by Lizzie Wade Believe it or not, the gelada monkeys (Theropithecus gelada) on the right may be sharing a good laugh—and possibly the emotions that go along with it. Previously, only humans and orangutans had been shown to quickly and involuntarily mimic the facial expressions of their companions, an ability that seems to be linked to empathy. After spending months observing every playful interaction among the gelada population at Germany's NaturZoo, scientists are ready to add another, more distantly related species to that list. Geladas of all ages were more likely to mimic the play faces of their companions within 1 second of seeing them than they were to respond with a different kind of expression, according to a paper published by the team this week in Scientific Reports. What's more, the fastest and most frequent mimicry responses occurred between mothers and their infant offspring, like the pair pictured on the left. More research is required to determine if geladas are sharing emotional states in addition to facial expressions, but the team suggests that studying the quantity and quality of these mother-child interactions could provide a way forward. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 17968 - Posted: 03.30.2013

by Hal Hodson THAT fried chicken advert is about to get even more tempting. Soon it might be pumping out the mouth-watering smell of the stuff too. Tough luck if you're a veggie. The "smelling screen", invented by Haruka Matsukura at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology in Japan and colleagues, makes smells appear to come from the exact spot on any LCD screen that is displaying the image of a cup of coffee, for example. It works by continuously feeding odours from vaporising gel pellets into four air streams, one in each corner of the screen. These air streams are blown out parallel to the screen's surface by fans, and varying the strength and direction of them manoeuvres the scent to any given spot on the screen. The airflow is gentle enough that the team have been able to create the illusion that the smell is actually wafting from a digital object on-screen. The current system only pumps out one scent at a time, but Matsukura says the next stage is to incorporate a cartridge, like those for printers, which allows smells to be changed easily. The screen was shown at the IEEE Virtual Reality conference in Orlando, Florida, last week. Matsukura suggests it could also be used to enhance advertising screensMovie Camera and museum exhibits. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Robotics
Link ID: 17967 - Posted: 03.30.2013

By Andrew Grant A simple plastic shell has cloaked a three-dimensional object from sound waves for the first time. With some improvements, a similar cloak could eventually be used to reduce noise pollution and to allow ships and submarines to evade enemy detection. The experiments appear March 20 in Physical Review Letters. “This paper implements a simplified version of invisibility using well-designed but relatively simple materials,” says Steven Cummer, an electrical engineer at Duke University, who was not involved in the study. Cummer proposed the concept of a sound cloak in 2007. Scientists’ recent efforts to render objects invisible to the eye are based on the fact that our perception of the world depends on the scattering of waves. We can see objects because waves of light strike them and scatter. Similarly, the Navy can detect faraway submarines because they scatter sound waves (sonar) that hit them. So for the last several years scientists have been developing cloaks that prevent scattering by steering light or sound waves around an object. The drawback of this approach, however, is that it requires complex synthetic materials that are difficult to produce. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 17966 - Posted: 03.30.2013

By Neil Bowdler BBC News UK-based scientists have designed an 'intelligent' microchip which they claim can suppress appetite. Animal trials of the electronic implant are about to begin and its makers say it could provide a more effective alternative to weight-loss surgery. The chip is attached to the vagus nerve which plays a role in appetite as well as a host of other functions within the body. Human trials of the implant could begin within three years, say its makers. The work is being led by Prof Chris Toumazou and Prof Sir Stephen Bloom of Imperial College London. It involves an 'intelligent implantable modulator', just a few millimetres across, which is attached using cuff electrodes to the vagus nerve within the peritoneal cavity found in the abdomen. The chip and cuffs are designed to read and process electrical and chemical signatures of appetite within the nerve. The chip can then act upon these readings and send electrical signals to the brain reducing or stopping the urge to eat. The researchers say identifying chemicals rather than electrical impulses will make for a more selective, precise instrument. The project has just received over 7m euros (£5.9m; $9m) in funding from the European Research Council. A similar device designed by the Imperial team has already been developed to reduce epileptic seizures by targeting the same vagus nerve. "This is a really small microchip and on this chip we've got the intelligence which can actually model the neural signals responsible for appetite control," Prof Toumazou told the BBC. BBC © 2013

Keyword: Obesity; Robotics
Link ID: 17965 - Posted: 03.30.2013

By Emily Burns Lots of people set themselves goals – like things to do by the time you’re 30. Maybe it’s to find your dream job, meet the love of your life, or travel the world! For sufferers of Cystic Fibrosis, it’s living to see your 30th birthday. Even with all of the advances in medicine and technology, the average life expectancy of someone with Cystic Fibrosis is 33 years. Cystic Fibrosis is an inherited disease that mostly affects the lungs, but also the pancreas, liver and intestines. The body fluids we need – like the mucus in our lungs and intestines – are much thicker than normal, making it extremely difficult to breathe and digest food. Constant physiotherapy, breathing exercises, diet supplements and antibiotics are needed just to get on with daily life. And all of this suffering is caused by one tiny change in our DNA, which then messes up how one single protein folds into the right shape. It’s otherwise known as a protein misfolding disease. There are over 2 million proteins in the human body, carrying out their individual tasks to keep us breathing, thinking – enabling us to live. But their production isn’t easy. It’s an incredibly intricate and specialised process that is constantly going on inside us. If it goes wrong, there are serious consequences to our health, with Cystic Fibrosis being a prime example.... While the primary causes Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s is still not known, one of the theories suggests that cellular and ER stress results in the cell death that we see. They are known as amyloid diseases, as they’re caused by the accumulation of amyloids in cells. We usually think of amyloids as being associated with Alzheimer’s, so you might think that they were a particular type of protein, but that’s not quite it. Instead, amyloids are protein delinquents: any protein that can form a beta sheet can become an amyloid. When a mutated protein misfolds, the side chains of amino acids (that dictate the specific fold) are no longer so important: the main chain of the polypeptide now causes these amyloid fibres to stick together. These amyloid fibres are formed regardless of the original folded protein structure (meaning that they form the same fibrous shape for every protein) and can penetrate the cells, causing cell stress and death. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Alzheimers; Prions
Link ID: 17964 - Posted: 03.28.2013

by Sid Perkins The electric fields that build up on honey bees as they fly, flutter their wings, or rub body parts together may allow the insects to talk to each other, a new study suggests. Tests show that the electric fields, which can be quite strong, deflect the bees' antennae, which, in turn, provide signals to the brain through specialized organs at their bases. Scientists have long known that flying insects gain an electrical charge when they buzz around. That charge, typically positive, accumulates as the wings zip through the air—much as electrical charge accumulates on a person shuffling across a carpet. And because an insect's exoskeleton has a waxy surface that acts as an electrical insulator, that charge isn't easily dissipated, even when the insect lands on objects, says Randolf Menzel, a neurobiologist at the Free University of Berlin in Germany. Although researchers have suspected for decades that such electrical fields aid pollination by helping the tiny grains stick to insects visiting a flower, only more recently have they investigated how insects sense and respond to such fields. Just last month, for example, a team reported that bumblebees may use electrical fields to identify flowers recently visited by other insects from those that may still hold lucrative stores of nectar and pollen. A flower that a bee had recently landed on might have an altered electrical field, the researchers speculated. Now, in a series of lab tests, Menzel and colleagues have studied how honey bees respond to electrical fields. In experiments conducted in small chambers with conductive walls that isolated the bees from external electrical fields, the researchers showed that a small, electrically charged wand brought close to a honey bee can cause its antennae to bend. Other tests, using antennae removed from honey bees, indicated that electrically induced deflections triggered reactions in a group of sensory cells, called the Johnston's organ, located near the base of the antennae. In yet other experiments, honey bees learned that a sugary reward was available when they detected a particular pattern of electrical field. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Animal Communication
Link ID: 17963 - Posted: 03.28.2013

Pregnant women who experienced financial, emotional, or other personal stress in the year before their delivery had an increased chance of having a stillbirth, say researchers who conducted a National Institutes of Health network study. Stillbirth is the death of a fetus at 20 or more weeks of pregnancy. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, in 2006, there was one stillbirth for every 167 births External Web Site Policy. The researchers asked more than 2,000 women a series of questions, including whether they had lost a job or had a loved one in the hospital in the year before they gave birth. Whether or not the pregnancy ended in stillbirth, most women reported having experienced at least one stressful life event in the previous year. The researchers found that 83 percent of women who had a stillbirth and 75 percent of women who had a live birth reported a stressful life event. Almost 1 in 5 women with stillbirths and 1 in 10 women with livebirths in this study reported recently experiencing 5 or more stressful life events. This study measured the occurrence of a list of significant life events, and did not include the woman’s assessment of how stressful the event was to her. Women reporting a greater number of stressful events were more likely to have a stillbirth. Two stressful events increased a woman’s odds of stillbirth by about 40 percent, the researchers’ analysis showed. A woman experiencing five or more stressful events was nearly 2.5 times more likely to have a stillbirth than a woman who had experienced none. Women who reported three or four significant life event factors (financial, emotional, traumatic or partner-related) remained at increased risk for stillbirth after accounting for other stillbirth risk factors, such as sociodemographic characteristics and prior pregnancy history.

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 17962 - Posted: 03.28.2013

By Melissa Healy, Listening in on the electrical currents of teenagers’ brains during sleep, scientists have begun to hear the sound of growing maturity. It happens most intensively between the ages of 12 and 161 / 2: After years of frenzied fluctuation, the brain’s electrical output during the deepest phase of sleep — the delta, or slow-wave phase, when a child’s brain is undergoing its most restorative rest — becomes practically steady. That reduced fluctuation in electroencephalogram signals appears to coincide with what neuroscientists have described as major architectural changes in the brain that pave the way for cognitive maturity. While babies, toddlers and young children are taking in and making sense of the world, their brain cells are wiring themselves together willy-nilly, creating super-dense networks of interwoven neurons. But as we reach and progress through adolescence, neuroscientists have observed, a period of intensive “synaptic pruning” occurs in which those networks are thinned and the strongest and most evolutionarily useful remain. In a study published last week, scientists from the University of California at Davis say they believe the slowed fluctuations observed during the delta phase of teens’ sleep may be evidence of that pruning process at work. And since major mental illnesses such as schizophrenia appear to take root during adolescence, the authors of the study say the changing architecture of sleep may offer clues as to how and when mental illness sets in. © 1996-2013 The Washington Post

Keyword: Sleep; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 17961 - Posted: 03.28.2013

By Bruce Bower Children with autism may understand more about how other people think than they’re usually given credit for. The trick to exposing this awareness, a new study finds, is to motivate these youngsters to show what they know. In a lab game that requires a child to compete with two adults for a prize, many kids with autism demonstrate insight into how other people’s thoughts shape their behavior, say psychologist Candida Peterson of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, and her colleagues. The finding suggests that previous research testing this ability, called theory of mind, underestimates how well youngsters with autism can interpret other people’s actions, Peterson’s team reports March 19 in Developmental Science. Studies published since 1985 have found that most high-functioning individuals with autism — those who have serious social and language problems but average or better IQs — fail a standard theory of mind test at least through adolescence. Kids without autism usually pass the test by age 5. In the standard test, called the Sally-Anne test, children watch an experimenter play with a doll named Sally, who has a covered basket, and a doll named Anne, who has a box. Sally puts a marble in her basket and leaves. Anne moves Sally’s marble to the box. Kids with autism usually indicate that, when Sally returns, she will look for her marble in the box, failing to recognize that Sally falsely believes the marble remains in her basket. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 17960 - Posted: 03.28.2013

By DENISE GRADY The bacterial makeup of the intestines may help determine whether people gain weight or lose it, according to two new studies, one in humans and one in mice. The research also suggests that a popular weight-loss operation, gastric bypass, which shrinks the stomach and rearranges the intestines, seems to work in part by shifting the balance of bacteria in the digestive tract. People who have the surgery generally lose 65 percent to 75 percent of their excess weight, but scientists have not fully understood why. Now, the researchers are saying that bacterial changes may account for 20 percent of the weight loss. The findings mean that eventually, treatments that adjust the microbe levels, or “microbiota,” in the gut may be developed to help people lose weight without surgery, said Dr. Lee M. Kaplan, director of the obesity, metabolism and nutrition institute at the Massachusetts General Hospital, and an author of a study published Wednesday in Science Translational Medicine. Not everyone who hopes to lose weight wants or needs surgery to do it, he said. About 80 million people in the United States are obese, but only 200,000 a year have bariatric operations. “There is a need for other therapies,” Dr. Kaplan said. “In no way is manipulating the microbiota going to mimic all the myriad effects of gastric bypass. But if this could produce 20 percent of the effects of surgery, it will still be valuable.” In people, microbial cells outnumber human ones, and the new studies reflect a growing awareness of the crucial role played by the trillions of bacteria and other microorganisms that live in their own ecosystem in the gut. Perturbations there can have profound and sometimes devastating effects. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 17959 - Posted: 03.28.2013

By Puneet Kollipara Blind fish that spend their lives in dark, underwater caves have lost a huge chunk of their ability to hear, scientists report in the March 27 Biology Letters. Two of the fish species studied could not hear high-pitched sounds. “I was really surprised,” says study coauthor Daphne Soares of the University of Maryland, College Park. “I expected them to hear much better than the surface fishes.” Cave-dwelling fish can lose their vision and even their eyes over many generations. And without light, eyesight can lose its importance in fish survival. Only two previous studies have explored what happens to hearing after fish lose their vision; both found no differences in hearing between cave fish and those that experience daylight. Soares and her colleagues collected fish of two blind cave-dwelling species, Typhlichthys subterraneus and Amblyopsis spelaea, from lakes in Kentucky. Specimens of a surface-dwelling species, Forbesichthys agassizii, which is closely related to the cave dwellers, came from a lake in south-central Tennessee. Back in the lab, the researchers tested fish hearing by seeing whether sounds across a range of pitches could stimulate nerve activity in the fishes’ brains. The researchers also measured the density of sound-detecting hair cells in the creatures’ ears. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Vision; Hearing
Link ID: 17958 - Posted: 03.28.2013

by Niall Firth Automatic systems that analyse gestures and facial expressions may soon be helping psychologists pick up the easily missed symptoms of depression The interviewee shifts uncomfortably in his seat before stumbling over his answer. The movement, hesitation and telltale gaze aversion are noted: this person may be depressed. The probing questioner is SimSensei, a digital avatar that interviews humans to judge their state of mind. SimSensei is one of several new initiatives designed to partially automate one of the medical profession's trickiest tasks: diagnosing depression. SimSensei is more than an astute questioner. Behind the scenes, it uses face recognition technology and depth-sensing cameras built into Microsoft's Kinect to record and interpret the interviewee's body language. The animated psychologist can then respond appropriately. In work to be presented at the Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition conference in Shanghai, China, next month, Stefan Scherer of the University of Southern California and colleagues used the system to identify characteristic movements that indicate someone may be depressed. To extract the right features, his team interviewed a mixture of healthy volunteers and those who had previously been diagnosed with depression or post-traumatic stress disorder. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 17957 - Posted: 03.28.2013

By Meghan Rosen With parasitic flies gorging on her guts and the end approaching, a variable field cricket may have only one thing to do: Find a mate. Usually, female Gryllus lineaticeps prefer males with fast chirps. But when being eaten alive by fly larvae, female crickets don’t wait around for a snappy tune. Instead, they settle for slow-chirping sexual partners, evolutionary biologists Oliver Beckers of Indiana University in Bloomington and William Wagner Jr. of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln report in the April Animal Behaviour. Parasitic flies seek out crickets as potential homes (and meal tickets) for their young. Before the fly larvae chew through crickets’ bellies, female crickets have about a week to find a mate and lay eggs before dying. To find out whether infestation lowered females’ mating standards, Beckers and Wagner placed fly larvae on female crickets and then played slow and fast chirp recordings from loudspeakers set in separate corners of a square chamber. Healthy females walked toward the fast chirping sound about 80 percent of the time, while infested females split their devotion about equally. “They don’t invest a lot of time and energy finding the super sexy guy,” says Becker. “They’ll go for the average Joe.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 17956 - Posted: 03.27.2013

by Beth Skwarecki If you thought the battle of the genders was complicated, try having seven sexes. When Tetrahymena, a single-celled creature covered in cilia, mates, the offspring isn't necessarily the same sex as either parent—it can be any of seven. Now, researchers have figured out the complex dance of DNA that determines the offspring's sex, and it's a random selection, they report today in PLOS Biology. Each Tetrahymena has a gene for its own sex—or mating type—in its regular nucleus, but it also carries a second nucleus used only for reproduction. This "germline nucleus" contains incomplete versions of all seven mating type genes, which are cut and pasted together until one complete gene remains and the other six have been deleted. The newly rearranged DNA becomes part of the offspring's regular nucleus, determining its mating type. Because the mating type gene helps Tetrahymena recognize others of a different sex, the researchers say that the finding could shed light on how other cells, including those in humans, recognize those that are different from themselves. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 17955 - Posted: 03.27.2013

Alternating between periods of eating and fasting is gaining in popularity among dieters and generating criticism in nutritional circles. Intermittent fasting, sometimes known as the 5:2 diet, asks people to eat very little or nothing at times, such as eating normally for five days a week and fasting for the other two. Brad Pilon designed one of the first intermittent fasts that became popular after he published a guide, Eat Stop Eat. Pilon said the diet allows followers to eat the foods they crave most of the time and still lose weight. "In the fasted state your body's set up to burn the calories you stored while eating," said Pilon. "So it's set up specifically for the act of burning body fat." Cutting down on weekly calorie intake is generally recommended. And there's research underway into the hypothesis that restricting calories could extend a healthy lifespan. Critics of intermittent fasting say that besides burning unwanted fat, the body will also burn its building blocks. "So when those energy stores start to drop the body looks for other sources and it goes to the muscles and burns muscle," said Margaret De Melo, a registered dietician at Toronto Western Hospital. © CBC 2013

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 17954 - Posted: 03.27.2013

by Anil Ananthaswamy, A YOUNG man lies unconscious on the table, his head clamped firmly in place. His eyes are closed. The hair over his left temple has been shaved. I'm in the operating room at University Hospital Zurich in Switzerland with neurologist Thomas Grunwald, who has diagnosed 22-year-old Jeremy Künzler with drug-resistant temporal lobe epilepsy. His symptoms during fits suggest that the seizures begin in the left temporal lobe. Often, this condition can only be treated by surgically removing the errant brain tissue. Unfortunately, brain scans have revealed nothing that would point to the source of Künzler's seizures – no obvious tumour, scar or lesion. In ordinary circumstances, Künzler would have to undergo exploratory brain surgery. But instead of this drastic operation, Grunwald is pioneering a technique to pinpoint the problem area. He has asked neurosurgeon Niklaus Krayenbühl to implant electrodes inside Künzler's skull: a grid electrode over his left temporal lobe, and two strip electrodes beneath the left and right lobes, used to monitor activity bilaterally in the hippocampi and amygdalae. Once they are in place, Grunwald will record brain signals in real time during seizures and use the information to try to identify the epileptogenic tissue. It's my first time inside an operating room. I'm anxious, as I have been told not to touch a thing for fear of contamination, especially the giant surgical microscope covered in clear, sterile plastic. "The nurses are very strict," says Grunwald. "If you touch this, even with your head, they get really angry." © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Epilepsy
Link ID: 17953 - Posted: 03.27.2013

By HARRIET BROWN Mental-health care has come a long way since the remedy of choice was trepanation — drilling holes into the skull to release “evil spirits.” Over the last 30 years, treatments like cognitive-behavioral therapy, dialectical behavior therapy and family-based treatment have been shown effective for ailments ranging from anxiety and depression to post-traumatic stress disorder and eating disorders. The trouble is, surprisingly few patients actually get these kinds of evidence-based treatments once they land on the couch — especially not cognitive behavioral therapy. In 2009, a meta-analysis conducted by leading mental-health researchers found that psychiatric patients in the United States and Britain rarely receive C.B.T., despite numerous trials demonstrating its effectiveness in treating common disorders. One survey of nearly 2,300 psychologists in the United States found that 69 percent used C.B.T. only part time or in combination with other therapies to treat depression and anxiety. C.B.T. refers to a number of structured, directive types of psychotherapy that focus on the thoughts behind a patient’s feelings and that often include exposure therapy and other activities. Instead, many patients are subjected to a kind of dim-sum approach — a little of this, a little of that, much of it derived more from the therapist’s biases and training than from the latest research findings. And even professionals who claim to use evidence-based treatments rarely do. The problem is called “therapist drift.” “A large number of people with mental health problems that could be straightforwardly addressed are getting therapies that have very little chance of being effective,” said Glenn Waller, chairman of the psychology department at the University of Sheffield and one of the authors of the meta-analysis. Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 17952 - Posted: 03.26.2013

by Traci Watson You say you want to be alone? Think again. Researchers have found that older people with fewer human contacts are more likely to die—even if they're happy in their solitude—than are people with richer social lives. The study adds to the debate over whether loneliness, social isolation, or some combination of the two leads to higher mortality. Social isolation is an objective condition in which people have little interaction with others. Loneliness, on the other hand, is an emotional state felt by people who are dissatisfied with their social connections. "Someone who's socially isolated is likely to be lonely, and vice versa, but that's not completely the case," says epidemiologist and lead author Andrew Steptoe of University College London. To tease apart the effects of being alone versus just feeling lonely, Steptoe and his colleagues examined data from 6500 Britons aged 50 and up who had filled out questionnaires assessing their levels of loneliness. The researchers also tabulated the subjects' contacts with friends, family, religious groups, and other organizations to gauge their social connections. Then they counted how many subjects died over a 7-year period. The most socially isolated subjects had a 26% greater risk of dying, even when sex, age, and other factors linked to survival were accounted for, the researchers report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They then tweaked their model to determine whether the connection to death was due to the fact that isolated people are often lonely. It wasn't. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Emotions; Stress
Link ID: 17951 - Posted: 03.26.2013

Regina Nuzzo In a twist that evokes the dystopian science fiction of writer Philip K. Dick, neuroscientists have found a way to predict whether convicted felons are likely to commit crimes again from looking at their brain scans. Convicts showing low activity in a brain region associated with decision-making and action are more likely to be arrested again, and sooner. Kent Kiehl, a neuroscientist at the non-profit Mind Research Network in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and his collaborators studied a group of 96 male prisoners just before their release. The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the prisoners’ brains during computer tasks in which subjects had to make quick decisions and inhibit impulsive reactions. The scans focused on activity in a section of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a small region in the front of the brain involved in motor control and executive functioning. The researchers then followed the ex-convicts for four years to see how they fared. Among the subjects of the study, men who had lower ACC activity during the quick-decision tasks were more likely to be arrested again after getting out of prison, even after the researchers accounted for other risk factors such as age, drug and alcohol abuse and psychopathic traits. Men who were in the lower half of the ACC activity ranking had a 2.6-fold higher rate of rearrest for all crimes and a 4.3-fold higher rate for nonviolent crimes. The results are published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Aggression; Brain imaging
Link ID: 17950 - Posted: 03.26.2013

By MARY ROACH WAGENINGEN, THE NETHERLANDS — When I told people I was traveling to Food Valley, I described it as the Silicon Valley of eating. At this cluster of universities and research facilities, nearly 15,000 scientists are dedicated to improving — or, depending on your sentiments about processed food, compromising — the quality of our meals. At the time I made the Silicon Valley comparison, I did not expect to be served actual silicone. But here I am, in the Restaurant of the Future, a cafeteria at Wageningen University where hidden cameras record diners as they make decisions about what to eat. And here it is, a bowl of rubbery white cubes the size of salad croutons. Andries van der Bilt has brought them from his lab in the brusquely named Department of Head and Neck, at the nearby University Medical Center Utrecht. “You chew them,” he said. The cubes are made of a trademarked product called Comfort Putty, more typically used in its unhardened form for taking dental impressions. Dr. Van der Bilt isn’t a dentist, however. He is an oral physiologist, and he likely knows more about chewing than anyone else in the world. He uses the cubes to quantify “masticatory performance” — how effectively a person chews. I take a cube from the bowl. If you ever, as a child, chewed on a whimsical pencil eraser in the shape of, say, an animal or a piece of fruit, then you have tasted this dish. “I’m sorry.” Dr. Van der Bilt winces. “It’s quite old.” As though fresh silicone might be better. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 17949 - Posted: 03.26.2013