Culinary biomimicry
Thursday, October 10, 2013 - 13:01
in Physics & Chemistry
(Phys.org) —As any chef knows, preparing good food is just physics, or was that chemistry? Either way, the state of the art in cooking increasingly looks to science for inspiration. Engineers at MIT have partnered up with culinary collaborators from the industrial world, to bring us two edible enigmas—the self-propelled cocktail boat, and the floral pipet. Their recent paper, just published in the journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics draws on the natural mechanics of capillary action as perfected in plants, and the ballet of surface tension as virtuously demonstrated by water-walking insects.