Suggestions to prevent the dreaded onion-induced tears in the kitchen run the Ideas of ideas– Freeze from them, to cutting them under water, to sporty special glasses, to even fill some bread in your mouth. But what does the actual science say about how you can escape your next onion meeting? According to a team of physicists at Cornell University, it’s all about the sharpness of your favorite weapon and your speed of approach. Their findings are recorded in one preprint study– And it is even a small onion guilotine.
Onions have been an agricultural staple to at least 3000 BC. Ancient Egyptians actually she honored As representations of eternity because of their concentric layouts and the vegetables would place in the graves of pharaohs. Apart from their spiritual use, onions also have Very clear health and medicinal benefitsEspecially when it comes to their food, antioxidant content and antibacterial properties.
But after more than five million years of use around the world, the fact that in particular one onion compound is still a problem before our eyes: Syn-Propanethial-s-Oxide. The chemical is released in the sulfur -rich spray that is accompanied by the dicidation of the vegetables, which then travels through the air and eventually comes into contact with your tear tubes.
To test the dynamics of these aerosols and how to best avoid it, the Cornell researchers set up a small guillotine that is equipped with different steel knives before coating on the onion rooms with black spray paint. This was not to put a more funeral mood in the lab, but instead to help the team follow the deformation of the onion in response to the knife. After using an electron microscope to measure the width of the manure tip (which varied between 5 and 200 millimeters), they started cutting at speeds between 1.3 and 6.5 feet per second (or 0.4 and 2 meters per second). But not a word of whether the current can match Guinness World Record For most onions were peeled and cut in a minute – 21.69 ounces.
Their recordings clearly showed that sharper knives offered fewer drops that travel with less energy. The more dull the knife, the more it was liable to bend the skin of the onion before it cuts. These delays kept elastic energy that built up pressure in the vegetables before they eventually cut open, which resulted in a more explosive release of SAP. In some cases, the aeros roll particles reached speeds around 141 feet per second. To make matters worse, those drops are fragmented while they fly through the air to create a still diffuse fog of completely natural club.
Dull blades can be such a nuisance that they even create no less than 40 times as many drops as a sharper alternative. In the meantime, faster cutting speeds generated four times as many particles as slower speeds.
The data from this preprint must still be assessed. But this research seems pretty clear that a sharp knife and a slow approach will most consistently minimize the unwanted effects of onions. What you do with all those cut pieces, however, is entirely up to you.