Author Archives: beatriceco

From bench to bread: how science can enhance your hobbies

When Chantle Swichkow hops on a Zoom call, it’s unclear whether she’s logging in from the laboratory or her home. She is in her kitchen, but there are clear markings of a scientist at work. A microscope is on the counter to her left, atop a stack of thick textbooks. A large whiteboard dominates the background, documenting more than a dozen fermentation projects alongside their status and potential next steps. “I also have a whole little set-up over here with some sauces and some vinegars,” she says, motioning off camera. Her at-home experiments run the gamut of fermentation consumables. She bakes bread, crafts kombucha and concocts kimchi. She has also dabbled in making miso from a type of tortilla chip, and in creating her own peach rings from fermented fruits.Like many people, Swichkow’s passion for home-based fermentation experiments started during the lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, she was doing her PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), studying the genetics of metabolic diseases in mice.“I was so used to getting up every day and going and doing experiments in the lab. When the world shut down, it was like, I don’t know what to do with myself,” says Swichkow, who describes herself as a fermented-food scientist in her profile on the networking site LinkedIn. “I ended up throwing all of my experimental angst into a sourdough starter that my husband had given me,” she says.She became so intrigued by the genetic variation in yeast that her postdoctoral studies at UCLA, which ended last December, focused on the genetic architecture of yeast–bacteria interactions in fermented environments. She would conduct research in the lab, but also use her expertise — and sometimes the yeast — to conduct her own experiments at home as part of a hobby that continued beyond the lockdowns.“One of my favourite projects now is my own personal sourdough starter that I call the Frankenstarter,” she says. “I brought a handful or so of different sourdoughs that I collected, some from a bakery, some from industrial contexts, into my postdoc lab, but I had some left over, and I ended up just combining them all together.” (Swichkow notes that she wouldn’t usually eat the experiments that come out of the lab.)Chantelle Swichkow has experimented with making miso with Takis, a type of tortilla chip.Credit: Chantle SwichkowBringing work home is not always about making delicious food, nor is it possible for all scientific disciplines. Virologists can’t bring their specimens back in their briefcases, and chemists can’t play around with hazardous chemicals at home. But for scientists in certain fields, there are ways for scientific knowledge to influence — and enhance — hobbies.Carrying over to the kitchenIn labs, researchers follow the scientific method: questioning the world, making hypotheses and testing them accordingly. Swichkow applies a similar framework in the kitchen.“It’s about knowing what the question is,” she explains. “Sometimes it’s ‘can I make vinegar from this leftover bottle of wine?’ and if I do, ‘what will it taste like?’”Yvonne Henskens, a biochemist who specializes in haemostasis at Maastricht University Medical Center in the Netherlands, also sees overlap between her lab work and at-home cooking projects. She follows project-management processes with her home ‘experiments’ producing sourdough, cheese and yogurt. Her lab focus is on developing blood tests. But she says that the project-management process is identical. “So I say, on this day I have to do this. On this day, I have to do that. And then I have a checklist.”These lab and home checklists can resemble each other, because both processes involve exploration, documentation and testing. In the first step, she brainstorms new reagents (or ingredients, if she’s cooking), followed by a literature review. In the lab that means researching the history of the tests or the reagents, and in the kitchen it means reading recipes. Then she tests the variables, such as time or temperature. Finally, it’s presentation time, either in the clinic or at the dinner table.Swichkow describes a similar process. “I label things in the same way I would label cultures in the lab,” she explains. “I even got myself a whole set of laboratory tape and pens because I really just like that process,” she says. “I keep meticulous notes because, for me, it’s about reproducibility.”But flexibility is also key. According to Henskens, a protocol is important but, in some circumstances, it can be amended. “I want people to understand what they are doing, follow the protocol, but also divert if it’s needed,” she says. In certain situations, such as encountering a strange result, the lab technician might decide to run an extra control, to calibrate an instrument or to use extra reagents, she adds.“It’s the same with recipes,” she says. “You really have to taste and then have the capability of changing it.” Take lemon juice or red peppers, which will never taste the same each time. “Knowledge of ingredients and their variation, their properties in different cooking techniques makes it possible to deviate from recipes.”An alternative outlet for scienceJacob Brejcha also credits his cooking skills to science. Transitioning from a bachelor’s degree in chemistry to a master’s in chemical engineering in 2021 meant the time he spent in the lab shrunk. But he channelled his passion for hands-on experimentation into cooking, finding an outlet for skills such as patience and precision, which he’d honed as an undergraduate at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.“A lot of those reactions take a long time, so if you mess something up, you’re probably not going to finish your lab work,” says Brejcha, who now works as a licensing associate at Purdue Research Foundation, a non-profit institute that promotes entrepreneurship and helps researchers to secure patents. “Sometimes these baking projects take multiple hours, so it’s important to really be a stickler for getting the measurements right.” Other aspects of the scientific method also creep into his cooking — isolating variables and taking stock of what went wrong to improve the next meal.A scientific background doesn’t just enhance hobbies in the home — gardens are also a place in which expertise can shine. Conservation biologist Shaun McCoshum at engineering and surveying firm Westwood Professional Services in Odessa, Texas, has been applying a conservation-science approach to gardening.“Conservation is trying to rebalance nature and let things be messy in a way to support wildlife and help these natural systems continue, and clean up the messes that we’ve made, either from invasive species, pollution or overall habitat destruction,” he explains.In his garden, he tries to find ways for native species, such as toads, to thrive. And like Brejcha, he uses the scientific method. “I’ve got gradients of sandy soils in different pockets, but they all have the same Sun exposure, and they all have the same kind of vegetation cover,” he explains. “I’m trying to control as many variables as possible to see which soils are going to support which species.”Shaun McCoshum collected and weighed monarch butterflies before releasing them as part of his at-home scientific approach to gardening.Credit: Shaun McCoshumScientific knowledge and skills can also enhance other hobbies that take place outside the home. Rosalie Phillips, a mechanical engineer at medical-equipment company Agiliti in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, spends most of her days prototyping health tools, a role that requires both a computer and physical engineering work. But over the past few years, she has been leaning into hands-on projects outside work, exploring the world of glass neon. It’s meant to be a creative outlet, but she is applying what she’s learnt throughout her education and career.“One of the biggest things that I take from my day-to-day is the practical spatial understanding,” she explains. The complex glass tubing that holds the neon in place often needs to be delicately and deliberately shaped. “You can rarely bend them in precise order,” says Phillips. “You have to plan five steps ahead to make sure that nothing conflicts with itself.”Similarly, she says, engineers learn to be meticulous with their projects because if they mess something up, they have to spend several hours getting back to the point at which they can try again. “The desire to make sure you’re measuring everything and setting everything up so that when you do it, you’re setting yourself up for success, is definitely learned from mechanical engineering,” she says.

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Scientists’ warning after making disturbing discovery at the deepest point of the Mediterranean Sea

Scientists have issued a dark warning after making a disturbing discovery in the depths of the ocean.An international team of researchers headed down to the deepest point of the Mediterranean Sea, known as the Calypso Deep, around 3.2 miles below the surface.As shared by the University of Barcelona, a whopping 167 objects were found at the bottom of the Calypso Deep, mainly made up of plastics, glass, metal and paper.Published in the Marine Pollution Bulletin, the findings make up one of the highest concentrations of marine litter ever detected at such great depths.The scientists used the Limiting Factor, a high-tech manned submarine, to reach the bottom and to take images that prove litter can reach even the deepest and most remote points of the Mediterranean, making for a stark wake up call over the environment.A ‘litter hotspot’ over the floor of the Calypso Deep (Marine Pollution Bulletin)According to the report, 148 of the items are marine debris while the rest is thought to be of human origin.“We have also found evidence of the boats’ dumping of bags full of rubbish, as revealed by the pile-up of different types of waste followed by an almost rectilinear furrow,” said Miquel Canals, professor at the Department of Earth and Ocean Dynamics and director of the UB Chair on Sustainable Blue Economy.He then went on to warn: “Unfortunately, as far as the Mediterranean is concerned, it would not be wrong to say that ‘not a single inch of it is clean’.”READ MORE:DEEP SEA SCIENTISTS MAKE HUGE DISCOVERY AT BOTTOM OF PACIFICDIVERS SHOCKED AFTER HEARING INSANE SOUND AT BOTTOM OF SEAAccessing the deepest of sea basins like the Calypso Deep is a ‘huge challenge’ and therefore means it is extremely difficult for litter like this to be cleared up.So, the focus is on the need to implement ‘global policy actions to reduce ocean waste’ as well as to encourage changes in ‘consumption habits and waste reduction’.The Mediterranean is particularly affected by this environmental problem, with a previous study finding the Strait of Messina to have the highest known density of marine litter in the world.Items found by the sub (Marine Pollution Bulletin)The experts therefore hope their research will ‘shake up global efforts’.“And in particular in the Mediterranean, to mitigate waste dumping, especially plastics, in the natural environment and ultimately in the sea,” Canals added.Unlike the likes of beaches or the popular coastlines, the professor says that the ‘ocean floor is still largely unknown to society as a whole’ and this makes it ‘difficult to raise social and political awareness about the conservation of these spaces’.“It is necessary to make a joint effort between scientists, communicators, journalists, the media, influencers and other people with social impact. The problem is there, and it has an enormous scope, even if it is not directly visible. We should not forget about it,” Canals warned.

Scientists plan an even bigger atom smasher for physics research

GENEVA — Top minds at the world’s largest atom smasher have released a blueprint for a much bigger successor that could vastly improve research into the remaining enigmas of physics.
The plans for the Future Circular Collider — a nearly 91-kilometer (56.5-mile) loop along the French-Swiss border and below Lake Geneva — published late Monday put the finishing details on a project roughly a decade in the making at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
The FCC would carry out high-precision experiments in the mid-2040s to study “known physics” in greater detail, then enter a second phase — planned for 2070 — that would conduct high-energy collisions of protons and heavy ions that would “open the door to the unknown,” said Giorgio Chiarelli, a research director at Italy’s National Institute of Nuclear Physics.
“History of physics tells that when there is more data, the human ingenuity is able to extract more information than originally expected,” Chiarelli, who was not involved in the plans, said in an e-mail.
For roughly a decade, top minds at CERN have been making plans for a successor to the Large Hadron Collider, a network of magnets that accelerate particles through a 27-kilometer (17-mile) underground tunnel and slam them together at velocities approaching the speed of light.
The blueprint lays out the proposed path, environmental impact, scientific ambitions and project cost. Independent experts will take a look before CERN’s two dozen member countries — all European except for Israel — decide in 2028 whether to go forward, starting in the mid-2040s at a cost of some 14 billion Swiss francs (about $16 billion).
CERN officials tout the promise of scientific discoveries that could drive innovation in fields like cryogenics, superconducting magnets and vacuum technologies that could benefit humankind.
Outside experts point to the promise of learning more about the Higgs boson, the elusive particle that has been controversially dubbed “the God particle,” which helped explain how matter formed after the Big Bang.
Work at the Large Hadron Collider confirmed in 2013 the existence of the Higgs boson, the central piece in a puzzle known as the standard model that helps explains some fundamental forces in the universe.
CERN Director-General Fabiola Gianotti said the future collider “could become the most extraordinary instrument ever built by humanity to study the constituents and the laws of nature at the most fundamental levels in two ways,” by improving study of the Higgs boson and paving the way to “explore the energy frontier,” and by looking for new physics that explain the structure and evolution of the universe.
One unknown is whether the Trump administration, which has been cutting foreign aid and spending in academia and research, will continue to support CERN a year after the Biden administration pledged U.S. support for the study and collaboration on the FCC’s construction and “physics exploitation” if it’s approved.
The United States is home to 2,000 users of CERN, making them the single largest national contingent among the 17,000 people working there, including outside experts abroad and staff on site, Gianotti said.
While an observer state and not a member, the U.S. doesn’t pay into the CERN regular budget but has contributed to specific projects. Most of the CERN regular budget comes from Europe.
Costas Fountas, the CERN Council president, said he had spoken with some U.S. National Science Foundation and Department of Energy staff who relayed the message that so far “they’re ‘under the radar of the cuts of the Trump administration’. That’s their words.”
CERN scientists, engineers and partners behind the plans considered at least 100 scenarios for the new collider before coming up with the proposed 91-kilometer circumference at an average depth of 200 meters (656 feet). The tunnel would be about 5 meters (16 feet) in diameter, CERN said.