Now Good News About Chocolate and Coffee
If you’d been in Anaheim last week, you could have either a) rubbed shoulders with thousands of vacationers waiting in really long lines to go on really short theme park rides, or b) rubbed shoulders with thousands of chemists discussing recent advances in polyesters. Sounds like a tossup, doesn’t it?
But at the American Chemical Society’s annual spring shindig, you would have also learned all kinds of stuff about things we love to eat and drink.
Such as chocolate: Scientists at a variety of institutions, M&M;/Mars Inc. among them, report that chocolate is chock-full o’ antioxidant chemicals known as polyphenols and flavenoids, which when fed to rats and mice help protect against such things as heart disease, cancer and ulcers.
And coffee: According to some scientists, caffeine is addictive. But now some new research says it isn’t. When French researchers fed rats the equivalent of, say, three rat-sized cups of coffee, they saw no stimulation of a part of the brain involved in addictive behaviors--whereas stimulation is seen, they say, when rats consume even small amounts of addictive drugs like nicotine and cocaine.
Other scientists disagree with these findings. Our question is simply this: At 7 on a Monday morning, who cares?
Seeking Input on Care of Virtual Pets
Hey, kids! Over here! Before you decide your Furby or Tamagotchi is, like, totally uncool, why don’t you sit down and write a letter to Sherry Turkle at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology?
Turkle, a psychologist and sociologist, has been studying kids’ interactions with electronic games and toys for 20 years. But virtual pets, she says, are something new and interesting. They’re the first wave of toys that kids actually have to nurture, look after.
“We’re socializing our children to think that it’s natural to be having conversations with machines, and that it’s natural that machines should need nurturance,” she says. “I’m not saying that this is bad, but I think that we need to pay attention to its psychological implications.”
Turkle would like to learn more, so she’d like to hear from virtual-pet owners like you. What do you like and dislike about your pet? What is it like to take care of it? What things have you and your pet done together? Check out Turkle’s virtual pet Web site for more details: (https://web.mit.edu/sturkle/www/vpet.html). You can e-mail her at virtualpets@MIT.edu.
Turkle says she also wants to hear what parents feel about these lovable little chirping, beeping toys. We think this is incredibly brave of her.
Making Flies Work for Their Food
The next time you find a fly happily grooming itself on your burger, don’t swat it: Thank it. One day, part of the head of such a bug could be saving you from food poisoning.
We know. We can hardly believe it ourselves, but there it is, in New Scientist magazine: British researchers are using bugs’ super-sensitive antennas to create sensors that can warn us when food is going rotten. Long before a human nose could know.
The strategy goes something like this: You stick a teensy thin wire into the insect’s antenna. Then, when you spritz that antenna with trace amounts of certain smells, such as eau de rotting fruit or essence de putrescent meat, unique patterns of nerves fire in the antenna, which the scientists can detect and thus distinguish different odors.
Hmmmm. We wonder if this means that one day you could get a wired-up blowfly or beetle to crawl on your burger and, if it gave you the all-clear, you could feel perfectly happy about eating your dinner.
