Month: November 2014

My grandma the poisoner

People were always dying around Grandma—her children, her husbands, her boyfriend—so her lifelong state of grief was understandable. To see her sunken in her high and soft bed, enshrouded in the darkness of the attic, and surrounded by the skin-and-spit smell of old age, was to know that mothers don’t get what they deserve. Today, when I think back on it, I don’t wonder whether Grandma got what she deserved as a mother; I wonder whether she got what she deserved as a murderer.

Opentrons

Automating pipetting is a big deal.

Today, biologists spend too much time pipetting by hand. We think biologists should have robots to do pipetting for them. People doing science should be free of tedious benchwork and repetitive stress injuries. They should be able to spend their time designing experiments and analyzing data.

That’s why we started Opentrons.

We make robots for biologists. Our mission is to provide the scientific community with a common platform to easily share protocols and reproduce each other’s results. Our robots automate experiments that would otherwise be done by hand, allowing our community to spend more time pursuing answers to some of the 21st century’s most important questions.

30 years boxing champion

if you’ve seen the wrestler, you know how impressive this is:

Unlike most other boxers, who train down to their fighting weight only when they have a bout coming up, Hopkins keeps himself right around the 80 kg light-heavyweight limit. Fight people marvel at the ascetic rigor that has kept him perpetually in superb shape for almost 30 years, his habit of returning to the gym first thing Monday morning after a Saturday-night fight, the list of pleasurable things he won’t eat, drink or do.

Taste Spoon

If they can make healthy foods taste good, that would be something.

If Dinner is missing some zing, a spoon studded with electrodes could help. It creates tastes on your tongue with a pulse of electricity. The utensil may add some extra flavour for people who shouldn’t eat certain foods.

Different frequencies and magnitudes of current through the electrodes can create the impression of saltiness, sourness or bitterness. By boosting the flavour of plain foods, a tool like this could be useful for people with diabetes or heart issues who have been ordered to cut down on salt and sugar.

To see how well the electric utensils could fool diners, 30 people tried them out in a taste test with plain water and porridge. The spoon and bottle were judged 40-83% successful at recreating the tastes, depending on which one they were aiming for. Bitter was the hardest sensation to get right. Some testers were distracted by the metallic taste of the electrodes.