Bud Light or Merlot? Twitter Maps Show Alcohol Choice by State
A map of "cheap" beers as discussed in thousands of geo-tagged tweets on Twitter.
Matthew Zook, "The Geography of Beer" (Springer, 2014)
Open Wide: 3D-Printed Foods Made to Eat: Photos
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Ink seems so retro now that machines can custom-print myriad 3-D objects, including snacks. Here are some of the most impressive edibles to emerge from 3-D printers so far. Cornell University’s Creative Machines Lab is at the forefront of 3-D printed food. The lab’s Fab@Home project led by PhD candidate Jeffrey Ian Lipton uses solid freeform fabrication to print interesting snacks. Lab researchers worked with the French Culinary Institute to print this space shuttle from cheese. 3-D Printing Is Getting Ready to Explode
Cornell Creative Machines Lab
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Printing with chocolate is a no-brainer given its consistency but what used to be a novelty has started going mainstream. Chocolate companies are using 3-D printing tech in new ways, like this tractor printed for Nestlé and Android KitKat’s Chocnology exhibition.
Paul Jacobson, Flickr Creative Common
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Using food like ink can be much trickier than generating a mold from 3-D tech. Several years ago Windell Oskay and his team at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories custom-built a 3-D fabricator that fused sugar together into sculptures. More recently 3D Systems released the ChefJet printer to produce confections and cake-toppers.
Windell Oskay, Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories
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One day the pizza question could be, Fresh, frozen or printed? The Barcelona-based startup Natural Machines printed fresh pizzas using a 3-D machine prototype called Foodini in 2013. At the same time, NASA gave a grant to the Systems and Materials Research Corporation in Austin to develop pizza-printing capabilities for space. 3D-Printed Pizza to Feed Colonists on Mars
Youtube Screengrab, Natural Machines
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The crew at Cornell University’s Creative Machines Lab did print thick cookies containing the letter C but German designer Ralf Holleis produced fewer crumbs. He collaborated with a professor at the University of Applied Sciences Coburg to print holiday cookies from red and green colored dough.
Cornell Creative Machines Lab
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Printed meat doesn’t sound all that appetizing but that hasn’t stopped anyone from trying. The startup Modern Meadow is working on developing humane, bioprinted meat while Natural Machines used their Foodini to create real swirled hamburgers -- as well as the buns and cheese to go on top.
Youtube Screengrab, Natural Machines
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These chips might look like ramen noodles but researchers at the Cornell Creative Machines Lab printed them from corn dough. The flower shape allowed for even frying, Fast Company reported. If you want pasta, Natural Machines says its Foodini printer can serve up gnocchi and ravioli.
Cornell Creative Machines Lab
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NO Research envisions using 3-D printing to address world hunger, although some might squirm at their proposals. Their food printer can generate nutrient-rich snacks from alternative ingredients like algae and even mealworms.
TNO Research
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If telling kids to eat broccoli because it’s “little trees” doesn’t work, perhaps Natural Machines’ 3-D printed spinach quiche will. To tempt picky young eaters, the Spanish startup produced vegetable snacks in the shape of butterflies and dinosaurs using their Foodini printer.
Natural Machines
California and the Northeast love wine, Colorado and the Midwest quaff beer, according to new maps of American alcohol preferences as filtered through Twitter.
Using geotagged tweets from between June 2012 and May 2013, geographers mapped U.S. preferences for wine versus beer, as well as for beer brands. When reaching for light beer, Easterners are likely to reach for a Bud Light, while many Westerners opt for Coors Light, they found.
The maps and the findings appear as a chapter in the new book "The Geography of Beer" (Springer, 2014) and arose from the research blog floatingsheep.org, said chapter co-author Matthew Zook, a geographer at the University of Kentucky. [ See Which US States Like Certain Beer Brands (Infographic)]
If you've ever had one too many beers with your friends one night, you'll know how terrible that next morning can be. Is there a type of alcohol that gives a worse hangover than the others?
"The whole point of the Floating Sheep blog is just to play around, to do different things and silly things that might not make sense in an academic setting," Zook told Live Science.
Wine vs. beer
Zook and his colleagues collected tweets from the 48 contiguous U.S. states. First, they compared tweets about wine versus beer across the country. Unsurprisingly, a higher proportion of winetweets come from Washington, Oregon and Northern and Central California — wine country.
Wine references on Twitter were also concentrated in the Northeast Corridor from southern New Hampshire across much of New York state down to Washington, D.C. Tweeters talked about beer and wine approximately equally in North and South Carolina, with wine making a resurgence in Florida.
Beerwas more popular than wine in a swath of the country starting in western Pennsylvania extending down the border between North Carolina and Tennessee. This beer-loving region extends west through eastern Kansas and Oklahoma, with the exception of the Memphis metro area, which leans toward wine. There was not enough data across most of the Great Plains region and West to differentiate preferences, though Coloradans are more likely to tweet about beer than wine.
Beer brand geography
Next, the researchers looked at some specific beer categories. They started with light beers, because these lower-calorie beverages are so popular. The tweet data showed Bud Light dominates most of the eastern half of the country. Coors Light makes a strong showing in Colorado, California and western Oklahoma. Busch Light is the light beer of choice in Iowa and a small region stretching past its borders, while the Midwest chooses Miller Lite.
Next, Zook and his colleagues turned their sights to "cheap" beers, loosely defined as affordable brews, both domestic and imported.
"It was just, I don't know if I should call it nostalgia for my misspent youth," Zook told Live Science.
They found that cheap beers clustered around their breweries of origin: Sam Adams in New England and Chicago's Goose Island around the Great Lakes. Lone Star dominated southeast Texas, and people in Southern California loved their Corona. Upstate New York and Michigan tweeted about Saranac, and Colorado and New Mexico remained loyal to Coors.
Twitter users aren't a representative sample of Americans, Zook said, but the findings are exciting, because they show that what people talk about on Twitter tracks historical and cultural patterns you'd expect in real-world behavior, such as Coloradans favoring the Coors brewed in their state. Similar work could be done looking at the distribution of small craft brews, he said.
"This is really where it gets really exciting, when you start comparing what kinds of things are being tweetedin a particular place versus what's being tweeted in another place," Zook said. "There's where you start getting some interesting differences in attention or cultural preoccupation."
Original article on Live Science.
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