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Glassware for beer comes in various shapes and sizes

Photograph by Jonathon Kambouris

Brewers spend years perfecting a chocolaty stout or balanced IPA, but when it comes to showcasing their craft, a pint glass serves about as well as a bucket. To rectify this crime against taste, the glass makers at Spiegelau created a line of beer-specific glassware. The vessels ($24.90 for two stout or two IPA) better convey the complexity of craft brews—and keep them cold and foamy longer.

1) Fizzier IPAs

Bubbles form at nucleation sites, such as imperfections in glass. The IPA glass has a ribbed base, which boosts surface area and, with it, potential sites, so bubbles can form over the life of the pour. .

2) Enhanced aroma

The curved bowl of the IPA glass directs hops’ aroma—which accounts for up to 75 percent of beer’s taste—into your nostrils. Beer lands on the middle of the tongue, so it hits more taste buds.

3) Frothier stout

When beer pours over the edge of the bowl and into the base, turbulence froths nitrogen into stout’s signature head. With every sip, the angled base re-creates the initial pour, reviving the fizz.

Tested: Thinner Glass, Colder Beer?

The more quartz there is in a glass, the thinner it can be. Spiegelau uses almost-pure quartz to make extremely thin walls, which it claims will keep beer colder longer. In our taste test, beer poured into a Spiegelau glass was 2.5°F colder after five minutes than beer poured into a pint glass.

Problem With Pint Glasses

Spiegelau claims that the straight walls of a pint let beer flood into the mouth, triggering an antidrowning instinct that causes the tongue to press against the teeth. If this occurs, beer may not hit every type of taste bud; it could miss sweet ones and taste bitter.

A thick-walled pint glass has the potential to hold onto and, therefore, transfer more heat into a beverage than a glass with thinner walls. Warm beer traps less carbon dioxide than cold beer does, so tepid brews can lose their fizz faster.

This article originally appeared in the July 2014 issue of Popular Science.

Cooksey, Allen/NIST

These are some nice color swatches, don't you think? I can just imagine them as decorative bathroom tiles. But what if I told you these are samples of people's skin? They are! The top set is a series of photos of the skin from the inside of different people's forearms. The bottom set are images of the same people's skin, but the images were enhanced with techniques researchers are developing for medical diagnoses and biometric applications.

You might notice that while it's difficult to tell many of the photos in the top set apart, they're much more varied in the bottom set. That's because different people's skin reflects electromagnetic waves differently. The human eye can only see the narrow band of electromagnetic waves in the visible light range. The reflectance processing technique takes advantage of waves that aren't visible to the naked eye, from infrared light to ultraviolet light.

Because the enhanced images are so different from one another, researchers hope they might be used to identify people in the future. Imagine a face or fingerprint reader that takes into account not only your features, but also your skin tone, as measured by a wide range of light. In addition, some research groups are hoping to develop skin-imaging techniques that will tell doctors more about a person's health. Certain wavelengths of light could show how well skin is healing around a wound, for example.

Before researchers can put these applications to work, however, they have some basics to figure out. The images above come from an effort at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology to determine the best wavelengths of light to use for telling people apart by their skin. The researchers also wanted to check that the differences between people's skin were greater than the error bars of the instruments they used to measure skin reflectance. Their sample size was small—28 people—and not exactly random. (They appear to have simply nabbed people walking down the hall at NIST.) With this preliminary data, however, they determined the differences between individuals really are greater than instrument error, and the results suggest that visible and near-infrared wavelengths may be best for identification purposes. 

The researchers wrote a paper about their work and presented it last month at a conference hosted by the International Society for Optics and Photonics. 

The experimental steel is made of grains that go from small to large

Yuntian Zhu

People's teeth and bamboo stalks may not seem very durable compared to bars of steel. But, a new series of experiments finds, making metals mimic those materials could improve metals' endurance and strength.

A team of chemists from China and the U.S. manufactured steel with a particular microstructure, inspired by teeth and bamboo. The resulting material was both more flexible and able to handle higher amounts of stress than conventionally made steel. In factories, you want both qualities. Structural steel should be able to handle a lot of stress, but it should also bend a little when it comes near its stress limit. That way, it will give engineers more time to fix it before it fails, instead of shattering suddenly.

At the surface, the newly developed steel is composed of grains that are 96 nanometers wide, or about 1,000 times thinner than a sheet of paper. Deeper down into the metal, however, the grains become gradually larger. At its core, the steel has grains about 35 micrometers in size, or more than 300 times wider than the grains at the surface. Of course, all this change in grain size happens over a very short distance. The entire sheet of steel is only one millimeter thick. And remember, the small-to-big transition has to happen at both the top and bottom surfaces of the steel sheet.

The small grains on the surface of the steel help make the metal harder. Meanwhile, the larger grains deeper inside allow the steel to bend. Many things in the natural world also have microstructures that have a gradient of grain sizes from surface to center. The gradient helps them deal with stresses such as weather and wearing.

The China-U.S. team published their steel gradient findings in two papers in the journals Materials Research Letters and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The team isn't the only one to have tried creating metals with gradients. In the past few years, other chemists and materials scientists have made copper and stainless steel like this. (The latest gradient-grained steel is not stainless steel. Instead, it's of a type of steel called interstitial-free.) Those groups, too, found improved flexibility with strength in their metals.

[North Carolina State University]