Discovery

Wine windbag need deflating? Try science. (Photo by Brian Maki, Center for Distance and Professional Education)

Uncle Patrick gargles his wine. “I taste blackberries and cherry and oak,” he says, “and a lot of tannins.”

The only thing you know about wine is that it comes in different colors. But, with holiday meals approaching, here’s how to puncture wine windbags, thanks to Washington State University Professor Kathleen Williams:

Precipitate saliva. When Patrick says he tastes tannins, you say: “Tannins don’t have a taste. They create a sensation as they precipitate the proteins out of your saliva.” Tip: Stroke your chin sagely as you pronounce “precipitate.”

Throw in a German word. Patrick swirls the glass. “Good legs,” he observes. You say, “The French call them tears. The Germans call them kirchenfenster or church windows, because they form an arch.” Want more? Try this: “Water has more surface tension than alcohol. The evaporating alcohol pulls the water up with it. When the alcohol breaks through, the water runs down.”

Hit him with brix. Patrick looks at the label. “Oh my,” he says, “14.9 percent alcohol.” You’re ready for him. “Did you know that wines from hot areas tend to have more alcohol? That’s because the grapes have more sugar. As a rule of thumb, every 2 percent of sugar will produce about 1 percent alcohol. So this wine was originally almost a third sugar. Of course, wine makers don’t call them sugars. They call them brix.” Tip: Refill his glass. Keep refilling his glass. This becomes important later.

Diamonds are your best friend. He holds the glass up to the light. Tiny crystals stick to the sides. “It’s going bad,” he says. “Not really,” you say. “Those are potassium tartrate crystals, same thing as cream of tartar. They’re a naturally occurring acid in grapes.” Smile tolerantly, and add, “In Canada, they call them wine diamonds.”

Herbal harmony. Patrick says, “A red wine would overwhelm the turkey.” You say, “It’s not really about the turkey. It’s about the herbs with the turkey, such as onion, celery and sage. What works well is to contrast the herbs with a fruity wine, such as a Beaujolais Nouveau or a Gewürztraminer.”

Make something up. By now, Uncle Patrick should be a bit toasted, so hit him with something ludicrous, but difficult to disprove: “Gewürztraminer has an umlaut,” you say. “The word umlaut is derived from the word omelet and Gewürztraminer pairs well with omelets. As a matter of fact, most umlaut wines go well with egg-based dishes, such as quiche. It’s called a bio-linguistic reaction.”

Fancy footwork. As he sputters to object, quickly change the subject: “Do you know what the best pairing is? Scientists in England proved that it is milk and chocolate chip cookies. Speaking of dessert, how about some pie?”

WSU’s viticulture and enology program offers both undergraduate and graduate degrees, and certificates. For more information go to http://wine.wsu.edu/education.

Even the technological wonders of genetic science can still require some basic, mundane tasks, like cutting pig hairs.

“I spent many, many, many hours snipping the roots of pig hairs,” says Kaitlin Wilson, a Washington State University master’s student in Animal Science. She processed five to seven hairs per pig, in fact, from a total of 272 pigs.

“It was a lot of hair,” says, Wilson, who raised cows and pigs for 4H while growing up on a Connecticut horse farm. “It took me days, hours and hours and hours.”

Pig's tail photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/ashleyb/

But inside those roots lay just enough DNA to determine each pig’s genetic makeup. And by comparing their DNA, Wilson and colleagues here and in Norway found what they believe is the first genetic basis for a particularly gruesome and costly problem: tail biting.

Pigs biting each other’s tails are a big problem. It’s painful and leaves the victim prone to infection.

“We’re not just talking a little bit,” says Holly Neibergs, an assistant professor of animal genetics and Wilson’s advisor. “We’re talking about a kind of mutilation here. They make these huge holes, which isn’t good.”

Farmers in the United States get around the problem by docking, or cutting, pigs tails. This in turn has been criticized as a cruel practice, which is why it is restricted by the European Union. Meanwhile, many EU pigs are getting their undocked tails bitten. One study found roughly one in every 12 pigs falling victim. Factored out over the EU’s 152 million pigs, that’s roughly 13 million bit pigs.

The behavior is thought to stem from modern facilities that don’t have earth or hay in which pigs can play, forage and root. Frustrated, they bite and chew tails. The biting is reduced with more space and materials to mess about in, but that doesn’t eliminate the problem.

Thinking the behavior might also have a genetic component, Wilson processed hairs from Norwegian crossbred pigs that were either biters, victims or neither. She found that, yes, biting pigs had several similar stretches of DNA in their genes. Moreover, she found that victims also had stretches of DNA in common. Biting’s heritability—the degree to which the behavior can be passed between generations—is significant enough that selective breeding can help reduce the number of biters and their victims, Wilson says.

“Who knew the things they could do with genetics?” says Wilson. “I can only imagine where this is going to go in the future.”

Wilson presented her findings at the 2010 Dr. William R. Wiley Exposition of Graduate and Professional Studies held last month in the CUB. Her poster can be seen here (pdf).

The news desk of WSU Discovery has been having more than its share of intellectual fast food this holiday season with the introduction of Google’s new Ngram viewer, which shows the relative frequency of words and phrases in the massive Google Books database. Researchers at Harvard University say the tool offers great promise in a field called “culturomics,” a quantitative view of human culture and society.

The Google books database shows mentions of Cougars pulling ahead of Huskies around 2002.

That sounds like a new major to us, so we ran the notion by Patty Ericsson, associate professor of English and thinker in matters cultural and digital. Her response:

“This is an interesting machine.  As you might guess from my scholarly agenda, I’m a little wary of machine-produced data that doesn’t have smart, knowledgeable human interpretation.  So I think that this word-crunching machine is great as a tool to aid analysis—political, literary, sociological, and more.

“In the hands of someone who knows something about political history, an analysis comparing occurrences of the words “Hitler” and “Nazi” might be worthwhile.  In fact the differences in the results in German and American English appear fascinating to me, but I can’t make any conclusions because I don’t know enough.  In the hands of someone who knows little about such history but tries to make causal links, the results might be misleading.

“In the literary world, this kind of machine-based word crunching has been going on for decades.  A colleague of mine at Dakota State University was doing computer-based textual analysis of Jane Austen and Dickens in the early 1980s.

“I’m also cautious about the data based used for this research.  Any use of the data produced would have to carefully consider the texts included in the database.

“I wouldn’t consider a major on the topic of Culturomics specifically.  It’s too narrow.  But we do have a major in Digital Technology and Culture at WSU and a course in it is the “Rhetorics of Information,” which considers the widespread uses of databases and data crunching.  I’d include the Culturomics machine in that course if I was teaching it.”

For further reading and a tour of popular ngrams, check out the growing list of Twitter #ngram hashtags. And let us know your favorites in the comment box below.

Potatoes Rout Carrots

Meanwhile, here’s an Ericsson favorite:

“I love potatoes and hate carrots,” she says. “Obviously, the rest of the world agrees.”

In Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, pretty much the greatest novel ever written about journalism, William Boot is sent to cover an African civil war with a ton of baggage, including a canoe and a cleft stick to carry his dispatches. The cleft stick has since become a metaphor for far-flung journalistic enterprise and the lengths a reporter will go to get a story back to the home office.

Cold and scenic: WSU geologist Jeff Vervoort took in this view recently on a trip to the striking Koettlitz Glacier.

Instead of a cleft stick, Jeff Vervoort has a laptop and a “very, very small bandwidth,” text-only connection from the Central Trans Antarctica Mountain field camp at Antarctica’s Beardmore Glacier field station. That’s about halfway between the McMurdo Station, the continent’s largest community, and the South Pole.

Where William Boot sent brief, easily misinterpreted telegrams to the Beast, Vervoort is filing for the New York Times’ “Scientist at Work” blog. Times editor James Gorman launched this modern version of the old field journal earlier this year “to give scientists in the field a chance to describe what they do as they are doing it.”

“I am obviously thrilled,” says Vervoort, who majored in English as an undergraduate and now specializes in dating rocks by their chemical signatures.

The first dispatch, by colleague and University of Minnesota-Duluth geoscientist John Goodge, went up on the Times site yesterday. Vervoort and Goodge are now scheduled to have alternate posts as their team spends the next five weeks gathering rock samples over about 1,000 miles.

Logistical challenges aside, it’s not hard to interest people in Antarctic science, Vervoort says in a recent email to Pullman:

“This place appeals to many people on so many levels for many reasons. It is the land of extremes (they  like to call Antarctica the coldest, windiest, and driest place on Earth) as well as unknowns.”

The continent also has an ancient story to tell about climate change, he says.

“Many people think of Antarctica as an ice covered continent and couldn’t imagine it any other way.  But 40 million years ago or so there were not permanent ice sheets on Antarctica, during a period of extreme global warming.  The best guess is that these started forming 35-40 million years ago. Sitting up here at the edge of the polar plateau in the austral summer with temperatures a little below zero degrees F and a stiff wind blowing, however, it is hard to imagine that Antarctica warming up any time soon.”

Blogger/researchers Jeff Vervoort, left, and John Goodge enjoy t-shirt temperatures before heading out on the ice.

The research can also tell an even older story about the earth’s crust, says Goodge in the first “Scientist at Work” post:

“Antarctica was a key piece in Pangea, Gondwana and Rodinia (huge supercontinents formed by the assembly of many of today’s familiar continents at roughly 250, 500 and 1,000 million years ago), and knowing more about its geologic architecture can help to refine the picture of global paleogeography as far back as 1 billion years ago.”

For more on Vervoort’s trip, see our previous post, “Journey to the Bottom of the Earth.”

Update–A few hours after this was posted, Vervoort’s first blog went up on the Times site. Here’s an excerpt:

It is probably impossible to prepare yourself before getting here for what to expect from this large ice-covered continent at the bottom of the world. Like many people, I have seen pictures and videos of Antarctica. I am also familiar with different scientific aspects of Antarctica’s oceans, climate and geology, and I had talked about this trip extensively with John Goodge, the leader of the current expedition, before coming down here. But nothing completely prepares you for this place.

Read more…