"project" news and stories

Well, tomorrow is Easter already. I know that the grocery stores are full to overflowing with candy and baked goods for the holiday. That's nice, but wouldn't it be fun to make your own Easter cake, especially if you have young children around?

Victoria over at Candy Addict remembered making this cake in a Home Economics class and thought it would be nice to share. It was very nice of her to share: thanks Victoria! She goes through the process step by step, with lots of pictures, and even provides a shopping list.

If you have kids running around, or you just have a fondness for really cute cakes, this might be a fun project for the holiday weekend. If not, hopefully you'll get a smile out of it.

For his science experiment this year, a middle school student from Boca Raton, Florida decided that he would test the effects of energy drinks on blood sugar. He came up with the idea because the drinks are hugely popular with his friends who feel that the drinks give them a "boost" and was already familiar with blood sugar and testing it because his cousin is a diabetic. Lucas Peel's hypothesis was that the drinks with the greatest amount of sugar and caffeine would produce the greatest increase in blood sugar, giving the drinker a burst of energy.

Over the course of about a week, Lucas drank Red Bull, Rock Star, Amp and water, testing his blood sugar levels twice after each of the three times he tried each drink. He found that, contrary to his original theory, it was "the energy drinks with the least sugar [that] increased blood sugar level." Red Bull boosted blood sugar more than any of the other drinks.

Lucas says that he avoids energy drinks and hopes that his project will help some of his fellow students to realize that they are not a good replacement for a real breakfast.

This isn't the first time that a middle-school student has conducted a science project that attracts a far-ranging interest. Earlier this year, for example, a student in Tampa, FL tested samples of water from the toilets at fast food restaurants and compared it to the ice from the soda machines, only to discover that there were more bacteria in the soda machine than the toilet.

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A masters student at UC Berkeley, Mike Wooldridge, started thinking about the relatively young "sport" of competitive eating and noticed that there were many records, but no way to compare performance results across food groups. He set out to see if he could normalize, or standardize, the results from all types of eating contests and make it possible to compare the performance of the eaters across different foods.

Mike analyzed 23 records and converted them into a rate of ingestion (ROI), resulting in a kilograms per minute value for every food.

The blue bars are the average ROI of given foods (easier foods have higher bars) and the yellow bars are the eaters' records. The big spikes are some of world champion eater Takeru Kobayashi's records, but you can see that, because the rest of the yellow bars are approximately equal, the eaters mostly perform up to the same standards, despite the food involved in the challenge.

[via Trencherwomen]

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After I found the cooking with your car engine photo-tutorial on Instructables, I did a little more browsing around and found something even more, um, impressive. Yes, this is a recirculating fountain brimming with "a gushing torrent of delicious, piping hot gravy." Roughly 10 gallons of it. What's more, the fountain uses peristaltic action to move the gravy, just like us. Yep, a series of moving rollers pushed that gravy from a stockpot in the base, through a rubber hose and up to a tasteful silver bowl. There's even a video clip of the fountain in action. It's surprisingly loud. Gravy and plywood: always a winning combination.

Green Tables is a project started by two health and eco-conscious groups, Les Dames d'Escoffier (LDEI) and the National Gardening Association (NGA), that hopes to encourage people to be more aware of their food, where it comes from and to make better food choices. Their program is called LDEI Civic Agriculture & Garden Initiative and it involves the 26 international chapters of the LDEI getting out and running projects in their communities, from cooking demonstrations to scholarships and other educational classes.

While many of the components of the initiative are public, most of them are aimed at encouraging youths to think about what they ear and, hopefully, to appreciate it more. Green Tables wants to educate people about why they might want to use locally grown foods and increase their environmental awareness. Ideally , participants will gain a deeper interest in community food, gardening and agriculture efforts, leading to both healthier foods and healthier lifestyles.

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