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A new artificial mouth will allow robots to snack on our tasty human flesh. French scientists have developed a way for robots to simulate the act of eating and tasting, using pointy artificial teeth combined with the proper chemical and environmental conditions found inside a mouth, including fake saliva. What's the use of such a device?
If you want to analyze taste, you can't just perform a chemical analysis of the food. Taste as experienced by humans includes the physical changes food undergoes as it is chewed (increasing surface area), chemical reactions with enzymes in our saliva, and volatile compounds that reach our olfactory receptors. This new artificial mouth is an attempt to take all these factors into account and create a situation very similar to what happens to food in a human mouth.
Why? It could be a first step toward codifying taste, allowing food scientists to test and create flavors in a laboratory kitchen without the time and effort of human taste tests. At some point, we might be entering flavor codes into the machinery at food production plants. Can Trek-style food replicators be far behind? Of more immediate concern is food safety. An artificial mouth can test the food supply for problems that might not show up until the food is chewed, although following that idea to its logical conclusion would seem to suggest a need for an artificial stomach as well.
Hungry robots. Yeah, that's not scary at all. Image by: American Chemical Society.
Effect of Apple Particle State on the Release of Volatile Compounds in a New Artificial Mouth Device. [American Chemical Society]
Comments
I'll tell you the use for this machine. It's so robots can eat our brains.
On the plus-side, when my evil brain is transferred into an indestructable robot body, I'll still be able to enjoy a pizza.
Cyborgs with prosthetic mouths. And another meaning for "You will be assimilated/"
will robots think that people taste like chicken?
Maybe they'll be happy just eating the dead. We have to program them to believe that soylant green is just as good as fresh, dewy-moist, sweet, young human flesh.
They could have made the model teeth less terrifying. After all, it is eating an apple, not poking into trees to reach worms. What kind of creature HAS teeth like that, other than those from our nightmares?
They are not making it any easier to not fear a robotic uprising, now with added (???)vorous mayhem. Hmm, now I am disturbed. I've never needed to know the latin word for human, and how to conjugate it with "eating." Sapivorous?
We only have to get robots that can poop and breathe for me, and I'm DONE with this effort of living.
mmmm Stroyent generator.
This reminds me of the taste-analyzing robot from japan, mentioned in the news a while back.
It was really accurate, except it kept registering its human handlers as 'bacon' or 'pork'
Long Pig, it's what's for dinner!
Am I crazy, or does that model look just like the bubble-gum making machine from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory? The one that tasted like tomato soup, roast beef, and turned Violet violet?
Text of a restaurant review, circa 2025:
"11001 000110. 10110 0011000 011, 1110. 0011. 1100 000110101!"
"Rating: 3.45356895435678 Stars"
@Hes-Dead-Jim:Zing!
Awesome!
I love that illustration.
-Kle.
@CMG: more likely they will think we taste like "Tasty Wheat."
@Hes-Dead-Jim: You should know better than to use fake binary on a geeky blog.
[www.roubaixinteractive.com]
Rating: 3.45356895435678 Stars = 01010010011000010111010001101001011011100110011100111010*00110011001011100011010000110101001100110011010100110110001110000011100100110101001101000011001100110101001101100011011100111000*0101001101110100011000010111001001110011
For readability, words are seperated by commas.
At least, that is if it is converted to ASCII. It would also be more efficient to convert the decimal notation into binary directly without the direct character conversion. Would probably remove three lines worth of 1's and 0's, although it isn't very accurate.
@Ghede: WHOA. Just broke the layout on the crappy IE6 lab computers. Hope it doesn't affect everyone.
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