Preserving summer

One of the many great things about living in Australia has been the amount of food that is literally growing around me.  It would seem that most people here have a fruit tree or two in their gardens.  For me seeing citrus fruit growing merrily used to be a very much Mediterranean holiday thing, now even in the cold June weather my local garden centre has a load of fruiting trees. 

A few people I know have had problems in using all the fruit they have, and now in the chill of winter I'm really happy that a work colleague back in February had a load of lemons to offload.  

Rather than the more typical lemon curd, I really wanted to try preserving some lemons.  I've got a few recipes that require them (they a great put in foil with white fish to bake) and I love the flavour they add to plain cous-cous.  Typically it's small lemons that are preserved, but I thought I'd have a crack with this large ones.  I found a few methods for preserving them on t'internet, these are the steps I took.  

First I picked out the better lemons, about half of the batch, and the other half I juiced to make the brine later.  The picked out lemons I cut into segments, not completing the cut so they still stayed together, then I put them into the freezer overnight. 

Ready for the freezer

Thawing in the morning.

After letting the lemons thaw completely the next day, I packed them with table salt, rubbing it into the flesh and into each segment cut.  They fell apart a bit at this stage, so I ended up packing them in halves as layers into sterilised jars. 

I sterilised the jars by popping them in a hot oven for 10 minutes.

The finish products, a little bit of summer in a jar.

Between each layer I sprinkled some peppercorns, and I got about 4/5 layers in each jar.  Once nice and full I covered the lemons with the juice I had squeezed earlier to make a brine for the preserves.  I let them sit for a month in a cool cupboard before tucking in to them.

An overdue statement

Hello all,
It can't have escaped your notice that I've not written anything here of late.  This is because I got invited to blog under Science and Technology at 'The Conversation'.  The new blog is called 'The shores of Titan' and I hope that you will all join me there.  I imagine that every so often I'll get gripped by a fit of domestic science and post up here, but I don't think I'll be able to keep it up as regularly as I did before.  
Thanks all so much for reading :)

Diamonds really are a girls best friend

It has been quite a hectic start to the new year, all leading up to the last few days where I had my first merit experiment on the beamline at work.  I should explain that to use the instrument that I work on you have to propose an experiment, write it down and send it to a committee that sort through the proposals and pick the ones they think are best.  It's pretty competitive so I was really pleased to be awarded some time for my own experiment, so you can image that I wanted to work hard and make the most of the time!  Hence, over the weekend I was in work and collecting a veritable mountain of data which I now have to sift through and analyse - keeping me nice and busy.


Anyway, one of the more exciting things to happen in January was the arrival of my diamonds. They had been sent over from Belgium in their little boxes and are now all ready to be put in the cells I've had made (two halves of which are the triangular grey things sitting behind my boxes.  So the plan now is to sit them perfectly on each half of the cell, so that I can sandwich them together to make very high pressures.  There's a bit more explanation on the video I made here.

Diamond are amazing for high-pressure science, not just because they are the hardest substance known but also because they are transparent.  This means that even when I've squished my sample between two of them I can still see the sample (albeit with a microscope) and watch what it does as I change the pressure.  Diamonds are composed entirely of carbon and the reason for their super-hardness comes from the way the carbon atoms are attached to each other.  

A while ago I made this model (out of hard gums and cocktail sticks) but hopefully you can see how the carbon atoms (the hard gums) in the middle of the structure are attached to four other carbon atoms.  This, in a diamond, would keep on going so that every carbon atom will attach to four other, making the hole structure very stable.  Added to this that the carbon to carbon bond is quite strong it makes for an impressive amount of hardness in the final product - the diamond.

The next stage is to mount the diamonds into the cells, which is actually pretty tricky.  You have to sit, starring down a microscope and holding the diamond steady in some tweezers and clean it so there is not a speck of the tiniest amount of dust on it.  Then you have to place it in the correct place, make sure it is sitting flat before you can finally glue it down.  All that time you need only squeeze your tweezers a little too hard and the diamond will ping off, and there's a good chance you'll never find it again!  Thankfully all my diamonds are now glued down and ready to be aligned and squeezed! 

Getting into the Christmas spirit.

I've promised various people that I won't go on about the nice summer weather I'm rapidly getting used to over here, especially with the reports of storms, squalls and snow from back home in the UK.  But all the sun and warm weather has made it really hard to feel remotely christmassy, so inspired by the Wellcome Trust's Festive Tree of Life, I decided to try and make some spacey baubles to adorn our new Australian Christmas tree.    


For me when I see hanging baubles my mind goes to the giant orbs of our solar system, the planets.  So why not make the most of that and make a solar-system inspired Christmas tree? First job, to the local stuff shop to locate some spheres of different sizes.

Two sizes of Baubles and a few ping-pong balls to start with.

Whilst out I armed myself with some packets of play-doh in order to get some nice bright colours to the tree.  I'd originally only planned to make the gas giants - but perhaps Uranus and Neptune were too easy?

I covered the medium-sized bauble with a layer of green play-doh to be Uranus.

So I got really stuck in and inspired to represent the clouds of Jupiter, ending up with this, complete with it's giant red spot.

 
I wasn't sure how much detail I could squeeze on a ping-pong ball, but I'm pretty happy with my representation of our little planet Earth. 

Each of the play-doh baubles I covered with a layer of 50/50 mixed PVA glue and water to finish them off and to stop the dough from drying out.  Here are the final products.

The gas giants, from top Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

And the terrestrial planets, from top Mercury, Venus, Eartha and Mars.

I'm afraid I couldn't resist the more nerdy details - the asteroid belt (which is between Mars and Jupiter and has thousands of bits of rock swirling thought it), the ice line (the point where water ice could form out of our early solar system, which meant that giant planets like Jupiter could be formed) and the Kuiper Belt (the spread of objects beyond Neptune where lots of icy dwarf planets live).

Glitter balls are my asteroids and the Norwegian flags are my ice line

The snowflake beyond Neptune, standing in for the Kuiper belt.

We've topped the whole thing off with some solar powered Christmas lights (only in Australia, huh!) and with a few parcels arriving from overseas I'm really beginning to feel seasonal.  I wonder how mulled wine is at 30 degrees? 

The 'Office'

Since I've started at the synchrotron I've been really looking forward to the Open day.  The day we turn off the machine for the day and invite the public in to look about (after all they do pay for it!). I was pretty determined that Aus_Pod would be one of the highlights of the day so I set too looking for some ideas that would help us bring some of our science to life.   It's also given me a great excuse to introduce where I work these days!

Me outside the experimental hutch, sporting my new hair-do for the public

 When you boil down what the beamline does it come out that we're a very big, expensive and powerful wave machine.  In the optics hutch, locked away behind tonnes of lead, are a couple of crystals which filter the light coming from the synchrotron to one very precise wavelength.  The crystals are kept under a super vacuum which takes three days to pump down, which unfortunately meant that we couldn't open up the vessel for the public to see for themselves.

The crystals sitting inside the drum, when it was all opened up during shut down.  This is our 'filter' which lets us choose the wavelength of light we need to study each material.

With all this talk of waves, it's always good to have a wave machine for a hands-on demonstration.  A bit of searching I found great inspiration in this video.  Such a simple, and cheap idea that can show so much, it was constructed in the first half hour of the open day (we were at the end of the self-guided tour), pretty happy with the result!

Science and food - always a winning combination

Once we have a beam of light at the right wavelength, we pass this into an experimental hutch where we can place a sample into beam to study it.  The technique we use for this, diffraction, acts like a super-microscope letting us construct models of where the atoms and molecules are actually sitting in the sample.   This structural information has a great range of uses, from working out how a material conducts electricity to how a material gets bigger when we heat it. 

So that's my 'office', where I'm lucky enough to work.  There are the laboratories too where as my research cracks on a pace I'll be spending lots of time in preparing sample for the beamline. I've been lucky enough to be granted time for a couple of experiments in the run after Christmas, so that will be keeping my very busy. (To use the beamline, you have to write a proposal of an experiment and send it to a review committee - it's nerve racking but a great feeling when you get granted time).


As well as the 3000 visitors the synchrotron got, there was a live broadcast on the 3RRR radio station and you can download a podcast of the program - you may recognise one of the guests! 

Making a good brew

You know you've landed on your feet with a job when the latest staff activity is a microbrewing competition.  Soon after I started at the synchrotron the St Arnold project was launched and in an effort to get to know some others who worked at the synchrotron I whole heartedly joined in. The object of the project is to find a brew for the Christmas party, with help from a local microbrewery.  Appropriately enough I joined the McBrewers team, who'd chosen to brew up a Scottish brown ale (yum).  The whole process is now complete, I write this knowing that there's a cold beer in the fridge for when I'm done, and I've have a bit of a wizzy introduction into the science (and craft) behind beer brewing.

The first stage was to boil up some water in an enormous cauldron and once it was hot add some sugar in the form of maltose syrup.

The malt syrup being measured out.

The marvellous cauldron with the maltose being added

Essentially all you need to make beer - water, yeast and a source of carbohydrates to feed the yeast.  In addition to the maltose sugar, as our source of carbohydrates while the brew was hot we added a sort of tea-bag filled with malted barley.  The hot water helped extract out the starches from our barley.

The sugar and barley in the liquid is the feed for the yeast, in this case we plumbed for a dark sugar like maltose to give the final beer a nice dark colour.  It's important to not add the yeast into the pot while it's too hot.  Yeast is a microorganism and boiling water will kill them off! 

Yeast ready for action!

The whole brew is sealed up and contained for a few weeks to allow for the fermentation process.  During this time the yeast eats away (metabolises) the sugar in the liquid to produce alcohol and carbon dioxide.  It's the same process that yeast gets up to in bread making (or even baking powder in cake making), with the carbon dioxide in that case causing the dough to rise.  In the case of beer making the yeast picked to more efficiently convert the sugar to alcohol.  

Hops all measured out and ready to go.

The first beers brewed would have followed this simple recipe, only in the time things have been added to enhance the flavours.  A very common ingredient are hops, which are tight-bud like flowers of the plant Humulus which is pretty common in the Northern hemisphere.  These give a bitter flavour to the beer, and also add some preserving power to the brew.  


Once the brew has cooled down and the yeast added it was all put into a large bucket - where it was kept while the fermentation process got going.

Great colour from the start

Sealed up and fermenting away. The valve at the top is to let the build up of carbon dioxide escape - other wise the beer may have quite a bit of energy to it.

There's an even happier ending to the tale.  Not only do I have some of the brew left in the fridge (it was delicious) but my colleagues at work judged our teams beer to be one of the best - so it's being brewed again for the Christmas party in couple of weeks!  

A growing issue?

I've been drawn, this week into reading The Conversation's series on 'The science behind weight loss'. 

Drawn, but in a sort of unwilling way as it's an issue I really don't like to confront.  Like the majority (in fact I imagine all) of women I've struggled with my body image all of my life and I've never really felt completely at ease with it at all.  (For those who don't know me I've got a figure akin to Nigella, and probably for the same reasons) I've been there with the fad diets, most memorably (aged 15) with the 'cabbage soup' diet which spelled the end for my mothers food processor.  My most recent experience was the 'breakfast cereal' one, and yes I loss weight.  But with it, I felt tired, uneasy in myself, messed up my bodily cycle and put the weight back on within the month. 

One thing I've always noted is that it's so hard to find impartial advice on loosing weight, and so that's why I was very interested to read what the Conversation had come up with.  (The Conversation is a new web-based newspaper who's content comes mainly from academics and researchers - people have to declare if they have a financial interest in what they are saying).   The series is in the light of the national debate here about bringing a 'fat tax' to counter the fact that Australia (like most western nations) has a growing obese population.  

The first article, written by Rosemary Stanton from the University of NSW,  'Diets and weight loss: separating fact from fiction'  set out to dispel various myths.  The article set up what I interpreted to be a theme through the series that there is no magic bullet 'cure all'.   This is the heart of the matter for me, we are all different, our bodies cope with food in different ways.  The only proven way to loose weight on a long term (that researchers who aren't making money from a product agree on) is to make gradual changes to your lifestyle and stick with them.  No one is saying it is easy, in fact they acknowledge it is hard, but I'm personally not convinced a 'fat tax' would be the right encouragement (the experts seem split on this).    


The other article in the series that I'd encourage people to read is more on the perceptions of body shape/image.  In 'Feel manipulated? Anxious? Tune out the hype and learn to love your body' - written by a professor of psychology Susan Paxton - on the pressure that are brought on us to conform to a certain body type.  She explains some of the measures her and her colleagues are taking to counteract the unrealistic images portrayed by mainstream media.  

For me, the acceptance of my shape was definitely a step along the road to a healthier lifestyle.   Having identified of late that I did need to shed a few pounds I've started to cycle to work and only snack between meals on fruit.  Just small things, but I'm seeing the difference already, and they've made me happier that eating cereal all the time!