Mayonnaise: the original nanotechnology
Homemade mayonnaise. © Dennis Hawkins.
JB: This is Earth and Sky. Scientists are manipulating particles the size of just few atoms . . .
DB: . . . to create materials with fundamentally new and different properties. This is nanotechnology. Nano materials are already in the marketplace. It’s strange to think of fundamentally new materials. But there’s one nano structure we all know –mayonnaise – made from blended oil, lemon and egg.
Carl Batt: What you’re doing is you’re taking those components . . . and creating something that doesn’t exist at a macroscopic scale. So it doesn’t taste like lemon it doesn’t taste like egg, it tastes like something totally unique…what makes that kind of creamy feeling in your mouth is also all those little properties interacting at a very, very small size scale
JB: That was Carl Batt, Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor of Food Science at Cornell University. Mayonnaise was first concocted by a French chef in 1756. Today, says Dr. Batt, scientists are making new nanostructures more intentionally.
Carl Batt: So now we have technology to not accidentally discover something like mayonnaise by whipping together these ingredients . . . Now we have the ability to now make those materials in a much more deliberate, much more predictable fashion.
DB: Come to our website – earthsky.org – with your questions and comments about nanotechnology. With thanks to the National Science Foundation, we’re Block and Byrd for Earth and Sky.
More with Dr. Carl Batt:
Everything has a nanometer structure to it…so all matter has some sort of nanometer structure. What nanotechnology’s all about is really manipulating that structure so that you’re revealing what’s important and what makes that structure unique at that size scale?We’re making particles so small that they don’t separate, they don’t respond to gravity…
For example, fog is a nanoscale material. If you take all that water collect it and put it into drops big enough, it falls to the earth and it’s called rain. But when you take it and disperse those particles into very fine particles then basically what you have is fog, and fog has this sort of translucent effect to it, it bends light, it changes our ability to see through it, and it’s the same material you have in rain, except the particles are much much smaller…
Now we have technology to not accidentally discover something like mayonnaise by whipping together these ingredients and then 150 years later looking under a microscope and saying “ah ha! This is why …it behaves the way it does. Now we have the ability to make those materials in a much more deliberate, much more predictable fashion?When you start to understand how things behave at the nanoscale and what structures look like at the nanoscale, then you have a much greater intuitive sense of how to manipulate those materials
Thanks to:
Carl A. Batt
Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor
Director, Cornell University’s Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research
and Co–Founder, Main Street Science
Ithaca, New York
