From Toy Story to Shrek the Third, computer graphics have contributed hugely to the movie industry. But graphics scientists are pressing ahead with even more realistic simulations that could make as big a mark in medicine, food science and atmospheric science as in the cinema.

Henrik Wann Jensen of the University of California at San Diego is an Oscar-winning computer scientist who specialises in creating such emotive images as light filtering through a glass of brandy. Now he and his colleagues have developed a graphics model which can accurately depict materials based on what they are made of. For example, if given the ratio of fats, proteins and water in a glass of milk, the software will generate the information needed to create an image. Different types of seawater, meanwhile, can be rendered using mineral and algal content. It's all to do with the way light is scattered or absorbed by different substances.

Remarkably, the model created by Jensen and his team also works in reverse: given a digital picture of milk, the model will estimate its constituents. Jensen sees applications in skin disease, where a cancer specialist might need to know how structures in the skin scatter light, and in food safety. "Grocery stores could identify spoiled meats and contaminants if a particular food problem consistently and detectably changed the light-scattering properties of the food," he says. "Movies are a done deal. Now it's time to show computer graphics have other uses."

When greens get the blues

Plants suffer stress – not, like us, from overcrowding on the Northern line, but from too much water, too little sun or some other hazard in their environment.

Now scientists at a research institute in Flanders have revealed the mechanism that switches a plant into "safety mode" until conditions improve.

They found that a pair of enzymes called kinases move into action when conditions deteriorate, turning on a network of genes which create a kind of enforced hibernation, conserving energy at the expense of growth.

The same kinases are found in mammals, suggesting they may play a part in disorders such as diabetes and obesity.

Beans and rice

"Beans, beans, good for the heart/ They make you strong and make you fart." So goes the playground rhyme, underlining the value and drawbacks of pulses. When raw, beans and rice are a rich source of lectins, proteins thought to be a natural insecticide – but for humans, a deadly poison. That is, they would be lethal, except that eating any quantity of lectins leads to nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea.

Researchers at the Medical College of Georgia reckon they know why. Lectins, they found, bind to the wall of the intestine, stopping it carrying out vital self-repairs and causing gaps in the intestinal wall. "You are exposing the nasty internal world of your gastrointestinal tract to your blood supply," says Dr Paul McNeil. The body detects that its defences have been breached and warns you, via feelings of bloating and nausea, to get rid of the poison by emptying your digestive tract. Thorough cooking destroys most but not all the lectins, which is why we are able to enjoy rice and beans with only occasional inconvenience.