Culinary Medicine—Jalebi Adhesions

Biomimicry and the culinary arts.

We present the results of a recent collaboration between scientists, engineers and chefs. Two particular devices are developed, both inspired by natural phenomena reliant on surface tension. The cocktail boat is a drink accessory, a self-propelled edible boat powered by alcohol-induced surface tension gradients, whose propulsion mechanism is analogous to that employed by a class of water-walkin...

Focal adhesions

What are they? Focal adhesions are the anchor points of the cell. These dynamic cytoskeletal structures are regions where the cell membrane firmly attaches to the extracellular matrix or the substratum. At the same time, focal adhesions provide scaffolding; they associate with an elaborate actin network inside the cell. Importantly, it’s now known that focal adhesions also act as communication ...

Pelvic adhesions

Integrin adhesions

Cell migration requires the coordination of adhesion site assembly and turnover. Canonical models for nascent adhesion formation postulate that integrin binding to extracellular matrix (ECM) proteins results in the rapid recruitment of cytoskeletal proteins such as talin and paxillin to integrin cytoplasmic domains. It is thought that integrin-talin clusters recruit and activate tyrosine kinase...

Computational Creativity in the Culinary Arts

This work examines the potential for computational creativity in the culinary arts. In particular, we present the outcome of our efforts to create an artificial chef that produces novel salad recipes with limited human assistance. Our system was designed in two steps: first, we constructed a statistical model to rank recipes. Then, we experimented with various search algorithms to explore the s...