Researchers at Calcutta’s Jadavapur University have succeeded in fortifying the rasogolla, the favourite dessert of Bengalis, with beta-carotene, a precursor to vitamin A. Scientists from the department of food technology and biochemical engineering mixed carrot paste with cottage cheese which went into making the ping pong-like juicy balls. Among the various concentrations tried out, the one with 30 per cent carrot paste was found to possess the highest levels of beta-carotene, they report in the September 2007 issue of the Journal of Industrial and Scientific Research. Carrot rasogollas were found to be quite similar to the traditional ones in terms of moisture, sugar content, elasticity and cohesiveness, but had different fat and protein levels. The fortified sweet could be useful in fighting acute vitamin A deficiency, a major cause of childhood blindness and severe visual impairment in India.

Of swarming

Swarming is said to an attribute of the animal world. Perhaps the best examples of this are a school of fish rapidly changing course to evade a predator, or locusts numbering hundreds of thousands descending on a crop field. A swarm is a system in which the density of particles fluctuates wildly from place to place. Though physicists have tried to develop mathematical models of swarming, there are few experimental systems available for testing them. Now, however, Vijay Narayan of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and colleagues have demonstrated swarming in a table-top experiment involving very simple objects — thousands of tiny copper rods less than a millimetre thick vibrated between two horizontal plates. Reporting their work in Science, they say that their experiment shows how simple small-scale interactions could give rise to large-scale changes in behaviour and could provide a better understanding of “swarming” in living organisms.