Homebrewing is a niche hobby today, but before the industrialization of the industry, a lot of beer was made in people’s kitchens. Li Liu, a professor in Chinese archaeology at Stanford, was part of a team that recently discovered a 5, 000-year-old beer recipe that she figured could be recreated at home. The process was approachable enough for students in her Archaeology of Food: Production, Consumption and Ritual course to make in the classroom, so that’s what they did. The recipe, found during research that presents the earliest known evidence of beer production in China, consists primarily of grains like millet and barley, as well as Job’s tears (a type of grass native to southeast Asia) and traces of yam and lily root. The concoction produced is thicker than modern beers, and one student said it had “a pleasant fruity smell and a citrus taste, similar to a cider.” Liu said she was surprised to find that barley was part of the recipe, since the earliest evidence of barley seeds in China dates back to about 4, 000 years ago. This could mean that barley was first brought to China for alcoholic uses, rather than other food purposes. “Archaeology is not just about reading books and analyzing artifacts, ” Liu said . “Trying to imitate ancient behavior and make things with the ancient method helps students really put themselves into the past and understand why people did what they did.” Ancient drinks have captured the imaginations of many consumers and enthusiasts, which is why breweries like Dogfish Head make their own throwback beverages based on the traditions of yesteryear. For those wanting to learn more about the process, watch Liu explain the process in the video below. Source: Stanford
View article:
Stanford students recreated a 5,000-year-old Chinese beer
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: Nearly 1% of carbon emissions annually can be attributed to paper production, even though we recycle much of the paper we produce. Yadong Yin has a solution. He and his colleagues at the University of California at Riverside have invented a type of paper that can be printed on using just light, erased by heating, and reused up to 80 times. Yin created nanoparticles, which are a million times smaller than the thickness of human hair, with the dye Prussian blue, or its chemical analogues, and titanium oxide, which is commonly used in white wall paint. This mixture is then applied to normal paper. When the coating is exposed to ultraviolet light, electrons from titanium oxide move to the dye in the nanoparticle. This addition of electrons makes the blue dye turn white. Focusing the ultraviolet light into shapes, you can print white words on a blue background — or blue words on a white background, which are easier to read. If left alone, the paper reverts to its original state in five days. That process can be accelerated by heating the paper to 120 C (250 F) for 10 minutes. Read more of this story at Slashdot.