Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Tue, 30 Apr 2013 17:00:00 PDT Michael Ho http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101123/16294111996/dailydirt-seeing-color.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101123/16294111996/dailydirt-seeing-color.shtml

Chemists are cranking our visual red dial to 11 -- enabling people to see redder than red. By modifying proteins that interact with the chromophore rhodopsin, it might be possible to see light with wavelengths as high as 644 nm. [url]

Tetrachromats might be able to see more colors than most people (who are just trichromats). But that's nothing compared to mantis shrimp... or butterflies. [url]

Neil Harbisson was born completely colorblind, so he could only see in black and white -- until he started wearing a device on his head so that he could hear colors. Google Glass could presumably do this, too, and maybe we'll all be wearing visors like Geordi La Forge someday. [url]

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]]> urls-we-dig-up http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20101123/16294111996 Fri, 5 Oct 2012 17:00:00 PDT Joyce Hung http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100928/22581211205/dailydirt-accounting-taste.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100928/22581211205/dailydirt-accounting-taste.shtml

Many animals, including cats and dolphins, can't taste sweet things. It turns out that a large number of carnivores can't taste sugars because they have non-working versions of the genes responsible for making sugar receptors on the tongue. [url]

Researchers are working on developing artificial tongues that can mimic the human taste response to various flavors. However, to fully reproduce the experience of taste requires the development of an artifical nose, because a large part of "taste" is actually due to smell. [url]

The elusive "salt receptor" is unlike the receptors for all the other tastes, and figuring it out is complicated by the fact that sodium is essential for life but can kill you at high enough doses. (Apparently, it takes only a few mouthfuls of salt water from the Dead Sea to kill a person.) Researchers now believe that there are two receptors or mechanisms involved in tasting salt -- one that makes salt desirable and another (the elusive one) that makes it undesirable at high concentrations. [url]

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]]> urls-we-dig-up http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20100928/22581211205 Tue, 24 Jul 2012 17:00:00 PDT Michael Ho http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100903/16074510902/dailydirt-visions-future.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100903/16074510902/dailydirt-visions-future.shtml

Paul Bach-y-Rita is a neuroscientist working on brain plasticity, studying how various senses can be re-mapped in the brain. People with vision problems might be able to learn how to see via tongue sensations. The brain might be able to process visual information in many different ways. [url]

A retinal implant that could allow the completely blind to perceive light and shapes is in early trials -- in rats. There are several kinds of retinal implants that could potentially help people with degenerative retinal diseases, but the technology is still primitive compared to natural vision. [url]

Sheila Nirenberg's TED talk on eye prosthetics describes how technology could be used to help the blind see again. Nirenberg's strategy to create software that can translate signals (from images) into input that the brain can understand could also be useful for other senses like hearing. [url]

Steve Mann has been wearing a camera attached to his head for quite some time now -- as an exploration of wearable computing. Recently, though, he was assaulted for wearing a digital camera, and he's blogged about his experience trying to live in a society that may not be ready for people wearing personal computer vision systems. [url]

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]]> urls-we-dig-up http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20100903/16074510902 Tue, 17 Jul 2012 17:00:00 PDT Michael Ho http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100801/10475310435/dailydirt-blue-green-green-blue-crayons.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100801/10475310435/dailydirt-blue-green-green-blue-crayons.shtml

The vast majority of people are trichromats who can perceive about a million shades of color, but there are also dichromats who see fewer colors -- as well as tetrachromats who can see a hundred million colors. But even if you can see those extra millions of colors, it's a bit difficult to describe them to others in words. [url]

Movie posters from 1914 to 2012 are mostly blue and orange. The distribution of colors isn't too even, and the spread of the use of blue appears to be growing over time. [url]

The color of food can really affect how it tastes. Red-colored drinks seem to taste sweeter for some people, and people are pretty bad at tasting flavors when the color of a drink doesn't match its flavor. [url]

Adults and infants may perceive colors very differently -- with babies seeing colors directly, but adults seeing colors based on language interpretations. Interestingly, some Russian speakers may be able to see more shades of blue than English speakers. [url]

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]]> urls-we-dig-up http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20100801/10475310435 Fri, 6 Jul 2012 17:00:00 PDT Michael Ho http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100304/0432398415/dailydirt-no-accounting-taste.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100304/0432398415/dailydirt-no-accounting-taste.shtml TED talk on spaghetti sauces discusses. Still, food science has to take some kind of measurements, and here are just a few examples.

• If you want to hone your tasting skills, you have to practice, practice, practice. And maybe buy a bushel of different apples and try to describe each variety in as much detail as possible.... [url]
• A fascinating study of Asian and Western food recipes shows that Western dishes tend to pair ingredients with similar flavors, whereas Asian recipes don't. So the "sweet and sour" sauce is only on an Asian menu, but this study goes into far more depth than that. (And there's a free article on taste, sponsored by Ajinomoto.) [url]
• The hottest pepper on the planet goes to the Trinidad Moruga Scorpion with an average Scoville Heat Unit value of 1.2 million. Some individual peppers from this plant have hit 2 million Scoville heat units, and this research will allow hot sauce companies to scientifically claim to use the hottest known peppers. [url]

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]]> urls-we-dig-up http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20100304/0432398415 Thu, 13 Oct 2011 17:00:00 PDT Michael Ho http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100513/0854049411/dailydirt-slowly-piecing-together-how-brain-works.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100513/0854049411/dailydirt-slowly-piecing-together-how-brain-works.shtml

Scientists at UC Berkeley have started to develop a method that could reconstruct mental images using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure the brain activity of volunteers. Reconstructed videos aren't exactly high definition reproductions, but they vaguely match up to the videos that the volunteers are shown. [url]

The placebo effect (for pain) has been shown to involve cannabinoid receptors in the brain. The study suggests that people are capable of creating their own natural opiate-like chemicals with some training. [url]

After a professor of neuroscience developed synesthesia and started to actually feel sounds, there's a bit more interest in discovering how the sense of touch is related to hearing. Come on, feel the noise. Girls, rock your boys. [url]

To discover more interesting articles on the human mind, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

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