But a new study has taken it to the next level by scanning... some cheese.
OK, this is not quite true. The study used NMR spectroscopy to analyze the chemistry of some cheeses, in order to measure the effects of different kinds of probiotic bacteria on the composition of the cheese. NMR is the same technology as MRI, and indeed you can use an MRI scanner to gather NMR spectra.
In fact, NMR is Nuclear Magnetic Resonance and MRI is Magnetic Resonance Imaging; it was originally called NMRI, but they dropped the "N" because people didn't like the idea of being scanned by a "nuclear" machine. However, this study didn't actually involve putting cheese into an MRI scanner.
But the important point is that they could have done it by doing that. And if you did that, what with the salmon and now the cheese, you could get a nice MRI-based meal going. All we need is for someone to scan some vegetables, some herbs, and a slice of lemon, and we'd have a delicious dataset. Mmm.
How to cook it? Well, it's actually possible to heat stuff up with an MRI scanner. When scanning people, you set it up to make sure this doesn't happen, but the average fMRI experiment still causes mild heating. It's unavoidable.
I'm not sure what the maximum possible heating effect of an average MRI scanner would be. I doubt anyone has gone out of their way to try and maximize it, but maybe someone ought to look into it. Think of the possibilites.
You've just finished a hard day's scanning and you're really hungry, but the microwave at the MRI building is broken. Not to worry! Just pop your fillet of salmon in probiotic cheese sauce in the magnet, and scan it 'till it's done. You could inspect the images and the chemical composition of the meal before you eat it, to make sure it's just right.
Just make sure you don't use a steel saucepan...
Rodrigues D, Santos CH, Rocha-Santos TA, Gomes AM, Goodfellow BJ, & Freitas AC (2011). Metabolic Profiling of Potential Probiotic or Synbiotic Cheeses by Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) Spectroscopy. Journal of agricultural and food chemistry PMID: 21443163
8 comments:
Funny post. Boys and their toys. Imagine what one could do with the LHC. Fire cheese derived particles and let them collide with fish derived ones. Unified Theory of Food gets posed. And indeed the answer is still 42
Nice. I once worked with a vet who was on a macrobiotic diet, so of course he could not use the microwave. When he arrived in the morning he would use the autoclave to heat up his breakfast.
Wow.. get a life? That would be my reaction if I caught some dude sizzling his tucker in the tube. I wonder if you can tan in there..
I've often considered writing a series of satirical articles entitled something like "How to use your $3 million MRI scanner as a (microwave oven)."
In addition to an inefficient food heating device, you could use your expensive scanner to measure barometric pressure (so much cooler than a barometer, yet so much more costly), as a pH meter (31-P NMR), as a thermometer (59-Co NMR)...
Though given that we are already using them to read people's minds I think our credibility is already weak. See previous work by some of my former colleagues:
www.ufbi.ufl.edu/~amris/research/fmri_esp.pdf
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For the record, even if you ran the RF at 100% duty cycle on a typical clinical strength scanner (1.5 or 3 T) you'd get very inefficient heating via spin absorption of energy. You really need to be at very high magnetic fields, 20+ T, and into GHz frequencies to where rotational absorption is more efficient. An electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) scanner is more the ticket!
Damn. No MRI cookery for a while, then.
Thanks for the link to the ESPfMRI, I hadn't seen that one!
That was wicked
hmm maybe if I get rich, I'd buy an MRI and use that to cook my meals :P for the probiotic bacteria, are those the probiotic strains they're testing? I've read in http://probiotics.mercola.com/probiotics.html that there are many strains and each of them have different effects. And I've read there are thousands of probiotic strains out there. maybe some strains could make the cheese jellylike? :P
Quite helpful material, thank you for this post.
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