Cheese

The physics of frilly Swiss cheese “flowers”

For their experiments, the authors of the PRL paper selected samples of Monk’s head cheese wheels from the Fromagerie de Bellelay brand that had been aged between three and six months. They cut each cheese wheel in half and mounted each half on a Girolle, motorizing the base to ensure a constant speed of rotation and making sure the blade was in a fixed position. Their measurements of how the cheese deformed during scraping enabled them to build a model based on metal dynamics on a two-dimensional surface that had “cheese-like properties.”

The results showed that there was a variable friction between the core and the edge of the cheese wheel, because the core stayed fresher during the ripening process. Because the harder outer edge had lower friction with the blade, the edges of the cheese shavings were uneven in thickness—hence the resemblance to frilly rosettes.

This essentially amounts to a new shaping mechanism with the possibility of being able to one day program complex shaping from “a simple scraping process,” per the authors. “Our analysis provides the tools for a better control of flower chip morphogenesis through plasticity in the shaping of other delicacies, but also in metal cutting,” they concluded. Granted, “flower-shaped chips have never been reported in metal cutting. But even in such uniform materials, the fact that friction properties control the metric change is particularly interesting for material shaping.”

Physical Review Letters, 2025. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.134.208201 (About DOIs).

Florida man eats diet of butter, cheese, beef; cholesterol oozes from his body

beef, butter, Cheese, Cholesterol, health, JAMA Cardiology, xanthelasma / Tim Belzer / January 22, 2025

What could go wrong with eating an extremely high-fat diet of beef, cheese, and sticks of butter? Well, for one thing, your cholesterol levels could reach such stratospheric levels that lipids start oozing from your blood vessels, forming yellowish nodules on your skin.

That was the disturbing case of a man in Florida who showed up at a Tampa hospital with a three-week history of painless, yellow eruptions on the palms of his hands, soles of his feet, and elbows. His case was published today in JAMA Cardiology.

Painless yellowish nodules were observed on the patient’s palms (A) and elbows. B, Magnified view of the palmar lesions. These lesions are consistent with xanthelasma, likely resulting from severe hypercholesterolemia associated with a high-fat carnivore diet. Credit: JAMA Cardiologym 2024, Marmagkiolis et al.

The man, said to be in his 40s, told doctors that he had adopted a “carnivore diet” eight months prior. His diet included between 6 lbs and 9 lbs of cheese, sticks of butter, and daily hamburgers that had additional fat incorporated into them. Since taking on this brow-raising food plan, he claimed his weight dropped, his energy levels increased, and his “mental clarity” improved.

Meanwhile, his total cholesterol level exceeded 1,000 mg/dL. For context, an optimal total cholesterol level is under 200 mg/dL, while 240 mg/dL is considered the threshold for ‘high.’ Cardiologists noted that prior to going on his fatty diet, his cholesterol had been between 210 mg/dL to 300 mg/dL.

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