The Art of Science: Ghost Food

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Is “Ghost Food” the food of the future? Climate change threatens our continued ability to harvest many of the foods we take for granted now. So will we simply say goodbye to the tastes of today, or find ways to replicate them with technology? An innovative art project takes a look at one possibility.

GhostFood, created by Miriam Simun and Miriam Songster of STEAMworkPHILLY, along with the Monell Center and NextFab Studio, is a participatory installation based on the concept of a food truck. The GhostFood truck, which debuted in Philadelphia this month and then traveled to New York City and Newark, NJ, serves substitutes for chocolate, peanut butter and cod, three foods at risk from climate change.

The “ghost foods”, made of climate-change resilient ingredients (including algae and vegetable protein), are meant to look like the real thing. But the flavor is delivered via a mask with a fragrance bulb which delivers the scent of the real food as you eat the substitute. The combination is not supposed to exactly replicate the experience of eating the original food, but give participants a sense of what that experience might be like in the future, when the “real” food is just a memory.

It sounds a little sad, but who knows? It might work. Lots of people who have given up meat prefer tofurky to plain tofu, so why not fish-scented algae instead of plain? In any case, it’s an interesting experiment that combines practical responses to climate change with leaps of artistic imagination.

More information about the project is here.

Phillip Island

Everything about this post is very small: it’s very short because I only have a few minutes, and it’s about little penguins. That’s what they’re called: Little Penguins.

Little penguins live along the coast of New Zealand and the south of Australia, and are, as advertised, not very big. They’re about the size of a chicken or duck, if not smaller.

I’ve seen them both at Melbourne Zoo and at Phillip Island, an island close to Melbourne. At Phillip Island, you can even watch the penguins on their “penguin parade“, when they return to the island at night. You’re not allowed to photograph them, so it’s hard to find pictures of it online, but someone uploaded an old video to YouTube:

Adorableness starts about a minute in, and then gets increasingly cuter as the penguins get closer.

$cientists on Money

Jacob Bourjaily, a theoretical physicist, has collected a variety of banknotes from around the world that feature scientists, mathematicians, philosophers, etc. in the notes artwork. For me, it underscores the diverse locations that take pride in these individuals that have contributed so much to scientific progress (and their diverse backgrounds). It is also amusing to have such individuals on denominations that are best expressed in scientific notation (eg, Tesla on a 1010 Yugoslavian Dinar note, pictured).

In another way, the notes highlight the lack of diversity in our society’s perception of who great scientists are. While there are five notes honoring scientific concepts or technological feats, there are only three non-European scientists featured, and only one woman (Marie Curie).

I do not blame Jacob Bourjaily for the imbalance. First, it is unreasonable to expect the collection to be exhaustive or to not focus on the cultures most proximate to one’s own. Second, scientific research has been structured (ie, women forced to work for free without their own labs or titles) so that the credit for the work of clever women has invariable been handed to men. Remember when they did not really want to give Marie Curie the Nobel prize because of lady-bits?

Putting a more diverse representation of scientists on the money seems like a great way to promote science education, as well as present role models. I’ve got Andrew Jackson on a $20 in my wallet. I think we can safely say that no one with any sense wants any of our kids to grow up to be like genocidal Old Hickory. With that in mind, who would you like to see on our cash?

*Hat tip to Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution.

Food Sustainability – Science for The People

Science for The People, Episode #235: Food SustainabilityFood sustainability is a hot topic. Food everything is a hot topic. The most recent episode (#235) of Science for The People (née Skeptically Speaking) is exceptionally good* on this topic. Host Desiree Schell and guests Valentine Cadieux and Emily Cassidy cover standard topics of food sustainability, but address controversial areas like GMOs and “eating local” with nuance that gets beyond simplistic arguments over whether GMOs are safe or if “eating local” is environmentally friendly.

They also raise the issue of honoring food cultures as an important element of pragmatic discussions about feeding the ever growing human population. A potential result of our desire to provide adequate calories and nutrition to impoverished areas of the globe is the destruction of traditional food cultures in poor societies, while promoting those of rich societies – a kind of benign, cultural imperialism. Continue reading “Food Sustainability – Science for The People”

Sunday Science Poem: Believing is Seeing

Wallace Stevens’ “What We See Is What We Think” (1949)

640px-Garden_sundial_MN_2007How much of what we see depends on what we think?

In one sense, everything; seeing is not a passive process, but a sophisticated act executed by our neural circuits. In another sense, seeing is what we choose to see, as Harvard psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons demonstrated with their famous video of the gorilla walking across the basketball court.

But does the relationship between thinking and seeing go deeper than the involuntary side effects of our selective attention? Thomas Kuhn argued that it did, in his notorious chapter X from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (the chapter philosophers refer to, in a classic example of academia’s demented sense of humor, as the ‘X-rated chapter X’): Continue reading “Sunday Science Poem: Believing is Seeing”