Hearing conference weekend and science inspired art

This weekend marked the beginning if the Association for Research in Otolaryngology (ARO)'s midwinter meeting. The meeting is a must-go for researchers in the hearing field and normally rotates between a Baltimore, MD or San Diego, CA location.

While I've been to Society for Neuroscience meetings, ARO is a smaller, more focused meeting, which offers lots of opportunities to run into your superstar hearing researchers and talk one-on-one with people directly in your field. The venue for this year didn't hurt either - the conference is held at the Grand Hyatt, smack dab in Downtown San Diego. There's many venues to try within walking distance, and the sunset view is beautiful.

Sunset at the train station

There's something really cool about going to any conference. Whether it's getting inspired to try something new, like reading comics, or even going to the lab to tinker with a new experiment, conferences can ignite a passion that may have just risen, or was a faint memory from the past. For me, this conference got me back into hitting the work research grind and trying to do more things that I enjoy, such as doing more art. In particular, I'm interested with playing with different art mediums to do science-inspired art. Below is a piece that I just did after attending the conference - the little black fingers are similar to what you see in the auditory brainstem, a region of the brain that's important for locating sounds in space.***











"Trying to do more things that I enjoy."

That idea seems so easy to achieve, but we just get caught up with so many things that sometimes the most important things get shoved aside. I'm happy that I'm getting back into art, and have even decided to try new things, like photography (amateur albeit) and pastel art (I used to do sketching mostly).

That said, this blog has done quite a bit of morphing from the original posts. It's become more than just neuroscience behind food. Whether it's a rant about exploring a new part of Orange County and showering you with nature photos, or a cool finding from a science journal, or even a culinary adventure trying to recreate a childhood dish, this blog has definitely become more open with its range of topics. One thing has stayed true though - the core of this blog is to appreciate all things food and science. And hopefully, you get some giggles out of this blog.

Anywho, I've rambled for far too long. Just wanted to update everyone on what's going on. Please stay tuned for future posts ranging from various topics that interest me. I'm playing with the idea of changing the blog's layout to be more accessible, so keep on the lookout.

Until then, happy eating all!

P.S. Special thank you to MOH and my sisters for inspiring me to get back into art! Thanks em ba for supplying the awesome paper and preservant! Thanks to MOH for not complaining one bit while I dirtied up the coffee table with pastel smudges. And thank you all for reading and tuning in to these random postings! 

***The finger-like protrusions represent contacts that are made on a region in the brainstem and are called the calyx of held, named mainly after the researcher who discovered the connection (Hans Held) and the striking resemblance it makes to a chalice, or calyx. Because the calyx of Held provides so many points of contact onto the receiving cell, it provides fast transmission of an electrical signal to the cell, allowing for high fidelity communication.

V-day food love affair

Valentine's Day just passed and the holiday was chock full of young love in the air, people sporting chocolate bellies, and the local grocery store jam-packed full of people buying last minute candy-grams.

This year, I spent Valentine's hanging with four cute guys, including the diva shown above. Tumbleweed, or Bumblebutt, as MOH lovingly calls him, is one of our guinea pigs. He's quite the metro guy, and loves getting pampered in every way, whether it's getting an ear cleaning (you have no idea how much guinea pig wax collects in those cute ears) or having his hair specially blow-dried to perfection following a bath. 

For Valentine's, MOH and I decided to spend the night in and do a special dinner of things we love. 

MOH baked a dessert that I requested, and I would cook an entree that he requested. I requested double-chocolate cookies and MOH requested an authentic Thai dish called Kai palot. 

Kai palot is a pork and tofu sweet braised dish that has caramelized eggs. The sweetness of this dish lends itself to a five-spice blend mixture (contains cinnamon, fennel, sichuan pepper, cloves and anise). When I first tried this dish, it reminded me of a Vietnamese style dish, thit kho, normally sweet and salty and served with fermented mustard greens and pickled vegetables. Thit kho normally consists of pork belly and also features eggs submerged in a light brown broth that you eat over rice. 

MOH's request for kai palot couldn't have come at a better time. After the Vietnamese New Year, I got into a pickling craze.

It started off innocently at first. I saw mustard greens on sale at the grocery store and wanted to make fermented mustard greens to eat with rice porridge. Making pickled mustard greens was simple enough - you blanch the greens and submerge them in a salted water mixture for several days. Then, I saw napa cabbage on sale and was running low on my kimchi reserve. So I decided to up the ante and try my hand at kimchi. The results were pretty good and I was able to make a kimchi that was more forgiving with salt.

After kimchi, I decided to return to my Vietnamese roots and pickle some carrots and cauliflower. Pickled vegetables are a common side dish to eat during the new year. It goes great with just about anything - from thit kho to sticky rice cake to just popping the suckers into your mouth. I decided to make the kai palot and serve with the pickled vegetables I made. The results turned out pretty good and served for a nice V-day meal. It was also a win-win for us also, since our fridge has been loaded up with tons of pickling vegetables.

Hope everyone had a great Valentine's day! Also, it's a three day weekend, so hopefully you all have a great weekend and enjoy the Winter Olympics!

Ingredients for kai palot (modified from Temple of Thai's recipe):

- 4 eggs

- 1/2 pound of pork (belly preferable, but shoulder may do)

- 6 gloves of garlic, crushed

- 2 tablespoons of black pepper, coarsely grounded

- 1 package of bean curd, cut into square pieces (normally made with fried tofu)

- 5 tablespoons of soy sauce

- 5 tablespoons of sugar

- 3 tablespoons of chinese five-spice

- 1 tablespoon of vegetable oil

- 3 cups of water

Protocol:

1. Hard boil eggs - place eggs in water and boil for 15 minutes

2. Cut pork into square pieces 

3. Pound garlic and and place inside stock pot with pepper and oil - stir fry for about 1 minute until you can smell the mixture

4. Add in pork and stir fry until all sides browned

5. Add five-spice, soy sauce and water. Then add peeled boiled eggs into water. Simmer for at least 30 minutes.

6. Add sugar and bean curd pieces and continue to simmer for another 30 minutes.

7. When pork tender (depends on cut of meat), remove from heat and serve over rice with pickled vegetables.

Sure you want to eat that? You just did a run... visual appeal of food changes with exercise

For the past two weeks I started playing in an intramural league for soccer. It's a team made up of fellow grad friends and  has been more fun than I initially gave it credit for. It's a great form of release after a long day at work, and there's this great collegiality among your teammates in sharing the joys of a scored goal (we got 1 point last game, making our final score 1-5, 1 more point than we usually score!) or ragging on bad sportsmanship in a competing team.

Partly why our team is so awesome and we don't get totally slaughtered - we have an awesome goalie!

Another thing I didn't expect about playing outdoor soccer - the amount of soreness that I woke up to. I try to run regularly, but my body wasn't ready for the soccer match. Soccer, in my opinion is considered a high intensity exercise. There's bouts of sprinting down a field to catch a soccer ball, dodging to avoid getting hit in the shins by a stampede of competitive feet, and lots of quick movements to try to intercept balls. The day after our game, I couldn't move my thighs and had a 6 inch bruise and scratch running along my quad muscle, courtesy to the CogSci grad girl who decided to knee me during a play. You know how sore you are when in order to move your legs, you use your arms to pull up your legs... getting older, I tell you.

Despite the soreness, there's this great adrenaline and natural buzz that you feel after doing something physical. It's no secret that exercise is good for you. Exercise promotes brain growth and development (Cotman and Berchtold, 2002). High intensity exercises also enhance metabolism, burning off more fat than alternative exercises (Irving et al., 2008). But how about the effects on food? In particular, does our perception of food or how good something looks, change after exercise? Would our favorite indulgences lose appeal after doing some circuit sprints on the court?

Your call: a chocolate-y delight, or too close in resemblance to something else...?

As it turns out, a recent article published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition investigated how subjects perceive food following high intensity exercises.* One of their findings showed that areas of the brain responsible for "craving" foods were activated more when seeing low-calorie foods than high-calorie foods. This means that after a hard spin session, kickboxing class, or cross-fit boot camp, there's some sort of cross-talk between your muscles with your brain, signaling a preference for you to reach for the apple other than the curly-string fries. One caveat to this study, however, is the subjects were all male, so it would be interesting if there are any sex differences to this finding (maybe evolution would favor women to always crave the higher calorie food to promote survival and childbearing - it could explain why after a long run, I like to reach for a bag of cheetos).

Last weekend was Vietnamese/Chinese New Years. Vietnamese New Year is all about good fortune and prosperity. It's customary to normally ring in the new lunar year by doing a food offering for your ancestors, often cooking many traditional meals (somewhat analogous to Day of the Dead). During this offering, you ask for forgiveness for the past year, ask for luck for an upcoming mysterious new year, and ask for hope for your loved ones to succeed. New Years really focuses on spending time with friends and family and giving well wishes to loved ones.

A traditional setting for New Years - a feast offering for ancestors. Photo courtesy of D. Dinh

This New Years (albeit my greeting comes a bit late), I'd like to wish everyone a happy new year filled with lots of luck and good eating. I'm sure many of us have made resolutions to study or work hard, try to be healthier, procrastinate less, etc., but maybe this year, we can squeeze in moments full of good food and good company.

Good company not always appreciated, apparently by bunny

*The mentioned study was conducted using 15 physically-fit men who did 60 minutes of running at 60% maximum aerobic capacity and a resting control. After each trial, imaging of the brain was done using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to see which areas of the brain were differentially activated. They found that neural areas known as the reward system (insula and putamen) had increased activation to low calorie compared to high calorie food following exercise. In accordance to other studies, researchers also found appetite suppression (lower grehlin concentrations) after exercise.

References:

Cotman CW and Berchtold NC. 2002. Exercise: a behavioral intervention to enhance brain health and plasticity. Trends in Neuroscience. Jun; 25(6): 295-301.

Irving BA et al., 2008. Effect of exercise training intensity on abdominal visceral fat and body composition. 2008. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise. Nov; 40(11): 1863-72.

Crabtree DR et al., 2014. The effects of high-intensity exercise on neural responses to images of food. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Feb;99(2): 258-67.