Sugar, Sugar

DAY ONE:  We started a new online class today. Called "Science & Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science," it's offered through edX. This will be CJ and Annabelle's first edX class. All of their previous college-level courses have been through Coursera. The class' lead teacher is Michael Brenner, an applied mathematics professor at Harvard. (That's right, we've gone Ivy League!)

Here's the 'trailer' for the class.

It's not too late for you to join in the fun! https://www.edx.org/course/harvard-university/spu27x/science-cooking-haute-cuisine/639

We enjoyed the material so much, we wound up watching the whole week's worth of videos today! They covered everything from an introduction to the properties of fats, proteins and carbohydrates to molecules to the history of science in cookbooks. All fascinating stuff.

At one point professor Brenner was talking about sugar. He talked about how hard sugar crystals are (as compared to how squishy some other foods are).  Annabelle captured the fact in her notes. :)

Professor Brenner also talked about how readily sugar dissolves in water and, he said, that's one of the ways soda companies are able to put so much sugar in pop. He suggested viewers could stop the video and conduct an experiment, dissolving 2 cups of sugar in just 1 cup of water (ew, gross, isn't it?). And so we did just that (pictured atop the blog today).

Another thing we learned about was the very first high pressure cooker. It was invented by a French physicist, Denis Papin, in 1679.

Here it is, 330 plus years after Papin's invention, and I've never used a pressure cooker. They scare me. Apparently Papin had his fair share of explosions while developing his 'digester.'

The drawing on the left is Robert Boyle and Papin inspecting the 'digester.' The sketch on the right is the digester.

SLINGSHOT: I was surprised to see a Yahoo! news headline today that NASA's 8,000-pound Juno spacecraft will be whizzing by Earth tomorrow - just 350-miles overhead!

That thing was launched in August of 2011, but it's coming near to Earth for a slingshot-like maneuver to help it build up speed for its transit to Jupiter. It's expected Juno will pick up about 16,330 mph (26,280 km/h) after tomorrow's maneuver. 

Juno's scheduled to arrive to Jupiter's orbit in July of 2016. It will then circle our solar system's largest planet for an Earth year, using eight instruments to study the Jovian atmosphere, gravitational field and magnetic field with eight different science instruments. Juno has three big solar arrays, each about the size of a semi-with-trailer. It will be the first solar-powered probe to visit the outer solar system.
Graphics from NASA - via other sources, because NASA's web sites are still all shut down.

More Juno photos here: http://www.space.com/12495-jupiter-juno-mission-photos-gallery.html

MORE TO COME: I am falling behind on getting our England travelogue into the blog. Tomorrow I'll get back on track.