Milly: Make some cheese!

I really like cheese.

After some cheese based internet cruising I realised that I could realistically make some myself and so I set forth on a mission to curdle myself a brick of paneer. Since it is easy, cheap and fun (for those who don't get grossed out by things that look like vomit) I have decided to share with you, the joy of curdling.

SCIENCE BIT

Curdling. That thing you accidentally do during cooking when you add cold milk to hot things or when you leave milk in the fridge for so long that it gets a little chunky. Curdling milk is a necessary first step to make all cheeses. It occurs because, on addition of acid (lemon juice, vinegar or from the product of bacteria), the milk coagulates, no longer existing as a nice stable emulsion anymore but separating out into curds (solid) and whey (liquid). When you mix oil and water, an emulsion, eventually the oil will rise to the surface; this is the same with curdling as the more buoyant curds will float up and sit atop the watery whey, hoorwhey! For cheeses that wish to be hard, rennet must be added (extract of calf stomach), forming more cohesive curdling action via the action of enzymes. These cheeses go on to be inoculated with mould and what not but here I will simply demonstrate curdling cow's milk, with lemon juice, to form paneer, a simple cheese used in indian cookery (bit like solidified cottage cheese).

COOKING BIT

Step 1: Heat up a large amount of full fat milk (and only full fat). I used 4 pints. Use a medium heat and keep stirring or it may burn on the bottom (if this happens don't scrape it off, this will make things worse). At this stage you can add herbs/spices if you fancy.

Step 2: Once the milk is properly boiling (before this happens the milk might balloon into a giant dairy cloud so be ready to turn the heat down) add about half a lemon's worth of juice and stir gently. It should start to look disgusting, as shown in the picture. It should progress through the vomit stage (below) and start to look more lumpy, like overcooked scrambled eggs. If this doesn't happen add more lemon juice (shouldn't need more than 1 lemon if using 4 pints). If desired curdling has not been achieved, you may need to start again (this can happen if the milk is not hot enough).

Step 3: Pour the appealing mixture through a piece of muslin (try Kitchens, Whiteladies Road) sat in a colander and give it a rinse with cold water until the mixture is cool enough to handle. Give it a good squeeze to get out excess whey, wrap it up in the cloth tightly and sit a weight on top (big pan with tins in should do it).

Step 4: After about an hour the paneer should be a relatively solid block but it will probably still be quite crumbly.

Step 5: Cook the paneer! I fried mine in some oil to stop it from falling apart when I added it to a curry.

If you fancy a cheap meat alternative or something to make a lovely curry out of have a bash. I like cheese and I hope you do too.

James: Christmas Lectures

Now into the new year but a quite not over the christmas period so I suggest you look back to 'Royal Institution Christmas Lectures'.(They are all available on iplayer)

The man to give them this year, pictured here, is one of Bristol's very own Bruce Hood. Whom may already be known to you as he was interviewed for this very blog by Papi.

Science, poetry, funding and innovation

Two interesting articles in the Saturday Guardian struck me as worth mentioning. First, poet Ruth Padel, author of Darwin: a Life in Poems, talks about The Science of Poetry, The Poetry of Science:

"Poetry is about feeling, science is about facts. They're nothing to do with each other!" The A-level students in a school I visited last week were passionate on this point. Behind them was Keats, urging them on. "Philosophy," Keats said – meaning science – "would clip an angel's wings." Science was out to dissolve beauty, "Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, / Empty the haunted air and gnomed mine – / Unweave a rainbow …" Edgar Allen Poe agreed. Science was a "vulture" that shrivelled wonder. "Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood, / The Elfin from the green grass; and from me. / The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?" 

I think this over-romanticises both poetry and science, which have got on fine for two millennia and today are enriching their dialogue. Michael Symmonds Roberts's collection Corpus came out of a conversation with scientists mapping the genome. Jo Shapcott's collection Of Mutability is expanding poetry's audiences in the medical community.

Padel (who mentions Erasmus Darwin - see my previous post), sums up: "The deepest thing science and poetry share, perhaps, is the way they can tolerate uncertainty. They have a modesty in common: they do not have to say they're right. True, perhaps. Or just truer. "A scientist should be the first to say he doesn't know," a tiger biologist told me when I asked some detail of tiger behaviour. "A scientist goes forward towards truth but never gets there." (Read the full article here.)

This might not seem to be precisely the case if you head over to Philip Ball's article in another section of the newspaper, where he is bemoaning the conservatism of funding bodies:

The kind of idle pastime that might amuse physicists is to imagine drafting Einstein's grant applications in 1905. "I propose to investigate the idea that light travels in little bits," one might say. "I will explore the possibility that time slows down as things speed up," goes another. Imagine what comments these would have elicited from reviewers for the German Science Funding Agency, had such a thing existed. Instead, Einstein just did the work anyway while drawing his wages as a technical expert third-class at the Bern patent office. And that is how he invented quantum physics and relativity. 

The moral seems to be that really innovative ideas don't get funded – that the system is set up to exclude them.

As Ball says: "your proposal has to specify exactly what you are going to achieve. But how can you know the results before you have done the experiments, unless you are aiming to prove the bleeding obvious?" He talks about a new scheme being initiated by the US National Science Foundation to fund "'unusually creative high-risk/high-reward interdisciplinary proposals'. In other words, it is looking for new ideas that might not work, but which would be massive if they do." Read the full article here.

This fund, called CREATIV (not a very creative choice), might want to take some hints from poets about unknowns and uncertainties, perhaps?!  What are your thoughts - whether you are a poet, scientist or scientist-poet!

Milly: Deep sea flashers

Some brilliant research by Sarah Zylinski that came out of the deep sea research cruise in 2010. Strange to think that even in deep, dark, remote regions, animals still need camouflage...

A link to the paper here.

Tom Troscianko, 1953-2011

Professor Troscianko was a unique lecturer and I was fortunate enough to be one of his students.

I was really shocked and sad when I heard that he died on the 16th of November.

I know that his students, his fellow colleagues and most importantly his family will miss him greatly.

Professor Iain Gilchrist has summed up Tom's life and work in his obituary.

When it comes to death, especially the death of such a larger than life personality it is hard to find the words to express feelings. I will always remember his lectures, not only because he always had pictures of him in a bathing suit (?!) but because he was passionate about his work and most of all he was passionate about life.

Sir Paul Nurse and Poetry

Photo: Royal Society

There were two great events held here in Bristol last night, one at the University and one at the Bristol Old Vic, and I was hoping against hope that I would find a connection between them to make this blog post flow! And... what do you know? I did. The first was Sir Paul Nurse, president of the Royal Society, Nobel Prize winner, geneticist, president of Rockefeller University New York... all-round very very interesting scientist and excellent talker-about-science! He was giving the Sir Anthony Epstein lecture at the Wills Tower, in the largest, cathedral-like space, which was packed to the rafters... His topic was "Great Ideas in Biology" and he was quick to point out that these weren't THE great ideas in biology but his pick of great ideas... although he felt that most people would agree on 4 out of the 5.

So, what were his great ideas? Well: The Cell, The Gene, Evolution by Natural Selection, Life as Chemistry (and Physics) and the fifth, possibly contentious one, Biology as an Organized System, by which he meant looking at the biological networks and how they are structured, looking at the flow of "information", at the system as an information carrier.

It was all fascinating stuff, some of which I already knew a bit of, but always good to be reminded what a chromosome is, for example... with some great slides and historical perspective! I was then heading to a poetry event, so, I hear you ask, how are the two connected?? Well, it was at Great Idea Number 3, which you would assume centred around one Charles Darwin. But no, in fact Sir Paul wanted to focus on Charles' grandad, Erasmus, who was the first to talk about evolution (Charles later supplied the vast quantities of data to prove it). Not only that, apparently Erasmus - who was a colourful figure, so large that he cut an oval out of his dining table so he might sit rather nearer to his supper, and fathered 14 children - was a poet, at one time "one of the best known poets in England"! And not only that, he wrote much of his scientific reports in blank verse! (See Jenny Uglow on Erasmus Darwin's poetry in The Guardian). The Poetry Foundation gives us his poem, The Botanic Garden, and here is an excerpt:

 “You taught mysterious Bacon to explore

Metallic veins, and part the dross from ore;

With sylvan coal in whirling mills combine

The crystal’d nitre, and the sulphurous mine;

Through wiry nets the black diffusion strain,

And close an airy ocean in a grain.—

Pent in dark chambers of cylindric brass,

Slumbers in grim repose the sooty mass;

Lit by the brilliant spark, from grain to grain

Runs the quick fire along the kindling train;

On the pain’d ear-drum bursts the sudden crash

Starts the red-flame, and death pursues the flash.—

Fear’s feeble hand directs the fiery darts,

And strength and courage yield to chemic arts;

Guilt with pale brow the mimic thunder owns,

And tyrants tremble on their blood-stain’d thrones.

Stirring stuff! Now the poets I went to see after this lecture, Luke Kennard and Tom Philips,  did not deal directly with biology but I feel that Erasmus D would have enjoyed the evening, which moved from a searing critique/love poem about Portishead to a tale of the Murderer being taken for a haircut. I was immensely impressed by the whole event, organised monthly by Word of Mouth -  highly recommended if you are in the vicinity!

So, an evening of poetry, biology and biological poetry, what more could I have wanted?

James:A Nuclear Renaissance

Nuclear has had some what of a bad reputation of late, to such an extent that up until the white paper in 2009 there was to be no British nuclear future. As a man who grew up from the age of 4 saying 'I want to be a nuclear physicist' this was very worrying. However, now the tides have turned as realisation has come that, for whatever reason you chose, energy generation can not last on fossil fuels alone and we want power not just when the wind blows and the sun shines. So sorry folks but we need nuclear. Now I personally was very proud to be part of the launch of the new Nuclear Research Centre which will be mainly hosted by Bristol and Oxford universities supported by industry. This is, as the Minister of State Charles Hendry put it is 'the begin of a nuclear renaissance'. Which was highlighted by the demographic in the room as 'networking' began over sandwiches and tea. Britain has been out of the nuclear game too long, so there was a generation gap between those heading and steering the centre and us new guys looking to do the 'on the ground' research. It was alluded to during one of the opening speeches that this is a long term set of goals being created so they aren't for those setting the questions but more the eager minds of the new nuclear research generation coming through. Although I may look to be coming from a rather one eyed perspective I think this is a great thing and the first of many steps in the right direction which I hope to be a part of. Another key aspect that will set the NRC apart is that the research will be split into three main areas; first advanced research into generation 4 fission reactors and generation 1 fusion, secondly applied research looking to make the most of the energy produced and finally and possibly most importantly 'Nuclear Futures' a group dedicated to the social and environmental issues. So this will see working together as one not just the physicists, chemists, engineers but also those from the social sciences. I believe this is a good thing, and Tuesday could turn out to be a momentous occasion, not only for the country but also for Bristol University going forward to be the leader in yet another field.