Slashdot Mirror
MIT Creates Superhydrophobic Condiment Bottles
An anonymous reader writes "First we had a superhydrophobic spray that meant no dirt or sweat could stick to your clothes. Then a hydrophobic nanocoating was created for circuit boards to make them water resistant. Now MIT has gone a step further and solved one of the ongoing problems of using condiments: they've figured out how to make a food-safe superhydrophobic coating for food packaging. It means ketchup and mayonnaise will no longer be stuck to the insides of the bottle, and therefore there will no longer be any waste. What's amusing is this seems to be a happy accident. The MIT team was actually investigating slippery coatings to stop gas and oil lines clogging as well as how to stop a surface from having ice form on it. Now their lab is filled with condiments for continued testing of their food-safe version."
Is it durable enough to be used on washless or "rinse-off" dishes? Also possible application as a coating on bathroom fixtures, or perhaps applied to the inside of wax paper bags so the icing stays on my take-out snax.. come to think of it toothpaste tubes and racing swimsuits. Let alone the prank potential!
This stuff should probably be shipped in double walled tanker trucks.. hate to see what it does when spilt on a roadway.
Need superhydrophobic keyboards.
... but it's not, not to the people running the companies that sell the condiments and spec the packaging. They WANT people to waste the product, because that means the companies can sell more, and it's far cheaper for those companies to make more than it is for consumers to waste it. Guess who winds up profiting from the waste?
Another example: something so mundane as toothpaste. For decades there have been TV commercials and print ads depicting actors using completely obscene amounts of the stuff, literally an order of magnitude more than is required for an effective result. Colgate and other companies have been encouraging that waste for decades, and that stuff has consequences when it winds up in bodies of water. I also suspect there was a bit of sinister collaboration in the design of at least one electric toothbrush, again intended to manipulate people to use more toothpaste than required: one model originally had just the useful rotating circular head, but then later added a fixed-bristle region adjacent for - you guessed it - holding more toothpaste.
The final insult: at least one of those makers decided to tinker with the diameter of the toothpaste tube opening, which had been a de facto standard for decades. I have a backpacking/travel toothbrush that I bought in the Eighties, which included its own mini-tube that had to be refilled by screwing a tube of toothpaste into one end and squeezing; this was only made feasible because all tubes of toothpaste used exactly the same opening diameter and thread spacing. Fast forward to 2010 and my purchase of toothpaste made by Church-Dwight, and my subsequent angry discovery that they had increased the diameter of the tube opening such that it no longer fit my old travel toothbrush. Now why would they increase the diameter of the opening? It couldn't possibly have anything to do with promoting incidental waste and selling more tubes of product, could it?
I'm a perennial cynic and skeptic, but I doubt these superhydrophobic containers will ever be used for condiments. Not only would the more expensive packaging cut into profits, the reduced waste would make a dent in them, too.
Should we start long-term medical studies of things before the things are invented?
But seriously, there are a lot of people investigating nanoparticle safety. Some of them across the hall from me. Time will tell whether your fear is well-founded or not.
I spin them with my arm out like a centrifuge and pretend I'm refining the ketchup. Also, woe be to he who doesn't cap the bottle all the way.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
True. Just this morning, I wondered why there hasn't been any long-term medical study about crotch-punching Mark Zuckerberg for hours at a time. Will you injure your hand? Should you wear gloves? Take breaks every 15 minutes? We just don't know. That's why we need these studies.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
True story... I used to work in a restaurant. If you've ever seen the movie cocktail, you'll get a rough idea of how I was at work: one man show. One day the cap was NOT on tightly. Poor girl never saw it coming. Blonde to redhead in .5 seconds.
Super Hydrophobalistic Condimental Bottles,
The glass inside remains so clean just like the twelve apostles,
From them ketchup flows so fast you'll need to use some throttles,
Super Hydrophobalistic Condimental Bottles!
(to the tune of...)
So what would this do to the ability to recycle the materials? A general rule is that recyclers want you to clean glass (rightly so, as ketchup turns to pretty much carbon at the 2000 deg F required to melt glass, thus spoiling the recyc batch), but what would this do under intense heat?
This sig no verb.
True, but then there are things that are organic and food and things that are organic and not food--either be indigestible or outright poison. Meanwhile, most said nano organic things are mostly contained until they enter the digestive track--something which above nano-particles are unlikely to be--and aren't inhale-able/injected--there's very few things you can direct inject--, and the body can usually safely broken down in the digestive track those organic nano-particles or they can be contained and expelled by the body before entering the blood stream--a by-product of billions of years of digestive and defensive evolution to extant, potentially lethal organic or inorganic nanoparticles. But, like I was saying, that's still far from foolproof and there's still lots of stuff that can kill us.
So, yea, I understand your pedantic point, but I'm pretty sure the discussion is on man-made nanoparticles and cutting out "man-made" is just shorthand. Meanwhile, I'm not a supporter of the idea of halting the use of man-made nanoparticles until long-term medical studies are done. That doesn't mean we shouldn't do those studies as man-made nanoparticles used, to see if they really are a threat. It's the same with just about anything radically new and innovative, really, because there's a lot of room for not only positive outcomes but pretty extensive side-effects. I mean, I don't think it likely that all the major conceived designs for man-made nanoparticles (ie, the expected foundation and components) have an inherently Achilles heel of being unsafe, but then who's to say there won't be a man-made nanoparticle version of DDT or asbestos and the component responsible is present in a large percentage of man-made nanoparticles? Such would likely mean simply reworking those man-made nanoparticles to overcome the side-effects. Still, the damage would be done. :/ But, that's just a sad truth of life, with hindsight and everything. I mean, to know if progress is harmful or not, you have to progress first. :)
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
did the curtains match the carpet?
Depends on the time of the month.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
I was actually present once when someone did that the other way around: they were banging on the back end of the bottle with the heel of their hand to try and get it started and the bottle literally separated in half right there in his hand. The neck end slipped through his fingers and crashed to the floor, spraying everyone sitting at our table (and a few tables around us) under their tables from the knees down with ketchup with some broken glass fragments thrown in for good measure.
The best part was his reaction to it, he was so completely unprepared for that possibility that for a few seconds he just kinda sat there with the busted end of the ketchup bottle in one hand (as it quickly emptied of the remaining ketchup onto his lap and the floor) with an expression much like the one on the T-1000's face when he gets blown up at the end of Terminator 2.
Why would Heinz et al bother paying extra so their customers don't waste as much of their product [ie, so they don't return the store and buy more sooner]?
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
No, but we probably should before declaring something 'food safe'
Because Heinz et al can't afford the loss in customers when just one of their competitors releases a "No-Waste Bottle!". Seriously, getting the last bit out of the ketchup bottle has been a 1st World Problem since the stuff was invented. All manner of "techniques" and devices have been invented; Slapping the bottle, standing it on its cap (hence the Top Down bottles not available), inserting a knife to scoop it out...
Besides, as long as you're using ketchup correctly (an additional flavour, not the only one) they're all much of a likeness. If one company makes a bottle which has no leftover bits (which also makes recycling much easier), it'll fly off the shelves like ketchup from a hydrophobic bottle.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
About 25 years ago, on a trip in Czechoslovakia (a few years before the fall of the Wall) I experienced those bags for packing milk. My parents told me that in their childhood also in Netherlands plastic bags were used for milk, but such packing had long since been abandoned. Sure convenient to store and little waste, but that's all there is to them.
When opened, they're a pain to store as they don't have the rigidity of a bottle so tend to fall over. They're hard to grab on to, again no rigidity, so great risk of spills or sprays when picking up an opened bag.
And then they just look plain ugly compared to bottles. And, even though the content is the same, a prettier packing commends a higher retail prices and higher sales. That's just how consumers make their choice.
So long story short: the West used them too, long time ago, and it's not just because that this kind of packing is not used any more for anything but small bags of ketchup in McDonald's.
Want to bet that if this material made its way into products that the bottle would be redesigned and coincidentally the total volume was reduced by a substantial amount. That or they'll hike the price up way beyond the 0.1c or whatever it costs to actually apply it.
Unless, of course, this coating is something we don't want in our dumps . What happens when hydrophobic crap hits the water table? How does it affect the breakdown of garbage back into the environment? Does it solve the problem of plastic leeching estrogen-like chains into food or make it worse? What if it gets into food?
If it is safe however, I propose a protective coating for building foundations, basements and roofs. Include it in paint. Line gasoline tanks. Plenty of places in the world that water isn't welcome.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
TMS'ing a surface just makes it lipophile, so fat will stick to it. If you want a chemical hydro- and lipophobe, perfluorinated hydrocarbons are the way to go (teflon, microwave popcorn bags, muffin forms, basically anything paper or board that contacts food without problems). It seems they are not that healthy, so superhydrophobic structures might be the way to go, at least for food containers. Read up on it, it is pretty cool.
The "West" has used them continuously since at least the 1970s, assuming Canada is still allowed to be part of "The West." As in you can't find milk any other way in Ontario except cardboard for quart cartons, whose shape is already optimized for shipping.
Rigidity: You buy a 99c molded plaster pitcher that holds the thing. You put your bag in, slap the bottom of the container on the counter to seat it firmly, and then use a little cutter to remove the corner of the bag. Some of the pitchers even have a little notch that will hold the bag cutter, and all the cutters I've seen also have a magnet so you can place it on your fridge.
Ugly: Who cares? Cheaper to ship, cheaper to package, and less waste to recycle or throw away. A lot of people think the Prius is ugly too.
I moved from the US, the land of the gigantic gallon jug, to Canada, and I'm thoroughly converted on bag milk, if only for the fact that it takes up a ton less space in your fridge, since it's easier to store a bunch of pliable 1.3L containers than it is one big 3.78L jug.