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The Red Hot Poker John Mahoney
There’s an inescapable showmanship inherent in pouring liquid nitrogen into a champagne flute while a cloud of vapor billows from the -321°F fluid and puffs across the bar. But the show isn’t the point at Booker & Dax, a brand-new New York cocktail bar in the back of David Chang’s much-loved Momofuku Ssäm Bar, where supercold nitrogen, a laboratory centrifuge, and the like are used primarily to make drinks more delicious, and secondarily to create and serve them more efficiently. Only as an occasional side effect does a swell of fog or ceiling-high gout of flame provide entertainment to a customer.
Gin and Juice
Take the Gin and Juice. At one million bars around the world, you can have a bartender combine grapefruit juice, gin, and a splash of soda over ice, using basically the same technique that’s worked ever since humans first mixed one liquid with another. Booker & Dax, though, under the drinksmanship of friend-of-PopSci Dave Arnold, takes a more streamlined approach. Freshly squeezed grapefruit juice is clarified, using pectinase enzyme and a pair of chemical clearing agents borrowed from the wine industry, chitosan and kieselsol, in conjunction with a fast ride in the bar’s centrifuge. The opaque solids fall to the bottom, and the result is a pale liquid as clear as white wine.
Behind the scenes, the staff (or yours truly if they need an extra hand) mixes the juice with gin, sugar, and a precise weight of crushed ice or plain water, to bring it to the precise desired alcoholic strength and chilly temperature. The complete beverage is then bottled in liter bottles, carbonated at the bar’s CO2 hose, and kept chilled until it’s served.
When you sit at the bar and order a Gin & Juice, the bartender sets a champagne flute on the bar and swirls a splash of liquid nitrogen into it, bringing the glass down to delicious subzero temperatures amid the aforementioned dramatic puff of vapor. Then, with the nitro boiled off, the ice-cold carbonated cocktail is poured from the liter bottle into the glass and graciously served.
The Red-Hot Poker
Back in 1700 or thereabouts, if you wanted a hot drink, you asked your tavernkeeper to mix it up in a mug and then thrust a red-hot poker into it. The method lacked a bit of subtlety, though, and between that and the fact that modern bars rarely have blazing fires with iron pokers in them, that method of heating drinks has fallen out of fashion. Which is a shame, Dave Arnold points out, because it did more for the drink than merely making it warm — it caramelizes sugars and ignites alcohol vapors, changing the flavor of a beverage significantly. Your winter hot toddy gets its warmth from boiling water, which does the basic job, but has no flavor-enhancing effects.
So Dave has brought back the poker. His is made from a high-temperature industrial heating rod, which is cranked up to some 1500°F with electrical resistance. It sits in a handy holster behind the bar, and then, when a customer at Booker & Dax orders a hot drink, the bartender grabs the poker’s handle and plunges it into a glass of liquor. The result: instant boiling, flames flaring from the surface of the alcohol, and a caramely odor filling the air. Then the piping-hot drink is served, transformed by ages-old technology made new.
This video shows the Fire-Breathing Dragon, a concoction of centrifuge-clarified orange juice, tea, and rum, invented by Dave in honor of the lunar new year.
Booker & Dax is in the old Milk Bar location at the back of Momofuku Ssäm Bar, at 207 Second Avenue in Manhattan.
Video edited by Nate DeYoung
A new study, led by Dr. Klaus Reinhardt at the University of Sheffield, shows that females of some species can prolong the lifespan of ordinarily short-lived sperm cells by days, months, or even decades, waiting for the optimal time to use it. The study could have some big implications for the general study of aging, as well.
Here’s the deal: sperm cells are very short-lived, typically. They have a very high metabolic rate compared to other cells, but the reasons why sperm cells deteriorate so quickly is still not well-understood. It was assumed that part of the problem is that sperm cells produce a comparatively high amount of free radicals, which are damaging to the cells.
The study used a technique called fluorescence-lifetime measurement, more often used in oncology, to examine the sperm cells held in the body of female crickets. They compared the metabolic rate and production of free radicals in the female crickets to sperm stored elsewhere, and found that the females were somehow able to alter both of those attributes–the metabolic rate within the females was a whopping 37 percent lower than the other sperm.
That process allows many species of females to store sperm cells for a very long time. It’s not just insects; birds, fish, and reptiles are also shown to have the same ability to delay aging in the sperm cells. The most impressive creature is an insect, though–queen ants can keep these cells alive for an insane 30 years.
There are some interesting implications coming from this research. It definitely aligns with the theory that free radicals are a key element to the aging of cells, but it also explains why fertility tests on sperm are so unreliable. Without a female to slow down their rate of death, sperm cells could easily perish during the test.
Moon Man This 1962 photo shows inventor Allyn Hazard’s moon suit mockup, which carried its own food and oxygen. Fritz Goro/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Life put together a gallery of the photographs of Fritz Goro, a German-born photographer for Life as well as Scientific American. Goro died in 1986, but was once called “the most influential photographer that science journalism (and science in general) has ever known.” The photos are pretty amazing, for their subject matter and for their pure aesthetics. Check out the gallery over at Life.
Hydroponic Plant Bed Julie Beck
Growing kale and tilapia–and brewing beer–in an abandoned stretch of Chicago
Recently I had the opportunity to visit The Plant, Chicago’s first vertical farm. This claim depends on your definition of vertical farm, of course, because The Plant isn’t the sort of futuristic vegetation-filled skyscraper you might expect, and it isn’t solely agricultural. While food will be grown there, the space will also house small food-related businesses, breweries and bakeries and the like, so it might be more accurate to classify it as a “food business incubator.” Whatever you call it, The Plant is definitely an example of innovative green food production, with the ambitious goal of being net-zero energy and net-zero waste by 2015.
An anaerobic digester, the giant, mechanical version of your hippie neighbor’s backyard compost pile, will consume all of the building’s waste, as well as waste from nearby food manufacturers, and combine the materials’ carbon with hydrogen to form methane which can then be burned as a gas to power The Plant’s projects.
Click here for a closer look at the inside of The Plant.
I went to an event at The Plant put on by a group called the “Young Aggies.” It was the sort of night that consisted mainly of standing around drinking cheap Mexican beer, eating beans and watching a documentary about colony collapse disorder, which, due to my irrational fear of bees, left me in a state of heightened anxiety for the duration of the film.
But before I watched people reenact my worst nightmares on-screen–a man brushing bees off a honeycomb with his mustache, for example–we got a tour of The Plant itself from one of the regular volunteers (The Plant’s founder, John Edel, was not present). It’s housed in an old meatpacking plant in Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood, so named because it’s snuggled right up next to the old stockyards, in a creepy part of town that caused my roommate to posit that this would be a good place to lure young people with the promise of an urban agricultural event and then murder them.
A small staff of three employees and a team of volunteers have undertaken the daunting task of gutting the building and preparing it for its eventual net-zero glory. The input and output loops will all be closed, we’re told, which means byproducts that would otherwise be wasted will instead be funneled into one of the building’s many other processes.
We wandered on our tour from room to half-finished room, through sliding metal doors and past partly-demolished brick walls that look like Montresor from “The Cask of Amontillado” just gave up halfway. Not all the ghosts of the building’s former purpose had been exorcised just yet–there were still tracks on the ceiling that used to carry dangling carcasses, empty shells of smokehouses and ammonia chilling tubes in a room our tour guide informed us used to be a refrigeration space. Without any heat, in the dead of Chicago winter, it still felt like one.
The empty concrete shells we passed through are some of the cheapest industrial space in the city. One of them will eventually be home to the New Chicago Beer Company. Boiled grains from beer production only lose 20 percent of their nutrients, so The Plant will reuse them in a variety of ways, notably feeding them into the anaerobic digester. On Jan. 19, The Plant announced that they had signed a contract with the Eisenmann Corporation to produce the anaerobic digester, which should be ready by summer 2013.
The real action on this tour was in the basement, where we got to see some of the much-discussed closed input and output loops in action. There was a hydroponics bed filled with leafy greens hooked up to tanks of tilapia referred to by our tour guide as “love nests.” The nutrients in the tilapia’s waste water get filtered out by the plants, and the fresh, clean water is sent back up to the fish. Compared to the rest of the building, the room was downright toasty (warmed by just one heating coil, we were told) and the glowing purple lights and tanks teeming with fish gave a small glimpse into what The Plant will be capable of once the rest of the building is finished in 2015.
D-Dalus Graham Murdoch
Last year, the Austrian engineering firm IAT21 set out to construct a flying machine that floated like a hummingbird, traveled as fast as a jet, was as quiet as a hot-air balloon, and was simple enough that a car mechanic could repair it. The company’s working prototype, called D-Dalus, is roughly five feet by three feet square and can lift about 100 pounds. But the size and lift are not what’s most impressive. A flying machine with no airfoil, rotor or jet propulsion can travel where most cannot: in very tight spaces and through terrible weather.
ROTOR ASSEMBLIES
The craft’s four rotors spin at 2,200 rpm, and six blades attached to carbon-fiber disks create directional thrust. The blades act as mini airfoils, their angle of attack constantly shifting in relation to rotation. For vertical lift, a blade’s leading edge rises away from the center of the disk at the top of its rotation and toward the center of the disk at the bottom [pictured], creating a pressure differential.
FRICTIONLESS BEARINGS
Existing bearings were unable to withstand 1,000 Gs of force between the carbon-fiber disks and their blades and still deliver some degree of maneuverability. Engineers at IAT21 developed their own bearings, shaped like metal barrels, that hold up to the force better than spheres (think: arches) but can still roll enough for the blades to move.
AUTOMATIC STABILIZATION
Servo motors communicate with the rotor assemblies to automatically correct the craft’s speed, position and balance by adjusting the blades’ angle. If the pilot jerks the radio controls too hard in one direction, the craft will keep itself from pitching or yawing by increasing opposing thrust. The system can adjust for turbulence and heavy winds, too.
ADVANCED NAVIGATION
Radar, GPS and three multispectral cameras (visible, EHF-extremely high frequency- and infrared) act as the D-Dalus’s eyes. Visual information is fed into the craft’s collision-avoidance algorithm. The system is so sensitive that D-Dalus can fly within inches of power lines, hover above moving platforms (a ship’s deck in rough seas, for example), or refuel another D-Dalus in flight.
Hell-Monkey We love all living creatures here at PopSci, but that doesn’t stop us from getting a little creeped out at the, you know, nightmarish appearance of this rare Burmese snub-nosed monkey. It’s the first time the species has ever been photographed live; the only other time it’s been professionally photographed is after it was killed (and just before it was eaten (warning: graphic image)). Read more at National Geographic. FFI/BANCA/PRCF
This week’s image roundup is a particularly good one: the best “blue marble” picture we’ve ever seen, a video of the aurora resulting from the biggest solar storm in seven years, a foldable car, a stunning green-energy art installation, blah, blah, blah. All great. But what we really want to talk about is that ultra-creepy snub-nosed monkey, or, as we’ve christened it, the Hell-Monkey of Doom. Feel free to describe in detail exactly how much this picture (and a Google image search for the snub-nosed monkey) gave you the shivers.
Click to launch our guide to the upcoming year in science.
You can now watch Chris Paine’s sequel documentary to ‘Who Killed The Electric Car?’ for free!
A clever maker has crafted a gorgeous phoneograph, but it’s build for iPhones or iPads. Best of all, you can build it yourself!
A clever design idea takes old TVs and computer monitors and turns the outer shell into public waste bins to clean up neighborhoods.
 You know “that guy,” the one who still goes to work and sees friends even when he’s sick? Anna Post of the Emily Post Institute has some tips for him. Find out the “do’s” and “don’t” of being sick.
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