If your mother always used to nag you to eat your greens, good on her! New research suggests that not only are vegetables good for you, they also make your skin more attractive to the opposite sex. More »
from Gizmodo
From Discover Magazine: The Science Behind Why Airline Food Tastes Bad | 80beats
Airplane food is notoriously bad. But airlines, in financial free fall over the last decade, have been trying to bring back the luxe food of early flight in business class and first class, to lure in more high-end travelers. Biology is working against them, though. As Jad Mouawad reports for the NYTimes, part of why plane food lacks subtlety is that we can’t actually taste as well when we’re at altitude:
Even before a plane takes off, the atmosphere inside the cabin dries out the nose. As the plane ascends, the change in air pressure numbs about a third of the taste buds. And as the plane reaches a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet, cabin humidity levels are kept low by design, to reduce the risk of fuselage corrosion. Soon, the nose no longer knows. Taste buds are M.I.A. Cotton mouth sets in.
All of which helps explain why, for instance, a lot of tomato juice is consumed on airliners: it tastes far less acidic up in the air than it does down on the ground. It also helps explain why airlines tend to salt and spice food heavily and serve wines that are full-bodied …
from Discover Magazine
From Engadget: Toshiba builds scanner that can identify fruit without a barcode, yup
During our hurried supermarket sweeps, we’re aiming for the Granny Smith, yet somehow always come away with French Jonagold. That’s why we’re in awe of this new supermarket scanner from Toshiba-Tech that can identify individual species of fruit and veg from sight. Rather than a cashier keying in a produce code, a camera with optical pattern recognition technology filters out “visual noise” before identifying the genus of your apple by shape, surface pattern and coloration. It’s also able to scan labels and coupons, but so far the database only contains a handful of items. It’ll take over a year (when each thing has been harvested and scanned) to build a database necessary to make it commercially useful. Still, if you can’t bear to wait those precious seconds as your server finds the right code for lettuce, head on past the break to watch your future in action.
Continue reading Toshiba builds scanner that can identify fruit without a barcode, yup (video)
from Engadget
From Lifehacker: Make Sure You’re Actually Buying Beef When You’re Buying Beef
By now you may have heard of a problem where beef waste products—lovingly called “pink slime”—are being processed and, according to ABC News, sold as actual actual meat in most supermarkets. If this sounds gross and you don’t want it in your meat, here’s how you can avoid it. More »
from Lifehacker
From Morning Edition: Storing Grain Can Aid Farmers In Commodity Pricing
Across the corn belt, more farmers are putting up their own grain bins. In the past year alone, farmers nationwide have added some 300 million bushels of on-farm storage. By storing their own grain, farmers can choose when and at what price they want to sell, and that can translate into thousands of dollars in profit. And this has grain buyers — like grain elevators and ethanol plants –working to keep their edge in the market.
from Morning Edition
From Lifehacker: Bake an Egg in an Avocado for a Fast and Healthy Breakfast Treat
Avocados are amazing things—they’re delicious on their own, but they also have a lot of healthy fats, dietary fibers, and vitamins, and despite their high caloric value, they’re remarkably easy to prepare. If you have an avocado that’s too firm to use for something else, or you’re just in the mood for something new and healthy for breakfast, slice it in half, remove the pit, and carve out a little space in the center. Crack an egg where the pit was, and bake. In a few minutes, you’ll have a delicious, protein and vitamin-packed breakfast treat that’s rich enough to keep you going all morning. More »
from Lifehacker
From Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now: Chili Crab Dinner Inspires Robot That Crawls Down Your Throat To Grab Your Cancer
Who ever doubted an amazing meal could change your life? Researchers in Singapore have developed a robotic surgery device inspired by the country’s famous national dish, chili crab. The mini crab robot crawls down your throat and into the stomach, where its pincers grab onto a cancerous mass and a hook slices it away.
It could help patients with early-stage gastrointestinal cancer and is far less invasive than other surgical options – since it enters through your mouth, it leaves no visible scars.
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Technology, Rebecca Boyle, cancers, crabs, da vinci surgical robot, future of robots, medical robots, robots, stomach, stomach cancer, surgery
Enterologist Lawrence Ho of Singapore’s National University Hospital co-designed the robot and said it has already been used to remove early-stage stomach cancers in five patients in India and Hong Kong, according to Reuters. Other existing methods to excise these types of cancers require cutting a patient open, either through a large-scale invasive surgery or a keyhole surgery, in which smaller incisions can still enable surgical access. But those methods are both quite painful and invasive.
Instead, this device enters through a patient’s mouth and is attached to an endoscope, through which a surgeon can watch and control the robot’s actions. A hook attached to the crab bot is used to remove the cancerous tissue, and it also coagulates the blood to stop internal bleeding.
Ho and Louis Phee, associate professor at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological Institute, decided to build the robot after a 2004 chili crab dinner with a well-known Hong Kong surgeon named Sydney Chung. Chung apparently suggested the crab as a prototype. “The crab can pick up sand and its pincers are very strong,” Ho noted.
The team formed a company in October and hopes to commercialize the crab bot within three years, Reuters reported.
[International Business Times]
from Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now