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Nathan Myhrvold earned a Ph.D. in theoretical and mathematical physics at 23, helped Stephen Hawking research the quantum theory of gravitation as a postdoctoral fellow at Cambridge University, served as Microsoft's chief technology officer, became a billionaire, and founded an invention-generating company that now holds more than 30,000 patents, including one for an invisibility cloak and another for a laser beam that annihilates malaria-ridden mosquitoes. But that's not all he's done with his science knowledge. In March he published a six-volume, 2,400-page, 40-pound cookbook called Modernist Cuisine that attempts to catalog every science principle known (and, until now, unknown) to cooking. To research the tome, he and a team of 50 chefs, writers, and photographers spent five years conducting detailed tests, many of them involving liquid nitrogen, rotary evaporators, centrifuges, and other industrial paraphernalia. We asked Myhrvold and Wayt Gibbs, the editor-in-chief of Modernist Cuisine, to share a few favorites among the 3,200 photos in the book, along with some of the counterintuitive insights they gained along the way. Prepare to unleash your inner Frankenchef. Essential oils like those of lemon and orange, and concentrated aromatic compounds like vanilla, are to flavor what Klaxon sirens are to sound. Thanks largely to the perfume industry, a huge variety of essences are available, from allspice to wormwood. Some chefs have begun using laboratory-style distillation equipment to derive their own concentrates as well. Smoking is usually associated with sausages, ribs, and salmon, but there's no reason you can't smoke plant foods as well. With vegetables, the goal of smoking is to flavor rather than preserve, though some preservation inevitably results from the dehydration that occurs. Traditional examples of smoked vegetables include the charred, mashed eggplant in baba ghanoush and the smoked Mexican chili peppers known as chipotles. The trick is getting flavors in the smoke to condense in a film on the vegetables without heating them so much that their texture is significantly altered. New cold-smokers allow vegetables like this onion to remain at refrigerator-like temperature while smoke is piped in from a fire.A good pork roast is as sublime as it is uncommon: Its flesh is tender and juicy, its skin delicate and crisp. But how do you get that superb crackly exterior without overcooking the meat? One solution is to cook the skin and meat separately. Vacuum seal the pork in plastic and slow-cook in a water bath until the meat reaches the same temperature throughout. Meanwhile, gelatinize and fry the detached skin and sprinkle it on the loin. Here we garnish it with edible "coals" made out of stewed prunes and caramel foam. |
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view Beautiful, Edible Science: Cold Smoke, Flaming Oranges and Gelatinized Skin as presented by: Discover Magazine |
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The U.S. Navy wants to put powerful lasers on its ships to shoot down artillery shells and even cruise missiles at the speed of light (and really, who wouldn't). But there are a few scientific details to sort out before sailors can deploy the beams. "First we want to make sure the physics is right before throwing buckets of salt water over the thing," says Ed Pogue. Pogue is the program manager for Boeing's free electron laser (FEL) program, potentially the most ambitious laser weapons program since the Pentagon's controversial airborne laser. In that program, the Missile Defense Agency spent billions of dollars and over a decade to get a laser-rigged jumbo jet to destroy a ballistic missile in its boost phase of flight. They eventually succeeded in February 2010, but the Obama administration nixed plans to develop the experiment into a battle-ready weapon. Maybe the Navy's project will meet a better fate. In 5 years, at a cost of $163 million, Boeing hopes to get the physics right and demonstrate an extremely powerful--and hopefully seaworthy--giant laser. It's no small task, in part because the laser they're using is powered by several particle accelerators. Here's an overview of how the Navy's free electron laser works. These are the guts of the high voltage power supply, which provides juice to the electron gun. When the system is fully assembled, the six-foot-high metallic coils will be sealed in a pressurized chamber filled with a gas called sulfur hexafluoride. The massive amounts of power--hundreds of kilovolts--that the coils produce can cause arc discharges, when energy is discharged into the air. The sulfur hexafluoride prevents that from happening because it doesn't conduct electricity as well as air does. |
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view How to Build the Ultimate Naval Defense: Uber-Powerful Lasers as presented by: Discover Magazine |
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It may look more like a perplexing work of avant-garde sculpture than it does a telescope, but make no mistake about it--the golden snowflake on a surfboard that is the James Webb Space Telescope will be the premier eye in the sky of the next decade. With the assistance of the Webb, astronomers hope to take a giant leap forward in understanding the origins of the cosmos. It trumps all previous space telescopes by virtue of its 18 hexagonal reflectors, which combine to form a huge mirror roughly seven times larger than that of the Hubble Space Telescope. This will allow it to collect far more light to see with, enabling it to peer at the most distant objects in the universe. Since light travels in time as well as space, the further away the James Webb Space Telescope can see, the further back in time it can look, granting the world unparalleled glimpses of the light from the first galaxies. This next-generation space observatory will yield vital clues about every stage in the history of the cosmos, from the formation of the universe to the evolution of our own solar system. Expected to launch in 2014, NASA has allowed us sneak peeks at how one goes about building a successor for Hubble. |
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view How to Build a Telescope Even More Powerful Than Hubble as presented by: Discover Magazine |
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"It was one of those images that demanded more investigation," says photographer and film maker Andrew Zuckerman of a photo of a macaw that he had shot for his first book, CREATURE. So for his latest project, Zuckerman focused his lenses on birds. "Imagery of birds is found in all ancient art and has been repeatedly used throughout history—I was curious if I could add something to this tradition." The result is the new book BIRD from Chronicle Books, a collection of avian photographs stunning for their brilliant simplicity. Here, DISCOVER presents some high-flying highlights. From the plebeian pigeon to the rarest bird of all. The Spix's macaw, or the little blue macaw, may be the most endangered bird in the world. The last remaining member of its species known to be living in the wild, a lone male, was discovered in Brazil in 1990, but it has not been seen since 2000. Approximately 120 individuals now survive in captive breeding programs. Fifty of these are kept in the Al Wabra Wildlife Preservation in Qatar where Andrew captured them on film. This scarlet macaw is found in the subtropical rainforests of Central and South America. Individual birds can grow up to three feet in length, with nearly half that length consisting of long, tapered tail feathers. here's something special in a blue feather. Unlike feathers of other colors, which are pigmented, bright blue feathers, like these on the vulturine guineafowl, are the result of nanoscale structures in the feather barbs. Microscopic air cavities within the feather barbs are arranged just so to allow coherent light scattering, creating a blue hue. Green feathers are typically the result of a combination of blue structural color and yellow pigments. |
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view Stunning High-Speed Photos of Birds as presented by: Discover Magazine |
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Driven by the forces of sexual selection, male—and, in some instances, female—animals have evolved a dizzying array of mating displays and rituals. For jumping spiders, mating can be an tricky affair—but not for the reasons you might think. According to a recent study published in Current Biology, jumping spiders communicate during courtship using ultraviolet B (UVB) light, which humans are unable to see. While scientists have long known that certain species use UVA light for communication, this was the first study to demonstrate that some are also able to detect shorter-wavelength UVB light. The male jumping spiders have specialized scales that glow white and green when exposed to UV light; in female spiders, the palps appeared green under UV light. And the absence of UVB light effectively killed the mood: As soon as either sex was exposed to light without ultraviolet rays, the other immediately lost interest in mating. While this male mandrill may look unfriendly, mandrills are social animals that live in large groups in Africa’s rainforests. Each pack is led by a dominant, alpha male. These brightly colored, or “fatted” alpha males—as seen in this picture—are the only ones to sire offspring, and have much higher levels of testosterone than the paler, “non-fatted” males. The red color on the male’s face and genitalia also indicate its dominance within the group. What the male fiddler crabs lack in body size, he more than makes up for in claws. The large claw, or cheliped—which looks like a fiddle when moved in conjunction with the smaller claw—is used for communication, courtship, and combat. The smaller claw is used for eating and building a burrow. |
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view Flash, Deception and Suicide: 10 Remarkable Tricks of Animal Mating as presented by: Discover Magazine |
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The stunning pictures of Saturn, the deep field, the Eagle, Crab, and Butterfly nebulae—in its 20 years of operation, the Hubble Space Telescope has taken what are now some of the most famous images in astronomy. But you've seen those over and over. As NASA prepares to mark the telescope's two-decade anniversary on April 24, we thought we'd bring you a selection of the Hubble's slightly less famous—but still gorgeous—contributions. These ravishing images come from the new book by Edward J. Weiler, Hubble: A Journey Through Space and Time, published by Abrams Books in collaboration with NASA. may not be immediately obvious the first time you see this image, but notice the ring of slightly darker color around the center. That's a simulated map of the dark matter halo around galaxy cluster Cl 0024+17, superimposed on a Hubble picture. The ring may have been formed when two galactic clusters collided. Images like this are one of the ways researchers detect dark matter through its effects. In this case, Hubble observed how the gravity of this cluster distorted the light from more distant galaxies, and determined that the cluster's ordinary matter couldn't account for all of the distortion. |
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view Happy Birthday, Hubble: The Telescope's Most Underrated Images as presented by: Discover Magazine |
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Some fish scorn the easy life of the shoreline, and instead spend most of their lives out to sea, wandering in the wild blue yonder. In a new book from the University of Chicago Press, Fishes of the Open Ocean, author Julian Pepperell lets readers get up close and personal with these impressive and mysterious ocean denizens. This gorgeous picture shows a flying fish gliding towards touchdown on the smooth sea. The flying fish achieves takeoff by flapping its tail at speeds of 50 to 70 beats per second, and spreading its "wings," or modified fins. Scientists have observed flying fish traveling more than 400 yards in a single flight, though Pepperell writes that such distances are only achieved when the fish dips its whirring tail back into the water a few times for extra bursts of propulsion. ale sharks' habits are still poorly understood, but electronic tagging is beginning to reveal their secrets. Scientists recently realized that whale sharks aren't slow, lumbering creatures as previously thought; instead they leverage their massive weight to dive-bomb through the water like a hawk falling through the sky. he black marlin is a giant of the ocean, measuring up to 13 feet in length and weighing up to 1,500 pounds. The fish cruises the Pacific and Indian oceans in search of smaller fish to devour, and sometimes uses its spear-like upper jaw to stun its prey. |
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view Serpents, Flyers and Hammers: Strange Fish That Rule the Open Sea as presented by: Discover Magazine |
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