A painting too Farrah

A California jury has decided an Andy Warhol portrait of actress Farrah Fawcett belongs to actor Ryan O'Neal. The University of Texas at Austin had sued O'Neal, claiming Fawcett left them the painting as part of a donation. Fawcett, who died in 2009 aged 62, attended the university in the 1960s. O'Neal, aged 72, had an 18-year relationship with Fawcett and removed the painting from her home after her death. He said the portrait was a treasured memento of their relationship. The portrait is one of a pair created by Warhol in 1980, when he took Polaroid photos of the actress and added splashes of colour to a monochrome canvas. But at least Ryan O'Neal can sleep in peace each night knowing that the University of Texas at Austin will not get their dirty hands on his Warhol. In fact, he will never sell it, for his estate documents call for it to be passed down to his son with Fawcett, Redmond James Fawcett O'Neal. That's one matter settled, but there's another matter to settle: can you cook french fries in space? If humans ever voyage to a planet far bigger than Earth, the journey is sure to be arduous and full of danger. But there’s a consolation: french fries cooked at the planet’s surface will be crispier. That’s one way of interpreting new research investigating how unusual gravity changes the physics of deep-frying. It may be a slightly glib way of reading the results, but the gastronomic preferences of future astronauts are the genuine motivation for experiments conducted by chemists John Lioumbas and Thodoris Karapantsios of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece. That’s why their work is supported by the European Space Agency. However, preparing french fries, or any food for that matter, in space presents unique challenges. Apart from the obvious difficulties of floating crumbs, liquids, and peelings, the basic physics of cooking is different. For example, in zero gravity there’s no convection in hot fluids to redistribute the heat, so they experience highly localised heating unless you stir. Preparing drinks like percolated coffee is a challenge, because there’s no gravity to pull the water down through the granules. And if you wanted to cook with a naked flame – perhaps unlikely inside a space station – the shape of the flame would be compact and round, rather than elongated and tear-shaped. I'd say this sort of thing would need more research before they try it on an actual mission.