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Fake Snow from Potato Starch

Posted by Hemos on from the can-you-deep-fry-it dept.

Makarand writes "According to this article on Nature.com German chemists have created a new biodegradable type of fake snow from potato starch for the film industry. Most artificial snow types are plastic and it is impossible to pick up all the snow flakes scattered on film sets. The new snow presents no such problems. A good soaking is all that is needed to dissolve these biodegradable snow flakes. The process involves using starch from corn, potatoes or seaweed and puffing it up to make a spongy foam resembling snow."

5 of 47 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Fake Potato by exploder · · Score: 4, Informative

    Riiight...because as we all know, the reason people are hungry is because there just isn't enough food to go around.

    Idiot.

    --
    Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
  2. Packing Pea ^H^H^HPotatos by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    When you're unpacking all your mail order toys be on the lookout for this stuff. Back in the early 90's we got some supplies delivered to our Bio class in High School and the Packing Peanuts were made out of starch (not sure if it was potato). They look like the Cheese-Doodle type not the S-shaped. They're not as white as the polystyrene kind. If you wet your finger (lick it) and touch one it will be sticky/slimey. We disposed of them by washing them down the sink with warm water. Some spit (amylase digests starch) would prolly speed it up.

  3. Re:how is this "new" ? by stickb0y · · Score: 2, Informative

    Indeed.

    http://csmweb2.emcweb.com/durable/2000/08/01/p18s1 .htm has more information on various techniques filmmakers use for making various storms.

    This new development seems more evolutionary than revolutionary.

  4. How about rice? by jridley · · Score: 3, Informative

    According to the DVD extras on the extended edition of Fellowship of the Rings, they used a rice product, not plastic. So apparently degradable fake snow is not exactly new.

    (wow, how's that for geek karma?)

  5. Re:Fake Potato by MaverickUW · · Score: 2, Informative
    Okay, you're missing a few things here. I happen to work for a farm that supplies potatos to Frito Lay (occassionally up to a million pounds a day). If you saw the number of potatos that normally get rejected or filtered out for some reason, you could understand how this could be a good thing. Like many foods, potatos for human consumption have to meet certain requirements, and those used for stuff like chips have to meet even tougher requirements. As a result, many many tons of potatos are generally thrown out in some fashion or another. Many times they're sent to be mashed up for non-human use, so it's actually doubtful that the people doing this would actually use the human-consumable quality, as that's worth more than double what the really crappy quality stuff is, and the crappy quality stuff still has all the starch in it.

    Perhaps paying farmers for the crops they have to throw away will make more of them more willing to grow more food for feeding hungry people?