chemical products ranging from solvents to lubricants to jet fuel could conceivably be produced.
Of course, it’s important to note that the research reported in Nature is just a proof of concept. There’s no commercially viable process for doing any of this yet–but Keasling hopes there will be within a very few years. Work will continue as the researchers search for ways to make use of even more of what’s in the feedstock–not just the hemicellulose.
There’s already a company standing ready to market fuels and other microbe-produced chemicals. Based in California, LS9, founded by a geneticist and a plant biologist, helped fund the research reported in Nature. LS9 points out that the crude oil produced by bioengineered bacteria has none of the contaminating sulfur of regular crude oil, so it’s cleaner. And despite its unorthodox origins, it can be refined like any other crude oil in a standard refinery.
There are other companies pursuing their own paths. Amyris Biotechnologies, for example, says it has also created bacteria capable of providing renewable hydrocarbon-based fuels. There are many more.
Why would this be preferable to ethanol production as it is currently carried out? Aside from the aforementioned fact that we’re presently turning food into fuel, hydrocarbon fuels are more efficient than ethanol, packing about 30 percent more energy into any given quantity. And even better, they take less energy to produce: ethanol production, which involves distilling, requires 65 percent more energy than hydrocarbon production does.
Perhaps the oil industry will slowly evolve away from the purview of drilling companies and into the realm of agriculture.
As for the marketing slogan for this new germ-produced form of fuel, I think I’ve come up with a winner: “E. coli. It’s not just for food poisoning anymore.”
What do you think?
My review of Globe Theatre’s production of Marion Bridge…
…has already shown up online, even though it won’t appear in print until tomorrow. This is the first time I’ve seen something I’ve written pop up that far ahead of the ink-on-paper version, though maybe I just haven’t noticed until now.
The review begins:
I confess that I went into the opening night performance of Marion Bridge at Globe Theatre feeling skeptical.
The premise, after all, sounds like the set-up to a joke: “A nun, an actress and a soap-opera addict walk into a kitchen …”
Not only that, the fact the three are sisters home together — in Cape Breton, no less — for the first time in years because their mother is dying made me fear I faced a turgid evening of stereotypical CanLit dysfunctional-family angst.
But thanks to Daniel MacIvor’s sharp writing, unexpected story twists, and above all top-notch performances, Marion Bridge won me over.
Social contagions
Parents (I don’t think I’m giving away any parental secrets here) worry about peer pressure–not least because parents remember how much their behavior was influenced by peers when they were young.
The fact is, we’re all influenced by the people around us…and we often think of that influence as a bad thing.
As the Bible puts it, “Evil companions corrupt good morals.” And other kinds of companions can have other effects.
For instance, an analysis of 12,067 people that appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2007 revealed that you are more likely to be obese if your best friend is obese. (Overstuffed siblings or spouses also makes a difference, but the greatest negative effect comes from fat friends.)
To a certain extent, it seems, obesity is a kind of societal disease, rather like the mysterious fainting disorders Victorian women seemed to be heir to, or the bizarre disorder koro, which in South China convinces men that their genitals are shrinking inward and they will die once they disappear.
Which they don’t, of course, but the affliction is real even if the symptoms are imagined.
High anxiety, depression, anorexia and bulimia are also contagious, and if you believe all these things are being foisted upon us by a secret government agency, perhaps you have fallen prey to another contagious state of mind, paranoia.
But not all social contagions are bad.
Back around Christmas of 2008 I wrote a column on the discovery that happiness is contagious, spreading rather like influenza. It seemed a particularly fitting column for the holiday season…and the newest research along those lines seems particularly fitting for a post-holiday column, because now comes word that self-control is also contagious.
At the University of Georgia, psychology professor Michelle vanDellen and colleagues were able to measure the effect in the laboratory, through a variety of studies over two years.
In one, they randomly assigned 36 volunteers to think about a friend with either good or bad self-control. They found that those thinking about a friend with good self-control squeezed a handgrip (a standard method of measuring self-control, since you have to force yourself to keep squeezing it as your hand gets more and more tired) longer than those who were asked to think about a friend who had poor self-control.
In a second test, 71 volunteers were again randomly assigned to either watch other people exert self-control by choosing to eat a carrot rather than a cookie when presented with both options, or fail to exert self-control by eating a cookie rather than a carrot. The mere act of watching those acts of good and bad self-control altered the volunteers’ performances on a later test of self-control.
In a third experiment, 42 volunteers were randomly assigned to list friends with both good and bad self-control. Then, as they were working their way through a computerized test designed to measure self-restraint, the computer would flash, for just 10 milliseconds–too fast to be read, but enough to bring the names to mind–the names of those friends. Volunteers who were flashed the name of a self-disciplined friend did better on the test than those who were flashed the name of a non-self-disciplined friend.
VanDellen believes that the influence is great enough that hanging around with friends who exhibit self-control could help us keep from eating an extra high-calorie snack at a party, or drive us to go to the gym for a workout at the end of a hard day at work. It’s only a nudge, but sometimes a nudge is all that’s needed.
And just why are we so susceptible to peer pressure?
Because we’re primates, and, as science writer Meredith F. Small puts it, “A primate’s day is all about everyone else.”
Chimpanzees and other primates spend all their time touching each other, keeping track of each other, and building interpersonal relationships…and in a very real sense, so do we. We are constantly influenced by those around us…and influence them, in turn.
Rather alarming, if you ask me. I think I’ll just sit in my office from now on and not talk to anyone.
I wouldn’t want to catch anything.
Edward Willett is a Subscribe to my weekly science column
Terra Insegura
Finalist for the 2010 Prix Aurora Award for Best Novel in English
Marseguro, a water world far from Earth, is home to a colony of humans and the Selkies, a water-dwelling race created from modified human DNA. For seventy years the colony has lived in peace. Then Earth discovers Marseguro, and a strike force is sent to eradicate this “abomination.” But Marseguro has created a genetically tailored plague to use against Earth’s Holy Warriors. With the enemy defeated, the people of Marseguro feel they are safe. But Chris Keating, the traitor who signaled Marseguro’s location to the Holy Warriors, has fled to Earth, unknowingly carrying the deadly plague within him. The people of Marseguro feel they must send a ship to Earth with a life-saving vaccine. Only time will tell what awaits them when they reach their destination.
Marseguro
Winner of the 2009 Prix Aurora Award for Best Long-Form Work in English
Water world Marseguro is home to the Selkies, a water-dwelling race created from human DNA. When an unmodified human seeks revenge on a Selkie by activating a distress beacon taken from the remains of the original colony ship, a strikeforce is sent from Earth to eradicate the genetic abomination. Yet Marseguro will not prove as easy to conquer as the Earth force anticipates…
Lost in Translation
Kathryn was a human empath whose world and life had been destroyed when the alien S’sinn slaughtered her parents before her very eyes. Jarrikk was a young S’sinn, an unproven warrior who’d seen his flight mates slaughtered by the humans who’d sought to colonize his world.
As humans and S’sinn found themselves on the brink of war, these two Translators had to work together to find a common ground and avert catastrophe. But whether their Translators’ oath and training could overcome the enemies leagued against them was very much in doubt…
Archives
Historic Walks of Regina and Moose Jaw
Ten walks to points of historic and architectural interest in the cities of Regina and Moose Jaw (eight walks for Regina, two for Moose Jaw).
Disease-Hunting Scientist
The true stories of six real disease hunters. Epidemiologists travel the world trying to keep us safe from deadly diseases—from high-tech labs in Canada to remote villages in Africa. Learn how these “disease detectives” are coming up with new ways to fight disease, and find out if you have what it takes to become an epidemiologist, too!
The Bounty Mutiny
The Bounty was a British ship visiting Tahiti in 1789 when some of the crew overthrew the captain, William Bligh, and set him adrift in a tiny boat with sailors loyal to him. The mutiny resulted in a number of trials–both of the men who mutinied and of Bligh for losing command of his ship. These fascinating events have been the source for numerous Hollywood movies, most recently The Bounty. The Bounty Mutiny: From the Court Case to the Movie explores the famous case and the movies it inspired.
