In the world of professional spirits reviews, “smooth” is something of a dirty word. Consumers, on the other hand, absolutely love to use it.

The implication of “smooth” is simple; it suggests a product doesn’t hurt when you drink it. It’s such a sought-after quality that the distilling industry will do just about anything to achieve it. Some methods are respectable, like aging a whiskey for 15 years to file down its rough edges. Some are less so, like dumping in loads of chemical additives. Some are more successful than others, but none can completely eliminate that burning sensation in your mouth.

But it wasn’t until Joana Montenegro and Martin Enriquez, the spousal founders of Voodoo Scientific, that anyone really asked: Why does alcohol burn, anyway? And, most importantly, is there a way to get rid of that gasp-inducing burn altogether?

Conventional wisdom and common sense would suggest that ethanol is what makes that ill-advised shot of firewater sear your mouth and throat so badly, but it turns out that’s not the case. During the months of Covid-19 lockdown, Enriquez, a former telecom executive, says he and Montenegro, essentially on a lark, had the idea to dig deep into this question. They started by scouring the scientific journals to see if anyone had pinpointed the reason why whiskey and its ilk can cause an unpleasant burn. No one had. “Nobody could describe the compounds that make that harsh, painful bite,” he says. “No one could really identify what it is that attacks you and creates pain.”

Montenegro, a veteran food scientist from General Mills and Land O’Lakes, said they decided to go deeper. “We said, ‘Let’s go back and find the specific receptor in the mouth that’s being triggered by the spirit,’” she says.

To do that, the duo started by contacting David Julius, the head of physiology at UCSF, to discuss the line of inquiry. Masked and 6 feet apart in a Starbucks, Montenegro says, Julius didn’t comprehend why someone who was part of the team that patented Go-Gurt had an interest in pain receptors. Nevertheless, the duo persisted, and Julius eventually guided them on how to research the concept and determine which receptor was being activated to cause a pain response. Eventually Montenegro and Enriquez found it, a receptor called TRPA1.

Once a negative receptor like this is identified, traditional food science has a solution for dealing with it: You block the receptor with a chemical. It’s the typical way that sweetness and bitterness can be masked in foodstuffs, by just covering it up with something stronger. Alas, that didn’t work for hiding the burn of alcohol. “This receptor has a very unique property called reversible bonding,” says Montenegro. “It’ll bond to a thing, it’ll give you a jolt, and it’ll let it go—and then it’ll bond to another one.” This is why alcohol continues to burn sip after sip.

“In other words, you can’t block it,” she says. “It’s designed to continuously alert you that you’re consuming something that is an irritant.”

As the C language, which forms the basis of critical global software like operating systems, faces security limitations, KAIST’s research team is pioneering core original technology research for the accurate automatic conversion to Rust to replace it. By proving the mathematical correctness of the conversion, a limitation of existing artificial intelligence (LLM) methods, and solving C language security issues through automatic conversion to Rust, they presented a new direction and vision for future software security research.

The paper by Professor Sukyoung Ryu’s research team from the School of Computing was published in the November issue of Communications of the ACM and was selected as the cover story.

The C language has been widely used in the industry since the 1970s, but its structural limitations have continuously caused severe bugs and security vulnerabilities. Rust, on the other hand, is a secure programming language developed since 2015, used in the development of operating systems and web browsers, and has the characteristic of being able to detect and prevent bugs before program execution.

The U.S. White House recommended discontinuing the use of C language in a technology report released in February 2024, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) also explicitly stated that Rust is the core alternative for resolving C language security issues by promoting a project to develop technology for the automatic conversion of C code to Rust.

Professor Ryu’s research team proactively raised the issues of C language safety and the importance of automatic conversion even before these movements began in earnest, and they have continuously developed core related technologies.

In May 2023, the research team presented the Mutex conversion technology (necessary for program synchronization) at ICSE (International Conference on Software Eng). In June 2024, they presented the Output Parameter conversion technology (used for result delivery) at PLDI (Programming Language Design and Implementation), and in October of the same year, they presented the Union conversion technology (for storing diverse data together) at ASE (Automated Software Eng).

Dr. Jaemin Hong stated, “The conversion technology we developed is an original technology based on programming language theory, and its biggest strength is that we can logically prove the ‘correctness’ of the conversion.” He added, “While most research relies on large language models (LLMs), our technology can mathematically guarantee the correctness of the conversion.”

Dr. Hong is scheduled to be appointed as an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at UNIST starting in March 2025.

In addition, Professor Ryu’s research team has four papers, including C→Rust conversion technology, accepted for presentation at ASE 2025 held in Seoul, South Korea, Nov. 16–20.

These papers, in addition to automatic conversion technology, cover various cutting-edge software engineering fields. They include: technology to verify whether quantum computer programs operate correctly, “WEST” technology that automatically checks the correctness of WebAssembly programs (technology for fast and efficient program execution on the web) and creates tests for them, and technology that automatically simplifies complex WebAssembly code to quickly find errors. Among these, the WEST paper received the Distinguished Paper Award.

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