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Welcome to another episode of Behind the Science,

Rockstar edition.

I'm your host, Jennifer Fournier.

Today as I'm here eating my lunch

and enjoying my favorite carbonated soft drink,

it occurs to me that in, all my recent travels

around the world, this soft drink

has always tasted the same.

In this episode of Behind the Science,

let's dive into the topic of consistency and control

of quality in beverages.

To shed light on this, I'm going to turn to our very own food

rockstar, Joe Romano.

Hi, Joe.

How are you doing today?

Great.

Hi, Jen.

Great to see you.

Good to see you too, so I know that you've done a lot of work

on beverage analysis.

And I love my carbonated soft drinks

and it always amazes me, as I travel

around the world, the consistency of the taste

no matter where I am.

Yes, beverage manufacturers go to great lengths

to ensure the quality and consistency

of the key ingredients in any geography.

In fact, the quality control labs

at these production facilities

make sure that the additives

such as preservatives,

sweeteners,

and caffeine are at the level

that they should be

and therefore provide consistency and give you

the taste that you expect.

Let me show you on the white board how the process works.

That'd be great.

OK.

First, incoming processed water

is treated and filtered to produce high purity water.

Syrup concentrate is then added along with a sweetener

to produce a pre-mix.

Next, CO2 is added to create a carbonated beverage.

A controlled beverage sample is taken from the pre-mix for

UPLC analysis of caffeine, sweeteners, and preservatives.

If the ingredients meet the target range,

the batch is sent on to the filling station

to be packaged into bottles or cans.

Joe, that was so interesting.

So what happens if they get an unexpected result?

Well, by minimizing the cost of an out of spec batch,

a production facility can save approximately $24,000.

Wow, that's a lot of money.

So it's definitely worth doing QC testing on it.

It sure is.

So my other question is that in this hand, I have diet,

and in this hand, I have regular.

It looks exactly the same.

How can you tell the difference?

Well, let me take some samples and we

can run it on our system.

And I can show you how we tell the difference.

Sounds good.

OK, let's do it.

And Jen, here are the results.

First, we see a standard chromatogram

which shows the preservatives,

sweeteners, and caffeine

from the analysis.

In the second chromatogram,

we see the diet cola,

where we see the non-nutritive sweeteners,

a preservative,

as well as caffeine,

which identifies the key ingredients

in the diet cola.

Now for a regular cola,

what we would see

is the same profile,

except the non-nutritive sweetener

would be absent from the chromatogram.

I have a new appreciation for the quality control

that goes into carbonated beverages.

Waters' kit combined with the LC system

provides a robust rockstar instrument

that the QC lab can rely on.

Now every time I enjoy my favorite beverage,

I know exactly what makes it taste so great all the time.

Check out the links below to learn more

about controlling consistency

using the beverage analysis kit.

And join us next time for another episode

of Behind the Science, Rockstar edition.

For more infomation >> Joe Romano: Why do soft drinks taste the same all around the world? - Duration: 3:53.

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Why do we leave University students to their fate? - Duration: 6:24.

Hello, welcome at this new vlog of Belicons.

Nice that you are watching.

This week my blog and vlog are about students at Universities.

In my blog I was actually surprised about a news report in which they showed that we

can better take notes by hand than by means of a laptop because when we write them down

on paper we will remember them better.

That sounded strange to me, but research seemed to be clear about this.

So next time that I'm taking a course I'll consider taking a pen and a paper with me.

However, after writing my blog I kept thinking about the remark of professor Jeroen Janssen

who said that he didn't want to ban laptops from his classroom for his students are all

adults and thus they should just make their own choices.

Well, that makes sense.

This news report was about University students, so they belong to the people we regard as

the smartest of our societies and they are mostly already about 18 years old when they

first go to a University.

So one could think that they should be able to make responsible choices.

And that this is the way that many people are thinking is not only visible in remarks

as the one of professor Janssen, but also in that students at Universities don't get

as much supervision as younger people do or as people do at a lower level.

In each country the educational system is a bit different, but in The Netherlands college

at a lower level than a University is being called mbo or hbo.

Teachers at those levels often pay attention to whether their students are in class or not.

And if their students are skipping class too often, then at some schools that is reason

enough to tell them to follow that class again next year.

But at Universities they often pay no attention to who is present and who isn't.

These students have the responsibility to be on time and bright-eyed and bushy-tailed

in class each day on their own.

But one can wonder whether it is justified to ask this much of these youngsters.

They might be smart, but they are also still often between 18 and 25 years of age.

And this doesn't mean that I'm thinking negatively about youngsters.

On the contrary, I wonder whether adults, like employees of a University, shouldn't

take more responsibility for their students than they are often doing right now.

In order to make up our minds about this it is interesting to take a look at the development of our brains.

What can we really expect of people between the age of 18 and 25 years?

It might be nice to know that our brains continue developing.

Some parts of our brains do decline during our lives and for that reason it becomes harder

and harder to memorize things.

But we can slow down this process of decline by making sure that other parts keep on developing.

For that reason we sometimes even see people who are over 100 years old learning how a computer works.

If they like to do that, it is possible.

So the proverb 'You are never too old to learn' is a truism.

Time and again when you learn something new, your brain develops.

And physically exercise actually also helps to stimulate your brain to keep developing.

Nevertheless, there is a moment at which we can say that our brains are becoming mature

and that happens somewhere between the age of 22 and 25.

So at that age our brains are fully developed and thus we can make responsible choices on our own.

So youngsters actually miss certain connections in their brains which help them to make good choices.

And for that reason we see that adolescents act based on their emotions, they are focused

on the present and above all, they want to discover new things and are willing to take risks.

A child is fully focused on itself but adolescents start to see that they aren't just a person,

but a person in a society and they need to find out how to live in that society.

So they join a group, they start to experiment with all kinds of things and they think about

what feels good right now and not so much about what they should do now in order to

be able to get a degree in a few years.

So with that in mind, let's take another look at University students.

They are mostly about 18 or 19 years old when they first go to a University.

So their brains are further developed than that of, for example, an adolescent of about

14 years old, but they aren't fully mature yet.

And especially new students come in a new environment, that of campus life, and they

need to find out again how to live in that environment.

And at that moment, they still tend to act based on their emotions and to think in the present.

For that reason we regularly hear that new students agree to terrible initiations that

sometimes also have terrible consequences.

If one would ask the same of someone who is about 35 years old, then that person would

probably say: 'do it yourself'.

But for an adolescent it is much harder to say 'no'.

At the same time we do expect of these people that they understand the importance of being

on time and bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in class in order to listen to the professor.

And we also expect them to be able to make good plans about doing their homework so that

they can get their degree in time.

So even though their brains are almost mature and even though they are smart, it's still

good when people sometimes tell them: 'you are not allowed to do this'

or: 'this should be finished by then'.

Not in order to punish them, but just because they need that.

Or in other words: if you really love these youngsters, you sometimes need to say 'no'.

These are my ideas.

Let me know what you think, on Belicons or on YouTube.

And don't forget to mention your arguments of course.

I'm really curious and I will see you next week.

Bye!