This site is a post-script to my teaching page at the
University of Guelph Growth & Structure
of Meat Animals and indexes my research since
retirement at the end of 2006. One experiment
leads to another for the curious scientist – why should retirement
terminate curiosity?
220. Swatland, H.J.
2007. Stratification of toughness in beef roasts. Meat Science, 77: 2-6.
Meat
toughness can be measured with cylindrical cores of meat cut in a shear press.
But a whole roast of beef is a far more complex system, with various layers
affected to differing degrees by cooking, as shown in this research using a
fluorescence penetrometer.
It
is widely known among meat scientists that natural acidification causes meat to
become progressively more pale. This is essential to
give a bright appearance to beef, but may become a problem if it goes too far
in pork and poultry meat. The experiments reported in this paper explain how
acidification changes the optical properties of meat.
The
fact that you are reading this proves that the internet has enhanced the way we
communicate science. Electronic publishing of science produced some major
changes, a few of which are documented here.
Plants
store sugars as starch, and starch granules are a major food ingredient. It is
widely known among food scientists that starch granules appear with a Maltese
cross when viewed with a polarizing microscope. Under certain conditions, the
quadrants of the cross may light up with diagonal pairs of colours. This
research explains why.
Sometimes
waterfalls on the Niagara Escarpment are surrounded by petrified mosses. This research shows how lime is
deposited on mosses.
In
the age of the internet, we all take popular science and the international
communication of science for granted – but how did these important ideas
get started?
Our
remote ancestors ate meat, and so do most of us now. Meat has been around for
the whole of our history – in wars, religions, language, literature, laws
and technology. Here are some of the main points.
Have
you ever seen flickering patterns of light on the forest floor, or on the
bottom of a swimming pool? What
would you see if you were very small and you could swim under mosses in a
waterfall?
Rainbow
colours of oil on water, and rainbow colours on beetles and butterfly wings are
a familiar sight, and the causes are well known . But
what causes rainbow colours on meat?
Water
seeping through limestone makes a major contribution to streams and rivers
feeding into the Great Lakes of North America. Scientists around the World are
watching the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but levels are much higher
in the soil, where it is produced by microbial respiration. Carbon dioxide
dissolves in groundwater, but blows into the atmosphere when the groundwater
emerges into streams. What buffering will vast quantities of slowly moving
groundwater give us against rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere? How
might changes in groundwater acidity and temperature affect our fish? Nobody
knows right now, which is why we need the baseline measurements in this
research paper.
This
shows that iridescence in tuna muscle is just like iridescence in beef – most
likely caused by reflective interference from A-bands.
Preliminary research for adapting on-line prediction
methods to camel meat, including polarized-light interferometry.
From
textile fibers to biological samples it looks as if light scattering in the
sample has more effect on colorimetry than the way in which the color is
measured.
233.
Swatland, H.J. 2016. Interference colorimetry of starch
granules. Color Research and Application 41: 352-357. The subjective
evaluation of interference colours is a standard method of identifying minerals
in rock sections – but the reference charts are highly variable because
they use colorants in an attempt to simulate what happens when sinusoidal waves
interact with the spectral sensitivities of the human eye. Being somewhat reluctant to challenge a
standard method in mineralogy, I chose to work on starch granules and to solve
an ancient problem in polarized light microscopy. Jonathan Pereira, one of the
great pioneers in pharmacology, reported in 1843 that starch granules exhibited
a quadrant of diagonally paired interference colors when viewed under a
polarizing microscope fitted with a selenite
compensator. Research showed that the weighted-ordinate method of colorimetry
could be used to measure this phenomenon and that, as expected, it was a
function of the diameter of the starch granules. OK – this research will
get ignored by mineralogists, but it satisfies my curiosity.
234. Swatland, H.J. 2016. Starch granules in polarized light, following Pereira into the ultraviolet.
Quekett Journal of Microscopy 42: 601-609. This research challenges some current
beliefs held by food scientists and shows that the birefringence of starch granules is
caused primarily by straight chains of amylose.
235. Swatland,
H.J. 2017. Colored clays in a groundwater stream, correlating
fiber-optic reflectance with electrical impedance. Hydrology Current
Research 8:283. Wikipedia suggests that the coloured
clays on the Niagara Escarpment might be caused by acid groundwater. No
evidence of this was found, whereas a combination of palaeontology
and fibre-optic reflectance indicated that clay colour is determined by shale
colour, and that shale colour may be determined by aerobic versus anaerobic
conditions at the time of sediment formation.
236.
Swatland, H.J. 2017. A review of microcolorimetry
for textile, food, dental and optoelectronic industries. Asian Journal
of Engineering and Technology 5: 140-151 Macroscopic colorimetry is an
essential tool for color matching in many industries, but microcolorimetry
has been neglected. From individual fibers in complex textile pattern to the
dental fillings in our mouths – their colors can all be measured.
237.
Swatland, H.J. 2017. On wetting Muscovy glass and a peacock feather, following
Robert Hooke to investigate the colourimetry of meat iridescence. Queckett
Journal of Microscopy 43: 125-130. As the first great microscopist
discovered, multilayer interference survives under water while surface
diffraction does not. Hooke’s discovery is used to show that iridescence
in meat is not from surface diffraction, but from multilayer interference. The multilayers
are the sarcomere discs discovered by Bowman (another great microscopist).
An
invited abbreviated version of #226 above, for a commercial publication.
An invited conference
presentation guessing how basic science, from sensory perception, through x-ray
diffraction for the effects of pH on interfilament separation, to
interferometry in meat, might be used to grade meat.
An
invited conference presentation on how on-line evaluation of meat might be
applied for the grading of camel meat.
An invited
conference presentation on how the terminology of US meat cuts may have
developed linguistically from Ancient Greece to the present day, via Norse and
Old English and French.
An invited conference
presentation on how light scattering affects meat colorimetry.
A review of how
on-line evaluation of meat might be used in South America.
A book chapter
expanding on how on-line evaluation might be used for camel meat.
135.
Swatland, H.J. 2014. Growth of Meat Animals: Muscle. In: Carrick Devine &
Michael Dikeman, editors, Encyclopedia of Meat Sciences
2e, Vol. 2, Oxford: Elsevier. Pp. 70-74.
Explains the
histology of muscle growth in meat animals.
Cold
groundwater in a river bed creates suitable conditions for the spawning of
brook trout (Salvelinus fontinalis).
In some locations along the Niagara Escarpment, groundwater discharged from a
primary aquifer may run, exposed to the atmosphere, down a slope of clay into
the river. At other locations, the flow above clay may be within the overburden
and only exposed at odd sites, such as the stream vent described in this
chapter. In exposed streams,
travertine deposited by the degassing of calcium-rich groundwater after passing
over clay is darker than upstream deposits. Spectrocolorimetry of travertine, clays
and shale, and electrical impedance of clays were used to gather supporting
information. Ecological sampling showed a rich river fauna in the study area,
mostly associated with pristine water.
A
variety of optical methods were used to investigate the flicker patterns of
light in small waterfalls and their splash zones. Flicker patterns are important for the
photosynthesis of plants in and around small waterfalls, especially mosses. In
a forest environment, the intensity of incident light was increased when the
sky was clouded and when deciduous trees lacked leaves. Light penetrated deeply into waterlogged
splash zones by a series of reflections from living moss leaves, as shown by
using polarized light to detect Fresnel reflectance. Penetration was also high through dead,
brown moss below the living moss, but this was because only the walls of empty
cells remained. Flicker patterns in flowing water originated from surface lensing and bubbles, and were measured using optical
fibers. In the splash zone,
flickering was increased by shadowing from moving moss leaves. Shadowing by bubbles was estimated from
transmittance measurements made with a microscope spectrophotometer. Shadowing
from large bubbles was mainly from the Becke line
(refractive index boundary) around the bubbles. Small bubbles cast strong shadows if the
Becke line occluded the central axis of the bubble.
138.
Swatland, H.J. 2018. Polarized light microscopy of moss leaves encrusted with
calcium carbonate. In Mosses. Ecology, Life Cycle and
Significance. Editors: O. Pokrovsky et al.
Chapter 12. P 275-287.A review of studies on calcium
carbonate deposition on mosses to produce travertine on the Niagara Escarpment.
My conclusion is there is nothing special about the moss – it grows fast
and can keep pace with petrification, eventually give
rise to massive layers of travertine.
139.
Swatland, H.J. 2018. Fascinating iridescence. Canadian Meat
Science Association website. A summary of
arguments to support multilayer interference from sarcomere discs.
BOOKS
7.
Swatland, H.J. 2014. Eating
Meat: Science and Consumption Culture. 5M Publishing,
Sheffield, UK.
This
is not a text-book but a series of personal observations and arguments to
support the idea that meat consumption culture can give us a new perspective on
meat science, and vice versa.
TRANSLATIONS OF BOOKS
1.
H.J. Swatland. Estructura y desarrollo de los animales
de abasto. Pedro Ducar
Maluenda (Translator). Vísceras y subproductos. Los tejidos conjuntivos de la canal.
Estructura
comercial de la canal. Distribución anatómica de los músculos
de la canal. Estructura y propiedades de la carne. Diferenciación de las fibras musculares y relaciones neuromusculares. Base celular
del crecimiento muscular
postnatal. Crecimiento y desarrollo animal. Conversión del músculo en carne. Editorial Acribia.
ERRATA. The origin of
the universe was probably the consequence of a divine mistake, so the mistakes
in my work should be viewed in their proper light, as small echoes of the primaeval big bang.
228. The colour figure of iridescence is for iliocostalis not
iliopsoas, but identical iridescence can be seen in iliopsoas, so this error
does not worry me too much.
234. On page 602, corrections made to the final copy did not reach
the printer – straight chains have 1-4 linkage, while branch points have
1-6 linkage.