Guess who has been watching Black Panther : The Animated Series lately?
Anyhoo, heya science fans, and welcome to another edition of the Friday Science Whatever, where I rustle up some of the most brain buzzingly cool science stories for you every week and serve them drunk and on fire!
So let’s jump right in, shall we?
First up, we have an interesting experiment : making veggies sweeter in order to make kids more willing to eat them.
No fancy science involved, the scientists just sprayed the veggies with a light mist of sugar and lo and behold, the lunchtime kiddie crowd was more willing to eat them.
I am fine with this. After all, the idea is to get the nutrition into the kids and if a little extra sugar does that, fine. It’s not like sugar on the outside destroys the nutrients on the inside.
However, in my experience, kids hate vegetables because their parents force them to eat them. I realize there is nothing a school can do to about that, but it is something for parents to think about.
Don’t turn this into a whole “test of wills” between you and your child. You might win a battle or two, but you lose the war.
Then again, we might not need the sugar at all if we could use the miracle fruit, Synsepalum dulcificum, to make everything taste sweet.
The miracle fruit gets its name from its one truly miraculous property : it contains a protein that binds to the sour receptors on your tongue and makes them register as sweet, meaning that everything you taste after eating one of these innocuous looking little berries will taste sweet as candy.
The article focuses on a fellow who has little tasting parties revolving around the fruit. People pay him $15 to eat a berry and then try different foods and see how much different they taste now.
Sounds like $15 well spent to me. Seems like a reasonable fee for a truly unique and pleasant sensory experience. And I am glad this little miracle is available on the open market now, although at $2.50 a berry, nobody will be buying them by the bushel any time soon.
Still, I would happily pay that for an hour or so of flavour filled fun. Being diabetic, I do not get much sweetness in my life.
It would be lovely to be able to get it guilt free!
Leaving flavour country for the salty deep, we find that dolphins call each other by name.
Wait, let’s back up a bit. Dolphins have names! And not just the demeaning ones we give them. Wild dolphins have a unique set of whistles and clicks that is their name! Wow, that’s cool.
What’s more, they use them like we would. When a wild dolphin is separated from its pals, it calls out their names just like we would!
That is so much the cooler. It shows that not only do dolphins have more advanced verbal skills than previously thought, but that they must have a sense of individuality.
If they were simple animals with no sense of who they are, names would be useless to them. You have to have a concept of yourself before you can know what you name is.
And you have to recognize the individuality of others before using their names makes sense. A less intelligent or social animal would only have the concept “other dolphin”, plus gender at mating times.
But clearly, dolphins understand that each of them is unique, that there is Frank and Dorothy and Tyrel and Timone, not just “other dolphin”.
That blows my mind.
Next up, we have a real world saving device : the micro-algae lamp.
This amazing device uses algae to power itself and, this is the truly amazing part, absorbs an entire ton of CO2 per year.
Here is the vid :
That is exactly the sort of thing I have been imagining for our future for some time now. We need to build up as much CO2-hungry infrastructure as possible, and use the exact same powers of scale that got us into this global climate change problem in order to solve it.
Admittedly, I had not imagined it would be in such a simple and elegant form. I was picturing something more like enormous terraced gardens producing said micro-algae. And that still might be needed.
But this lamp really seems like the first step in the right direction. We are powerful enough, as a species, to ruin the planet for ourselves.
Via smart solutions like a carbon devouring lamp, we might just fix it.
And who knows, with selective breeding and genetic engineering, we might be able to make strains that take even more carbon out of the air, and bring us back to a stable level we can live with.
Righteous cool, dude.
Finally, we have the rather extraordinary prospect of temporary tattoos giving you telepathy.
Telekinesis too. Well, of a sort.
The idea is that, as part of the cheap sensing revolution we are now enjoying, in the future a simple temporary tattoo embedded with sensors could, if applied to the head, let you control devices via your brain waves, or, if applied to the throat, allow you to control devices and even communicate with others via the previously discarded technology of subvocalization.
See, when we think about saying something, many of the same muscles tense in our throats as if we were saying it, and so it is at least theoretically possible to translate that muscle respond into words and voila, you can speak by just thinking about it.
Hook said speech into, say, text messaging, and you can text with a friend without lifting a finger.
And that is, for all intents and purposes, a kind of telepathy. Experienced subvocalizers might very well be able to “type” much faster that way, making it not just less effort but faster as well.
And all because of a little tattoo on your throat.
The future is one cool country, and I can’t wait to get there!
Seeya next week, folks!