You’ve probably used food coloring to make your icings more festive. But did you know that, besides their amazing coloring abilities, the liquids actually exhibit behavior?
Researchers at Stanford have been studying the science behind food coloring for years. What they’ve found is that the liquids tend to behave a certain way, e.g. chasing, dancing, or avoidance, depending on their color. This is made possible by something called artificial chemotaxis, which actually mimics the behavior of living cells.
Let’s hear from much smarter people to help explain this… Tom Abate of Stanford…
The critical fact was that food coloring is a two-component fluid. In such fluids, two different chemical compounds coexist while retaining separate molecular identities. The droplets in this experiment consisted of two molecular compounds found naturally in food coloring: water and propylene glycol. The researchers discovered how the dynamic interactions of these two molecular components enabled inanimate droplets to mimic some of the behaviors of living cells.
Manu Prakash…
The physical properties of these fluids give rise to this immense complexity of behavior. For example, chasing and sensing each other, and very much what we call artificial chemotaxis. Chemotaxis is the idea in biology that one single cell can sense where its enemy is, and it brings up all its machinery, and it chases that enemy to try to eat it.
No mention if they made colorful sciency cupcakes afterwards. Please watch this…
