Advertisement

If you have an ACS member number, please enter it here so we can link this account to your membership. (optional)

ACS values your privacy. By submitting your information, you are gaining access to C&EN and subscribing to our weekly newsletter. We use the information you provide to make your reading experience better, and we will never sell your data to third party members.

ENJOY UNLIMITED ACCES TO C&EN

Environment

I ♥ Newscripts

by Bibiana Campos Seijo
March 9, 2015 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 93, Issue 10

Yes, I love it! For those of you who are not familiar with Newscripts, it is a one-page article right before the back cover. Its remit is to highlight what I’d describe as “quirky” science, and team members volunteer to write it. I like it because it is fun, informal, and it shows the humorous side of chemistry and science in general.

I’ve been going through some of the most recent issues as well as the archives of the magazine, and we have had really interesting stories covered there. If you, like me, are interested in food, for example, you’ll be glad to hear, courtesy of Newscripts, that scientists have recently been able to “unboil an egg” (C&EN, Feb. 23, page 56). Indeed, a team at the University of California, Irvine, showed that they could untangle the proteins that bind a hard-boiled egg using a mechanical technique that physically pulls the proteins apart. Although the technique was able to return the egg white to its original liquid state, you probably wouldn’t want to eat it, as the fluid used to dilute the protein mass adds a bad aftertaste.

But if you crave an unboiled egg, you might want some fries with that. In the same column, Newscripts suggests you can make them healthier by frying the potatoes in molten glucose instead of oil. After unsuccessfully working on ways to make fried snacks healthier by reducing the amount of oil used, chemical engineer and food scientist Keshavan Niranjan at the University of Reading, in England, decided to exchange the oil for another liquid. His search for an appropriate liquid that is hot enough to fry a potato led him to glucose, as it melts around 140 °C and can easily get up to the average oil frying temperature of 185 °C.

And what would make the perfect liquid accompaniment to your unboiled egg and sugary fries? Look no further: Newscripts offers you some options.

If you can spare the time to wait for a miracle, then converting water into wine as Jesus did in the Bible is an option you may want to explore (C&EN, Jan. 26, page 96). A trio of physicists at the University of Leicester, in England, got to wondering if such an act was chemically and physically possible. Assuming that pure water was turned into a basic form of wine (water mixed with ethanol, at a 12% alcohol level, leaving out all the other goodness in wine such as vitamins, minerals, flavonoids, etc.) and that Jesus was able to provide the perfect catalyst for the reaction to make the activation energy negligible, the team did the calculations and concluded it must have been a miracle. They found that “the change in enthalpy at standard temperature and pressure across the reaction would be 1,255 kJ per mol, hence the reaction would be endothermic and not occur spontaneously. However, the entropy change would be 4.21 kJ/mol K, with the increase indicating that the reaction is still physically possible.” The researchers then calculated the extra energy required for turning water into wine and found that Jesus would have had to input more than 250,000 kJ—roughly half the amount of energy in a lightning bolt—into the system for it to work.

If you prefer a nonalcoholic beverage, then Newscripts suggests Ribena, a popular black-currant-flavored drink. But if you are health conscious, you may want to supplement it with some vitamin C. Newscripts tells us how two New Zealand girls aged 14 tested the advertising statements—that the black currants in Ribena have four times the vitamin C of oranges (C&EN, April 16, 2007, page 72). The girls found Ribena had almost no trace of ascorbic acid, even after they conducted their experiment 10 times. The girls’ experiment had legs: Three years later, New Zealand's Commerce Commission sued GlaxoSmithKline, the product's manufacturer, which was fined more than $163,000 for breaching the country's Fair Trading Act.

Interesting, fun stuff. If you haven’t already, I do recommend you make Newscripts one of your regular reads.

Views expressed on this page are those of the author and not necessarily those of ACS.

Article:

This article has been sent to the following recipient:

0 /1 FREE ARTICLES LEFT THIS MONTH Remaining
Chemistry matters. Join us to get the news you need.