Reheated Coffee, More Comfortable Mammograms, and the Chemist Who Created Home Ec

There's science behind why reheated coffee is terrible. In the incredible future, we may have better ways to mammogram. Plus, the woman who founded home economics was all kinds of amazing.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to How staff Works. Now. I'm your host, Lauren Vogelbaum,
a researcher and writer. Here at How Stuff Works. Every week,
I'm bringing you three stories from our team about the
weird and wondrous advances we've seen in science, technology, and culture.
This week, we take a look back at the perhaps
surprisingly feminist founder of the American Home a class and

(00:23):
unrelated Why is reheated coffee such a miserable experience? The
short answer science, but first. Senior editor Katherine Whitburne, along
with our freelance writer Aliya Hoyt, seek to answer another
question for us. Will there ever be a more comfortable
replacement for the vice like manogram? Like making a ponini

(00:46):
with your boobs? Is hall Anne Marie Crabtree of spring Hill, Tennessee,
describes getting a mammogram that sounds about right. Although mammograms
are critically important for screening for breast cancer, the experience
is far from delightful. It involves placing one breast startard
time on a machine that clamps it between two plates
while a load dose X ray of the breast is taken.
Susan Brown, Director of Education, with Susan G. Coleman explains

(01:10):
the point of the compression on your boobs like this,
X rays don't go through tissue very easily, so the
breast needs to be flattened out in order to spread
out the tissue. This allows for a better X ray
image with less radiation. Currently, mammograms are the best breast
cancer screening tool we have, but there could eventually be
other ways of getting the same results with no compression.

(01:30):
There's the breast ultrasound, where a handheld device is moved
over the breast to take pictures of it. It's used
to check ab normal results for a mammogram, for instance,
to see what's inside a breast lump. It's more comfortable
than a mammogram, but currently not accurate enough to be
a screening tool on its own. That could change, though,
as the technology improves. A biologically based test is another option.

(01:52):
Comen is funding research into creating a blood test that
could look for the presence of certain proteins in the
blood to detect cancer. Brown says a salive or or
your intest could be a possibility one day too. Here's
another high tech option. The Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility
and Dylon diagnostics have teamed up to develop breast specific
gamma imaging. Here, the patient is injected with a chemical

(02:14):
that would be more likely to be absorbed by cancerous tissue.
Once absorbed, any cancer cells would light up, allowing the
scientists to form a two dimensional image. The imaging is
done by a special molecular imaging camera created by Dylan.
For this procedure, the breast is confined to make it
easier to image, but at least it's not pressed down.
The camera is not yet on the market, partially because

(02:35):
the injected radiation is a higher dose than patients currently
are exposed to during a regular mammogram. Researchers are working
to lower this dosage level, but until we arrive at
the holy grail of a comfing mammogram, here are some
ways you can lessen your discomfort. Number one, if your
pre menopausal, schedule your mamograms immediately after your period when
your breasts are less tender. Number two, use over the

(02:58):
counter pay medication or even breathing techniques like those used
during childbirth to help with anxiety. And number three, talk
to the technician doing the mammogram if you're feeling a
lot of discomfort during the procedure. Keep in mind, though,
that any pressure on your breast is worth it in
the short and long term when you compare that to
the risk of actually getting breast cants. Next step stuff

(03:25):
uditor Eves, Jeff Cote, and our freelance writer Kate Kershner
explored the fascinating life in Times of Allen Richards, the
nineteenth century woman who helped make the study of living
conditions into a science. Women in science have experienced what
some research is called the Matilda effect, the idea that

(03:47):
women's work is systematically under recognized or simply ignored, and
men are given credit exclusively. The effect is evident, for example,
when men are disproportionately given scientific awards and prizes considering
the number of women nominated, but researchers have become keener
to learn how women's work in science has been overlooked
or prone to bias. When one scientific journal switched this

(04:09):
review process to leave out the names of authors, women's
acceptance rates rose seven point nine percent, and it's thirteen
Studies showed that abstracts of scientific papers were seeing as
higher quality if the author was male and wrote about
a stereotypically male subject like physics. Or math, but female
scientists have also been pushed aside for the very fields
in which they study. Let's delve into the story of

(04:31):
Ellen's Swallow Richards, who was instrumental to modern science, yet
her legacy and even entire field was dismissed and appropriated
into real scientific studies, and her story typifies the Matilda effect.
She was the first woman in America accepted into a
scientific school, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which was then
male only. She was also one of the first female

(04:53):
chemists in the United States, a creator of state water
quality standards, and founder of the modern study of domestic
science or home economics. Ellen Richards's career path, by all accounts,
hasn't received much recognition and perhaps has been pushed aside
because it wasn't seen as scientifically rigorous as so called
mail field. After graduating from Vassar College with a degree

(05:13):
in chemistry in eighteen seventy, and facing many rejections for
jobs in the field, she decided to pursue more education.
MTT accepted her, but only as a test case to
see if women could handle the rigor of a science program.
She passed the test after receiving a Bachelor of Science
and chemistry. In eighteen seventy three, she became a leader
in pollution studies and developed the study she dubbed ocology,

(05:35):
which became the basis for ecology. Richard's even taught sanitary
chemistry at her alma mater for nearly thirty years. Richard's
development of authenics, a study she defined as the betterment
of living conditions through conscious endeavor for the purpose of
securing efficient human beings, demonstrates her commitment to improving public
health and scientific education. Her early work as an ecologist

(05:57):
studying air and water pollution led to her interests and
in damning the home environment. She founded the modern movement
of home economics to incorporate science into the tests of
everyday life as a way of improving living conditions on
a household level. Maybe your idea of homemach is simply
sewing a button unclothed and learning to cook an omelet,
And yes, the science does include these household tests. But

(06:18):
what Ellen Richards recognized was that cooking, sanitary conditions, household organization,
and raising a healthy family were absolutely based in science.
Not that women universally embraced their mindset, though some early
women's liberation activists were not fans, believing that homemach just
enslave women to household tests and didn't promote equality. But
Ellen richards work added value and scientific backing to work

(06:41):
that women were already doing, like cleaning and raising children.
She highlighted public health issues like hygiene in luncheon schools,
and household issues issues like arsenic content and wallpaper and fabric.
Much of Richard's progressiveness resided in her uplifting a typically
female sphere instead of urging women into typically male spheres
for recognition radical stuff really. Richards even brought her background

(07:03):
as a chemist into the kitchen, making chemistry part of
the domestic activities of cooking and eating. She promoted nutrition
education and the science behind foods at a time when
diets were often poor and people rarely discussed health. Today,
the science of diet and nutrition is now studied robustly.
But Richards also worked hard to give women and girls
access to traditionally male spaces. In eighteen seventy six, she

(07:26):
founded the Women's Laboratory at m I T, a place
for women to study the sciences, which gave women more
recognition in higher education. We still shuffle the discipline of
home economics now called Family and consumer sciences into a
marginalized field or considered a soft science, although the work
is vital to many professions. Generally it includes the same

(07:47):
studies as one years ago, like nutrition and wellness, housing
practices and research, and family and child development. Yet it
could be argued that society has largely forgotten the woman
who pioneered the home economic movement in make science, education
and professions more accessible for women. Many feels we might
consider more rigorous or important, like sanitation and environmental studies,

(08:09):
are closely taught to Richard's research, just like the Matilda
pet might have predicted. Finally, this week staff out of
our Christopher Hasiotis and our freelancer Desceline Shields calling an
expert to explain the chemistry of coffee? Why is it
so delicious hot or cold? And so much the opposite

(08:32):
once it's been reheated. Hot coffee is supposed to be hot.
Cold coffee is supposed to be cold. That's the deal,
ask anybody. The problem, then, with hot coffee is that
you can't drink the whole cup while it's at optimal
temperature unless you're willing to really guzzle it. So when
it gets cold, you've got a few choices. Just drink

(08:54):
it cold, reheat it, or pour the cup down the
drain and start over with a new pot. All three
of these approaches are either perfectly fine or completely barbaric,
depending on whom you ask to. Some hot coffee that's
gone cold is revolting to others. The reheating process renders
it completely undrinkable. But tell that to the person who

(09:15):
pops a cup of nine hour old java into the
microwave at four p m each afternoon just to power
through until bedtime. Pooh pooing your scornful commentary. Research into
the flavors involved in reheating this humble drink is pretty
much non existent. But everything most likely has to do
with our sense of smell. Humans aren't great at separating
our gustatory and old factory responses our taste and smell responses,

(09:38):
and coffee has aromas and flavors that hit all five
of the tastes that can be picked up by your tongue. Sweet, salty, bitter, sour,
and savory. Yes, fine, you can call it ummmy. So
your personal sense of smell has a lot to do
with how coffee tastes to you, whatever the temperature or
however that temperature was achieved. But listen, the chemical makeup

(09:59):
of coffee is a stou doingly complex. Even though its
reputation relies heavily on the presence of caffeine, Coffee gets
its flavor from around one thousand different chemical compounds. Also,
the final flavor of the coffee you enjoyed this morning
was the product of a dizzying array of variables, including
temperatures and weather conditions, the coffee beans experienced when the

(10:19):
beans were harvested, how they were dried, how they were
stored and roasted, and how they were ground and brewed.
So while the compound three methyl butinol might make your
cup of joe taste a little caramel like, and ethyl
nonanoate may give it some fruit of your notes, each
step of the process either brings out or suppresses any
one of these many aromatic compounds differently. We spoke with

(10:41):
Christopher Hendon, a postdoctoral fellow in a chemistry department at
m I T and author of Water for Coffee, a
book about how coffee interacts with water. He told us
reheating coffee in principle can be an absolutely fine approach
to achieving a tasty beverage. In practice, this is not
usually observed because people reheated in ways that promote the

(11:01):
loss of delicious volatile compounds, and so the process of heating, cooling,
and heating again drives smelly and tasty compounds right out
of the cup. According to Hendon, coffee experts seem to
prefer a drink that has been brewed within the past
five to twenty minutes, and it turns out that most
people prefer the coffee as it cools to around a
hundred and fifty degrees fahrenheit or sixty five degrees celsius.

(11:25):
This has to do with the way our taste pathways
respond to temperature in our food. When something we put
in our mouth is too hot or too cold, we
can't detect all the compounds that contribute to its flavor,
and since coffee has loads of these compounds, the temperature
of the drink really can affect the taste. Bringing the
coffee brings out these aromatic compounds, but whether the cooling
process changes the actual chemistry seems to be controversial. Hendon

(11:49):
says it's absolutely benign, while others claim it makes the
drink more acidic as the coffee that's exposed to the
air oxidizes, So reheating coffee to the same temperature it
was when it was first brood might help you reach
that sweet spot temperature wise, but it also has the
potential to cause additional chemical reactions that further alter the flavor.
And if you're reheating coffee that already has milk or

(12:11):
sugar in it, that's even more in the way of flavors, proteins, chemicals,
and compounds to contend with. So although many coffee condostours
will tell you it's a lost cause once your coffee
goes cold, others say it's just important to reheat your
coffee as slowly as you can in order to prevent
additional chemical reactions. If you're worried the ghosts of past
foods heated in your microwave or coming back to hot

(12:32):
your reheated coffee, Hendon says that's actually pretty unlikely, telling
us that the concentration of volatile chemicals in say, splattered
pasta sauce, is pretty low, so he'd be surprised if
we could attribute the bad taste of microwave coffee to
only that the websites of large coffee shop chains even
speak out against microwaving their coffee. But also there's advice

(12:53):
out there for nuking coffee if you must, so pass
that info along before your next coffee argument pizza. That's
our show for this week. Thank you so much for
tuning in. Further thanks to our audio tex Tristan McNeil,
our producer Dylan Fagan, and our editorial liaison Alison Ludermilk.
Subscribe to now Now for more of the latest science

(13:14):
news and send us links to anything you'd like to
hear us cover, plus what's your favorite flavor? Mine is bitter.
You can send us an email at now podcast at
how stuff works dot com, and of course, for lots
more stories like these, head on over to our home
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