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Environment
Chemosphere, Nutraffin Wins, Elephant News
by Stephen K. Ritter
August 22, 2005
| A version of this story appeared in
Volume 83, Issue 34
The Internet yielded additional insight: Chemosphere is an international environmental science journal published by Elsevier, and Chemosphere apparently is the name of a rock-and-roll band.
What started this word chase was a newspaper article about the "Chemosphere House." The sleek-looking octagonal structure, built in 1960, resembles a flying saucer on a stick. It has become a landmark sitting on a rugged hillside in Hollywood and has been featured in countless movies and television shows.
John Lautner, a protégé of Frank Lloyd Wright's, designed Chemosphere House. Lautner is considered one of the important contemporary U.S. architects of the 20th century, and the house is hailed as a masterpiece of "California Modernism." Despite its history, the house had fallen into disrepair, and the newspaper article goes on about how it was recently renovated. But nowhere is it said how it got the name Chemosphere, although the fact that it was designed and built for an aerospace engineer is telling.
The winner of this year's product development competition sponsored by NASA's Food Technology Commercial Space Center in Ames, Iowa, is the Nutraffin. That's a bite-sized muffin made from carrots, soy milk, peanut and wheat flours, sugar, and spices. It's deemed to be perfect for space travel.
Nutraffin was created by a team of students at Oklahoma State University. The muffin has high calorie content for energy, and also is high in fiber, protein, and vitamins and minerals that astronauts need, as if we all didn't. The students earned a trip to the Institute of Food Technologists' annual meeting and food expo, held in July in New Orleans, and an audience with NASA scientists at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
For the competition, student teams are challenged to design a food product or processing system for long-term space missions. The products have to be based on crops that could be grown in space, are easily prepared, are nutritious, have few crumbs, and taste good. The students seem to learn a lot about food product development, marketing, and working as part of a team.
Nutraffin joins 2004 winner Veg@eez, a three-layer spread created by Pennsylvania State University students and made from spinach, tomatoes, carrots, potatoes, radishes, and other vegetables mixed with spices and olive oil. Veg@eez is described as a "delicious and nutritious snack."
It's likely not often that chemists publish their research in the Journal of the Elephant Managers Association, but chemistry professor Thomas E. Goodwin of Hendrix College, Conway, Ark., has. While corresponding on another topic, Goodwin intimated that he has been working on a side project on chemical communication among elephants to aid in conservation of pachyderms in the wild.
"Fascinating stuff, albeit a bit off the beaten path of my traditional organic chemistry research background," Goodwin says.
Goodwin has a National Science Foundation grant to collaborate with an animal behaviorist and a biochemist on the elephant project. The gist of the research is to identify pheromones produced by female African elephants and determine how male elephants detect and respond to the pheromones during the critical time of the females' estrous cycle when they are best able to become pregnant. The research results also have been published in mainstream chemistry journals, such as the Journal of Natural Products, Goodwin adds.
This week's column was written by
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