Monday, December 19, 2011

Fatstronaut

I like this one for a couple reasons. It's got an astronaut, it's got ice cream, it's got a fat guy chasing ice cream. Pretty simple. More so because when I ran a search for "What would happen to ice cream in a vacuum"  I found an answer. There was a post in a The Science Forum, which I might add is very aptly named. 

Here's an excerpt:
The whole thing will probably become freeze-dried ice cream/fruit beginning with the outside and working its way inward, depending on the length of exposure. The technical term is lyophilization, where everything freezes and the water sublimates. People see this in "shrunken" ice cubes in ice trays left for a long time in the freezer. The whole thing will freeze, but the lyophilized outer layer may prevent the rest from drying out. Same idea with the meat ... it will freeze-dry, and the vacuum of space will also disrupt/burst the cells. If you want these foods "cooked" to destroy harmful microbes, then few things survive lyophilization, so it should be safe.

To "revive" either, you'd need to add water, but you'll probably end up with a soup of molecular parts, which hardly sounds appetizing.

No comments:

Post a Comment