Category: Science

You know those cool robots they have now?

A friend of mine has one that cleans the pool in her back yard.

I’ve toyed with the idea of getting one of those carpet cleaning robots.

Some people have lawn mowers that work the same way.

But robots don’t have to move from place to place in order to count as robots. The assembly-line robots in Detroit auto plants, for example, are fixed in one spot.

This got me to thinking: What exactly is a robot? Unless we artificially restrict the term to meaning “android” (i.e., a man-shaped robot) then they seem to be any device that, while activated, automatically performs a task that used to be performed by human effort. (See Wikipedia’s entry for more.)

So I started thinking: I’ve got this tall, oscillating fan in my bedroom. Is it a robot?

They’ve had fans for centuries, but not automatic ones. Before this century you either used a small hand fan to fan yourself (as one sometimes still does) or you had a servant use a large fan to cool a whole room. (Y’know, like in all those movies where Egyptian rulers are being fanned with the big, feathered fans.)

The oscillating fans we use today perform this function without the use of human labor.

That seems to make them robots.

Dish washers and washing machines seem to be, too. People used to (and sometimes still do) perform those tasks by hand.

HERE’S A STORY SAYING ROBOT USAGE IS EXPECTED TO SURGE SEVEN-FOLD BY 2007.

It seems to me that the robots are already here. They infiltrated our society a long time ago.

In preparation for the Robot Uprising.

I’m going to be sleeping lightly tonight.

I’ve got a robot in my bedroom.

And what’s worse, they have the unfortunate habit of hopping over the edge!

(Sorry. Couldn’t resist.)

(Amphibians. Frogs, etc. Get it? It’s a joke, son, a joke!)

And what’s worse, they have the unfortunate habit of hopping over the edge!

(Sorry. Couldn’t resist.)

(Amphibians. Frogs, etc. Get it? It’s a joke, son, a joke!)

What comes next in the following list?

1) Sweet

2) Salty

3) Sour

4) Bitter

5) ________

You may be drawing a blank (pun intended). If so, it’s entirely understandable. Traditional Western cooking identifies only the four items named above as the “basic tastes” our taste buds are designed sensitive to. But it’s recently (in the year 2000) been proven that there is a fifth basic taste that our taste buds are designed to detect.

The name of the fifth basic taste?

Umami.

No, I didn’t just insult your mother. Umami is the name of the taste. It’s a fusion of a couple of Japanese words that together mean something like “essence of savor.” It was first identified in 1907 by a Japanese professor named Kikunae Ikeda, who also found a way to crystalize from seaweed broth the substance that causes this taste. He then sold the process to a company named Ajinomoto, which is makes about a third of all the 1.5 million metric tons of this substance that is used as a food flavoring every year in the world.

Despite the exotic origin of the good professor’s artifically distilled substance (i.e., seaweed broth), national versions of the substance are actually very common. In fact, it is the most common amino acid in the food we eat, found in virtually anything with protein. Our bodies even make the stuff. It’s part of us. Humans have a umami taste.

It’s also in loads of things we eat: meat, fish, fowl, cheese, tomatoes, mushrooms, seaweed, soy sauce, green tea, red wine, and a host of others. As a result, umami is an extraordinarily common taste . . . so common in fact that Americans don’t normally identify it as a separate taste. It’s in too many of our foods.

If you want to get a full strength taste sensation of umami, here’s what to do: Go to your grocery store (or simply your kitchen) and get a container of Accent flavor enhancer. It has just one ingredient: the artificial umami-inducing substance that Prof. Kikunae distilled. Put a little of the Accent in your mouth (or dissolve it in water and hold that in your mouth) and in a few seconds you will experience full strength umami.

It a kind of “meaty” flavor (unsurprisingly, since the stuff is in meat). Almost like salty, but not salty.

Once you taste it, you can instantly identify it in foods you’ve eaten in the past. After I did the Accent test, I immediately identified it as something I taste when eating very ripe tomatoes (ripe tomatoes have ten times the amount of the umami-causing substance as unripe ones).

While doing some web searching about umami, I found a good number of articles on it. Here are two of the more informative:

FIRST ARTICLE (WARNING! Evil file format! [.pdf])

SECOND ARTICLE

Now, at this point you may be all curious to go out and try the Accent test to find out what umami tastes like. Good! But you may be a little less anxious to do so once I tell you the name of the substance Prof. Kikunae distilled from seaweed broth.

The ubiquitous amino acid that causes umami is glutamic acid. That may not mean much to you. (It didn’t to me, though I take its derivative L-glutamine as a nutritional supplement for muscle building.) The name of the artificial version that Prof. Kikunae discovered, however, is much more well known: It’s monosodium glutamate or MSG.

MSG has gotten a bad rap in recent years, with some people absolutely convinced that the substance is pure evil and others equally convinced that it has no harmful effects at all. However that may be, a small taste of MSG for purposes of identifying the taste umami is worth it.

After all, if I’ve got a basic taste that I never knew about, I want to know what that taste is like!

(What I want to know now is whether there is yet another basic taste–hot–as reckoned in traditional Chinese cooking. Whether “hot” or “spicy” is a distinct taste is something I’ve looked into a bit and would love to see thoroughly argued.)

Okay, get this: Somebody has got a mutant poppy–named Norman–who is entirely morphine free. As a result, he may hold the key to developing less-addictive painkillers and addiction treatment drugs.

I’m not making this up.

MEDPUNDIT HAS THE STORY.

The First Idea deals with the emergence of language and thought in our species and in us as individuals. It is reported to offer some new ideas about how these emerged, and ideas that run counter to many of the recent ideas on this subject.

My interest in scient, language, and human origins combine to create a special interest in a book like this, though I’m not sure how well-founded the ideas presented in this book will be.

THIS STORY offers a summary of them, but I’m not putting a whole lot of weight in the article’s summary. One item in the summary sounds too extreme to be something the authors could actually claim–i.e., “That is, language is rooted not in genes, not in the wiring of brains, but in behaviors we have learned over millenniums.” I can’t imagine the authors really claim that, because without genes and the wiring of brains there are no behaviors to be learned over millennia. But then newspaper reporters ain’t always that great about reporting science (or anything else for that matter).

They also don’t always know what is a shocking claim and what ain’t. For example, the authors of the book apparently think that spoken language has pre-verbal predecessors like gestures. That’s not a particularly controversial claim among linguists. The idea that spoken language has gestural precedents (sign langauges) is often talked about in linguistic circles. After all, babies learn to do things like point before they learn to speak, and it’s a lot easier to manipulate our hands than the delicate mechanisms of our mouths and vocal chords (at least with the kind of control needed to produce speech). Is it unlikely that gestural communication preceded spoken communication?

The most intersting part for me is always what the hookup was (if, indeed, there was one) between the pre-humans we see in the fossil record and the first true humans. Given the depiction in Genesis of our first parents as rational, speaking beings, I tend to look to the emerge of language as the emergence of our species. In other words, when speech appeared among hominids is where you’ll find Adam and Eve.

Language and human origins? How can I resist?

GET THE STORY.

What isn’t covered in this story is that, despite suggestions to the contrary, men’s health is also under-researched. Womens’ health issues attract funding in a way greatly disproportionate to mens’ health issues. For example, far more has been done regarding the study, treatment, and prevention of breast cancer than prostate cancer.

Still, while both genders need their distinctive health issues to be better researched, it is a very positive sign that there is a growing awareness that the genders experience health problems differently and may need different treatments even for the same problem. In the future, this will allow both men and women to have better health and better health care.

At lunch today I was going to drop off a pair of boots to be resoled and was sitting at a stoplight when I saw this:

A HUGE dust devil formed right in front of me, just a few yards away. Actually, when it first formed (in a matter of a couple of seconds) it was much closer and larger. By the time I got my cameraphone out, it had already started to retreat and shrink.

Don’t know what it is with dust devils. Have been seeing them a lot lately. When I was on my recent trip through the Southwest, I ran into a dry lake bed in New Mexico where there were something like a dozen active dust devils at once.

Interestingly, dust devils have electrical fields associated with them.

LEARN MORE.

This may be the first picture of a planet outside the solar system. Or–more precisely–the red blob may be the planet.

Yes, we’ve found evidence of such planets before based on the wobble and changes in brightness of other stars, but we haven’t had pictures of the planets in question. Maybe now, we do.

This object is 230 light years away in the southern constellation Hydra. We should know within a year whether it is an actual planet (gas giant class) or a brown dwarf. Thus far all such planetary candidates that have been discovered have turned out to be brown dwarves, but the reddish color of this one makes the astronomers who found it think that it’s a planet.

GET THE STORY.

. . . in this article about men suffering from pre-menstrual syndrome.

Setting aside the obvious point that men don’t menstruate, it is hypothetically possible that men have a monthly biological rythm that leads them to experience PMS-like symptoms on a regular basis, however that is not what the study in question shows.

All it shows is that on a survey of 50 (!) men, the men admitted to

feeling antisocial and suffering poor concentration; depression; lack of arousal; hot flushes and pain – including stomach cramps, back pain and headaches.

Okay, fine. But so what? Lots of people have periodic symptoms like that without it amounting to a syndrome. What you’d need to have in order to argue that there is a male equivalent to PMS is evidence that the symptoms recur on a somewhat regular schedule, especially a monthly one. Yet that is what the researchers seem to admit they don’t have. According to the article:

[Dr. Aimee Aubeeluck] and colleague Joanne Worsey will now study couples over several months to discover if symptoms are cyclical for both men and women.

Given the wild inaccuracy of the press (more on that later), I can’t be sure if the researchers themselves tried to advance the “male PMS” angle or if that was a figment of the newspaper’s imagination, but if so it would be irresponsible to advance such a claim based on the scanty data the article represents the researchers as having (anybody know where the original study can be read online?).