The Science of Everyday Life: Why Teapots Dribble, Toast Burns and Light Bulbs Shine

Index

Introduction

All around us, every day, we are surrounded by some of the most interesting examples of science. Yet we don’t see it. The science is hidden in plain sight, submerged beneath the everyday phenomena of our lives and the hand-held gizmos we take for granted. The best bits of science are going unnoticed.

If you pause for a moment and scratch the surface, though, the gleam of fascinating science shines through. Take, for example, hot, spicy foods and what actually causes the sensation of heat. The effect of the causative molecule in chillies, capsaicin, has been studied right down to the molecular level, but that is only the start of the spicy story. There are also spicy molecules such as piperine, gingerol, allyl isothiocyanate and the tongue-twisting and tongue-numbing hydroxy-alpha-sanshool. Each molecule is different, yet each directly affects our nerves to mimic pain.

Even the most mundane of technological devices that we give barely a moment’s attention can harbour fascinating science. When was the last time you considered what was really going on inside a quartz clock? Yet the feedback electrical system used to set up the oscillations within a quartz crystal is fiendishly ingenious, and it’s not just in clocks, it’s inside every mobile phone, computer and tablet device. Or there are the infrared motion sensors, part of every alarm system that silently watches us all as we go about our lives. What makes them so brilliant is hidden within; the cunning wiring of two tiny crystals allowing the sensor to not only see parts of the spectrum that we cannot, but to react only to moving sources of infrared light above a certain size.

In many cases, once you get past the initial understanding, you find yourself abruptly at the scientific coalface, where the ultimate answer is that we just don’t know the answer – so far. From the possibility of mining our road sweepings for precious platinum, to what makes a moth circle a light, the science of everyday life still contains unexplored territory.

However, does understanding this everyday science matter? On the surface the answer to this is no. Superficially, it doesn’t make any difference in the slightest if you don’t know how a toaster works, or why sitting under a tree is delightfully cooling. These things still happen even in the face of ignorance, but knowing why can make a difference.

Crucially, in our technologically controlled world, greater understanding can lead to better-informed decisions. These might be small but vital choices, such as what sort of object to poke into a toaster to free a stuck piece of bread. Knowing that the bare nichrome wires in a toaster have mains electricity flowing in them should convince you to use a wooden spoon or a chopstick, rather than an electrically conducting metal knife. By understanding the workings of a simple item like a toaster you can shape your interactions with it, increasing its usefulness and function. Similarly, appreciating the cooling effect of green vegetation provides an informed reason to choose to plant green spaces within our cities and towns.

It’s not just about the appliance of science for the creation of handy life hacks and city planning; there is a more nebulous, but fundamental reason why everyday science is important. It makes life more exciting. Knowing the context and explanation for something makes the experience of the thing vastly more enriching. No one would deny that this is true for a great work of art or literature, and the same is true for science. Once you know why your fingers really go wrinkly in the bathtub, you will never look at your prune-like fingertips in the same way again. Your bath time just became more interesting.

This book sets out to reveal some of the astonishing and intriguing science going on all around you all the time. What’s more, it’s not as if this is old science that has been long established. To put yourself at the cutting edge of scientific understanding you don’t need to travel to the extremes of our world, into deep space, or to collide subatomic particles at nearly the speed of light. All you need do is look around you and dive into the subtlety and complexity of the science of your own everyday life.

The Sustaining Science of Food and Drink

The sweetest thing

Sweet, juicy strawberries, cake still warm from the oven and, my favourite, honey straight from the comb . . . Most of us enjoy eating sweet things, to the extent that seeking them out seems to be hard-wired into our brains. Yet our ability to taste sweetness is remarkably non-specific, and is fooled by a host of chemicals that seem to bear little resemblance to sugar. Not only that, but when it comes to sweetness, ordinary sugar, or sucrose, isn’t very sweet at all.

The sweetest chemical so far discovered goes by the name of lugduname and ranks about 250,000 times sweeter than sucrose. What’s perplexing for chemists, though, is that lugduname doesn’t bear any structural resemblance to other sugars. This poses a little bit of a problem for science, as the usual way that a chemical receptor works is that it recognizes just a small portion of a molecule, maybe the arrangement of a half-dozen atoms or so. It doesn’t matter what shape the rest of the molecule is, as long as those half-dozen atoms are in the right places. It’s called the lock and key model, and so long as a chemical has the key, it will fit the lock. Sucrose and lugduname don’t appear to share any such kind of key.

The term sugar itself denotes a group of chemicals of different lengths of chains of carbon atoms, including an oxygen, and often bent into a ring. The simplest sugars contain just one of these rings, and include glucose and fructose. Two simple sugars can hook together to make compounds such as sucrose, which is really a fructose stuck together with a glucose. All of these chemicals share common structures, and it is easy to imagine how it is that they register as sweet, as they all possess the right key.

Things start to get a bit weirder when you look at sugar substitutes. We are all familiar with sweeteners, such as aspartame, found in a whole host of food products including diet fizzy drinks. Many people presume that sugar substitutes are entirely synthetic and made in a lab. It turns out that nature was there long before the diet industry, and you can find sugar substitutes in surprising places.

My own personal favourite, because it surprised me when I first encountered it on an ecology field trip, can be found at the seaside. Next time you walk along a rocky shore line keep your eyes peeled for fronds of Saccharina latissima, or sugar kelp as it is commonly known. It’s fairly distinctive and easy to spot once you know what to look for. It’s a type of brown seaweed that comes in single, undivided blades, and is often a couple of metres (around 6 ft) long and about 10 to 15 cm (4–6 inches) wide. What makes it particularly distinctive is that the edge of the blade is flat or gently wavy, while the centre is all puckered up. If you allow a length of sugar kelp to dry out, a white powder forms on the surface, which is deliciously sweet with a hint of the sea. Although, if you are going to start licking bits of seaweed, I suggest you consult a proper identification guide first. While sugar kelp is popular in places such as Japan, other nations are not so keen.

Instead you could turn to glycyrrhizin, found in the woody roots of Glycyrrhiza glabra, more commonly called the liquorice plant, and used in the production of liquorice sweets. While glycyrrhizin is only fifty times sweeter than sucrose, it does seem to linger on your taste buds, giving liquorice one of its unique characteristics. It is also best eaten in moderation, as not only can it cause a rise in blood pressure, but it also has laxative effects.

Finally, my last example of an artificial sweetener from a natural source is stevia, or more precisely the steviol glycoside group of chemicals derived from the South American sugarleaf herb. These chemicals are about 150 times sweeter than sucrose, temperature stable, acid-resistant and non-fermentable by yeasts. All of which has made them very popular as food additives, to the extent that both the The Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo have produced stevia-based sweeteners.

What these sugar-free sugar substitutes have in common is that they all bear some structural resemblance to sucrose itself. It therefore comes as no surprise that our taste buds detect them as sweet, as they all possess the key to the sweetness lock. So how, then, does the super-sweet lugduname work? There are a number of theories about our ability to detect sweetness, and the most recent is called the multi-point attachment theory, developed by biologists at the University of Lyon in France. In this theory, the sweetness receptor on the tongue detects not one big structural region but up to eight, smaller and spaced-apart areas – it looks like a molecule doesn’t need to contain all eight regions to register as sweet. It’s not so much a lock and key model as a sack full of locks and a key ring crammed with tiny keys. This also gives us an elegant way to envisage why super-sweet lugduname doesn’t look like sucrose. While the molecules are dissimilar, they must each open enough of the eight locks to qualify as sweet. It may be that the sub-set of locks on the sweetness receptor they each open is different, but our tongue is clearly a lot less discriminating than we would imagine, and all sugar is not equal.

Light and fluffy cake chemicals

I would argue that there are few things more pleasing than a deliciously fresh and spongy cake accompanied by a hot cup of tea. The production of such an appetizing, light and fluffy example of the baker’s art is surprisingly simple. You need two basic things: something that produces lots of bubbles of gas, and a way to trap those bubbles inside the yummy cake. The second part of the job is almost universally achieved by adding egg to the mixture, but there are a couple of options for creating the bubbles.

It is perfectly possible to create your bubbles by whisking air into the eggs, but far easier and more reliable is to use a bit of clever chemistry instead. Most cakes I bake rely on self-raising flour to produce the requisite bubbles of gas. The self-raising part of the flour comes from the inclusion of baking powder at 5 g to every 100 g plain white flour (1 oz baking powder to 1¼ lb flour). What, then, makes baking powder so good at blowing bubbles?

There are two key ingredients in baking powder: the first is sodium hydrogen carbonate. This is its official IUPAC (International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry) name, but it is more commonly known by a number of colloquial names that include: bicarbonate of soda, baking soda, cooking soda or just plain bicarb. The soda bit of the name refers to sodium and is not the interesting bit. What makes this chemical so useful to us is the hydrogen carbonate as, when this is dissolved in anything acidic, it turns into carbonic acid, which quickly breaks down into water and carbon dioxide gas. All of the bubbles inside a cake are made using the breakdown of hydrogen carbonate and are filled with carbon dioxide gas.

As an aside, sodium hydrogen carbonate will also break down to produce carbon dioxide if you heat it above about 50 °C (122 °F). Some baking powder is labelled as ‘double-acting’, and this relies on not only the acid reaction but also the heat breakdown of hydrogen carbonate to produce bubbles.

What makes baking powder really cunning is the inclusion of a second key ingredient, along with the hydrogen carbonate, called disodium dihydrogen phosphate, which sounds terribly complicated. However, this second component is just a dry powdered acid. When you mix it in water, disodium dihydrogen phosphate creates a slightly acidic solution, equivalent to adding a splash of lemon juice or vinegar, but without the smell.

Both elements of baking powder are completely inert when left mixed together in your cupboard but dissolve them in water, or anything containing water, such as milk or eggs, and the chemistry starts to happen. The dihydrogen phosphate makes your cake mixture a little bit acidic and the hydrogen carbonate then starts to immediately produce carbon dioxide gas. Which is why, once you have added liquid to your baking powder or self-raising flour, you want to get your skates on and get the mixture in the oven, so you can set the egg and trap the bubbles. If you leave cake mixture on the kitchen counter for too long before baking it, your cake will not be as light or fluffy, although it may still be delicious.

Putting the cracker into prawn

Whether you call them prawn chips, shrimp crackers or prawn crackers, when they arrive on the table at Asian restaurants, these crispy, curled morsels always disappear before you have time to reflect on what they are, how they are made and if they actually contain any prawn or shrimp. It often comes as a surprise to people that prawn crackers do indeed contain prawn, and the ingredients list is unusually short for what is clearly a heavily processed food. The prawn content is somewhere around 10 to 15 per cent, but the bulk of the cracker is made up of tapioca starch. Converting simple starch with prawn to a bubbly crisp is a marvel of food manufacture. The first step is to create a disc of starch plastic.

The key ingredient in prawn crackers is tapioca starch, which itself contains some scientific surprises. It comes from the tuberous roots of the cassava plant. These roots look a bit like sweet potatoes and are a staple crop for large populations of people living in the tropics. Given this, it’s a little alarming to discover that cassava is also a rich source of cyanide and can lead to both acute and chronic poisoning. There are different varieties of cassava, and the ones known as bitter cassava contain dangerous amounts of a chemical called linamarin, which is basically glucose attached to cyanide. When the root is peeled, or chopped up, enzymes are released that break down the linamarin and release the cyanide. With this in mind, a vital part of the tapioca starch extraction process is to remove all of the cyanide. Step 1 is to finely grate the cassava, which starts the breakdown of linamarin and the production of cyanide. In step 2, you chuck it all in a vat of water and leave it to soak for a couple of days. The cyanide will dissolve into the water, and by changing the water a few times to give the grated cassava a rinse, all of the cyanide is flushed away. You then take the resulting mush and squeeze all the liquid out. The mush you chuck away and the milky white liquid you leave to evaporate. What remains is a very fine, and very pure, starch powder.

It is possible to make prawn crackers by hand, the artisanal way. Take minced prawns, mix with tapioca starch and add a little water to make a dough. Then form the dough into a sausage and steam it. This produces an extremely unappetizing, gluey blob of cooked starch that needs to be dried for a couple of days. It is then cut into thin slices and further dried for a few more days. You end up with a disc of what looks and feels like plastic. It will be slightly translucent and, depending on how thin you managed to make it, pretty tough stuff. Finally, drop this into hot oil and it magically expands, puffing up and turning into a prawn cracker.

If you think this sounds like an involved process, the industrial method is possibly even more extreme. The key to making prawn crackers is to get the moisture content just right. For bulk manufacture they use tapioca starch, dried prawn powder and a tiny amount of water. The resulting powder is placed in a machine that compresses and heats the starch mixture. The pressure involved is huge, at up to 2 tonnes per square centimetre (about 35 pounds per square inch). At this point the starch melts, flows