Master sushi chefs in Japan spend years honing their skills in making rice, selecting and slicing fish, and other techniques. Expert chefs even form the sushi pieces in a different way than a novice does, resulting in a cohesive bite that doesn’t feel all mushed together. In this short video clip from a longer Japanology episode on sushi, they put pieces of sushi prepared by a novice and a master through a series of tests — a wind tunnel, a pressure test, and an MRI scan — to see just how different their techniques are. It sounds ridiculous and goofy (and it is!) but the results are actually interesting.
Month: September 2017
Vendy Awards Finalists
Tomorrow, the 13th Annual NYC Vendy Awards return to Governors Island. Who’s duking it out this year for street food supremacy? 5 very different trucks, all dishing out some of the city’s tastiest dishes to be eaten on the go. Here, an introduction to all of them
Font Detectives
What does international political corruption have to do with type design? Normally, nothing—but that’s little consolation for the former prime minister of Pakistan. When Nawaz Sharif and his family came under scrutiny earlier this year thanks to revelations in the Panama Papers, the smoking gun in the case was a font. The prime minister’s daughter, Maryam Sharif, provided an exculpatory document that had been typeset in Calibri—a Microsoft font that was only released for general distribution nearly a year after the document had allegedly been signed and dated.
Climate Futures
The non-stop, “never-seen-before” hurricanes of the last few weeks have given us a glimpse of what a climate-changed world will look like for humanity. If it seems like a scary vision, you should know that we’re only at the very beginning of this wild ride. Things are likely going to get harder. But what would it mean for us to deal effectively with the long-term planetary changes we’ve initiated? What would it look like if we could marshal our creativity to find a smooth landing for our cherished project of civilization?
UV life
red dwarfs may not be as habitable as we thought, as they’re low on uv radiation, which is crucial for RNA formation
ultraviolet radiation may even have played a critical role in the emergence of life here on Earth. As such, determining how much UV radiation is produced by other types of stars could be one of the keys to finding evidence of life any planets that orbit them.
Nutrient collapse
rising co2 levels mess with plant nutrients, in a bad way.
Rising CO2 revs up photosynthesis, the process that helps plants transform sunlight to food. This makes plants grow, but it also leads to them pack in more carbohydrates like glucose at the expense of other nutrients that we depend on, like protein, iron and zinc.
Emma’s Torch
Emma’s Torch’s brunch is served Saturdays and Sundays, 9:00 to 14:00, and the menu is devised to reflect the skills the students are learning and to highlight unique flavors from their own experiences. A recent menu featured the requisite avocado toast and Greek yogurt parfait, along with a mouthwatering selection of baked goods. The shakshuka, a Middle Eastern specialty with heirloom tomatoes, mixed peppers, feta cheese, garlic confit, onion rings, and saffron-spiced toast is a standout that marries the cafe’s commitment to local produce and the regional flavors the refugees cooks bring from home. “The food is wonderful. It’s a combination of fresh brunch classics, and specials influenced by the participants, foods from their countries of origin”. The menu evolves and changes as new students go through the program, allowing all participants to learn from one another.
Lost and Found
On the southern edge of Paris, a 500 m2 basement houses the city’s lost possessions. The Bureau of Found Objects, as it is officially called, is more than 200 years old, and 1 of the largest centralized lost and founds in Europe. Any item left behind on the Métro, in a museum, in an airport, or found on the street and dropped, unaddressed, into a mailbox makes its way here, around 600 or 700 items each day. Umbrellas, wallets, purses, and mittens line the shelves, along with less quotidian possessions: a wedding dress with matching shoes, a prosthetic leg, an urn filled with human remains. The bureau is an administrative department, run by the Police Prefecture and staffed by very French functionaries—and yet it’s also an improbable, poetic space where the entrenched French bureaucracy and the societal ideals of the country collide.
Dutch Agriculture
The Netherlands is a small, densely populated country. It’s bereft of almost every resource long thought to be necessary for large-scale agriculture. Yet it’s the globe’s number 2 exporter of food as measured by value, second only to the United States, which has 270x its landmass. How on Earth have the Dutch done it? That copious output is made all the more remarkable by the other side of the balance sheet: inputs. 20 years ago, the Dutch made a national commitment to sustainable agriculture under the rallying cry “2x as much food using 50% as many resources.” Since 2000, van den Borne and many of his fellow farmers have reduced dependence on water for key crops by 90 %. They’ve almost completely eliminated the use of chemical pesticides on plants in greenhouses, and since 2009 Dutch poultry and livestock producers have cut their use of antibiotics by 60%.
The way in which the Netherlands uses architecture to feed the world is best seen from above. Dutch agriculture is defined by vast landscapes of greenhouses which dominate the architectural landscape of South Holland. In total, the country contains greenhouses in an area 56% larger than the island of Manhattan.
1 proposition for the future of the countryside can be found in the Netherlands. On the Hook of Holland, a vast sea of greenhouses surrounds vernacular Dutch farmhouses, alive with high-tech, innovative food production. Despite its small size, and dense population, the Netherlands is the world’s second-largest exporter of food. Such an accreditation would not be possible using conventional farming methods. But the Dutch countryside is far from conventional. In place of plowed furrows and green grazing fields, there are extraordinary greenhouse complexes with climate-controlled farms, some spanning over 1 km2.
Over the past 60 years, greenhouse production has been focused on yield. If you compare a field in Spain with greenhouses in the Netherlands, we are more sustainable because we are using agricultural land more optimally. If you want the same yield in Spain, you need 20x as much land. But the best part of the story is because we grow under controlled conditions, we can use biological controls. There are hardly any pesticides used in greenhouse production, but it’s also more efficient with water. The 80 kilograms per meter in the Netherlands is achieved with 4x less water than the 4 kilograms of tomatoes in Spain.
but there’s a claim hydroponics don’t “taste” good:
Soil is fundamental for preserving an ecosystem, and for delivering flavor and nutrition. There is a lot of complex biology in soil, including fungal and bacterial networks, which enable the plant to absorb these micronutrients. When you farm hydroponically, it’s a very inert environment where you are growing from a substrate and you’re adding 5 inputs. It’s very hard, almost impossible, to argue that a plant grown in a hydroponic environment has access to the same nutrition as a plant grown in healthy soils.
Electric planes
The 2-seat Sun Flyer will be the first FAA-certified all-electric trainer aircraft. The new 4-seat will closely follow. Features of the Sun Flyer 4 include a 116 cm cabin width, 12 m wing span, ballistic parachute recovery system and a gross weight of 1200 kg with 540 kg of payload for pilot and passengers. “Like Sun Flyer 2, Sun Flyer 4 will run completely on batteries. As a result, the 4-seat airplane will have operating costs 5x lower than costs associated with similar combustion-engine aircraft. With 4 hours of flying time, the versatile Sun Flyer 4 will appeal to both flight schools and pilot-owners.”
Gregor J. Rothfuss 