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Carrion Luggage
Carrion Luggage
 
Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem.
This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it.
It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans.
It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier."
I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination.
December 3, 2025 at 8:26am December 3, 2025 at 8:26am
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Now this... this is what science is for. A short but piquant article from PhysOrg:
This is one of those times when it pays to go to the article to see the picture. Because when I saw it, I thought they'd made the artificial tongue look like an actual, disembodied, floppy tongue.
The appearance of a hot sauce or pepper doesn't reveal whether it's mild or likely to scorch someone's taste buds, but researchers have now created an artificial tongue to quickly detect spiciness.
Or you just dare an insecure teenage boy to eat it, preferably when he's around people he's trying to impress.
Inspired by milk's casein proteins, which bind to capsaicin and relieve the burn of spicy foods, the researchers incorporated milk powder into a gel sensor.
Okay, so it's not a step on the way to unlimited free energy or anything, but it's at least useful.
"Our flexible artificial tongue holds tremendous potential in spicy sensation estimation for portable taste-monitoring devices, movable humanoid robots, or patients with sensory impairments like ageusia, for example," says Weijun Deng, the study's lead author.
Except, of course, for the bit about "movable humanoid robots." Don't give them a sense of taste. Have you not read science fiction? They will develop a taste for human flesh.
Still, the article goes into a bit more background, but, as I said, it's short.
As a proof-of-concept, the researchers tested eight pepper types and eight spicy foods (including several hot sauces) on the artificial tongue and measured how spicy they were by changes in electrical current. A panel of taste testers rated the spiciness of the same items.
I have to wonder if they had a diverse group on the panel; that is, some from spicy-food cultures and others from the American Midwest. Because while spice level is objective, reaction to it is subjective.
Now, I'm a fan of spicy food. I don't eat it to show off; I genuinely enjoy the heat... up to a point, but that point is far beyond that of my fellow Americans of Midwestern origin. But this would be useful to anyone, whether they're trying to find, or to avoid, the hotter stuff.
I'm just disappointed that it's not, ultimately, shaped like an actual, pink, floppy, disembodied, human tongue. |
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