taste

iPhone users wondering whether their wine or breath have gone bad may soon have help from a chip designed to identify nearby aromas and flavors.

Adamant Technologies has created a processor for iPhones that "can take the sense of smell and taste and digitize them," Adamant founder and CEO Sam Khamis tells Business Insider. Khamis says his company's product is fairly sophisticated, employing roughly 2,000 sensors to identify smells compared with the about 400 sensors in the average human nose.

The San Francisco startup, which is backed by venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, has begun producing chips … Read more

Perhaps you, like me, enjoy a glass of wine. Especially if it's a larger glass, at least half full of good wine.

Perhaps you, riding on your usual wave of intelligence and sophistication, believe that you can always taste the difference between cheap wine that deserves a box or a hole in the ground, and expensive wine that deserves another year or two in a dimly lit cellar.

Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire in England, believes the mathematical likelihood is that you have no idea what you're talking about.

Wiseman, you see, decided that … Read more

What if your toothpaste could tell you whether you needed to leave the house carrying an umbrella? Or how hot the day was going to be?

Odd as it may sound, David Carr of MIT's Media Lab is working on just such a prototype product, "Tastes Like Rain."

Carr and his colleagues are focused on super-mechanicals, or the idea of taking a basic object and giving it dynamic properties (consider, for example, the Proverbial Wallets, also out of MIT's Media Lab, that know your financial state).

In this case, toothpaste is modified to dispense one of three flavors depending on the weather. If it's mint, you know it's colder out than yesterday. Cinnamon means it's hotter. Blue stripes indicate tartar precipitation.

The prototype is currently hooked up to a small Linux computer that pulls forecasts, using custom software to compare previous and current temperatures and divvy up the flavors.

Then, linear actuators squeeze out the proper variety of toothpaste through a heavily modded Mentadent dispenser. … Read more

A caller wonders what happens to the Chevy Volt if you have the gas in there too long. Does the gas go bad? Well, it could get gummy. And nobody wants gummy gas. or gummi gas either. Not tasty. We also take the SEC conference to task for trying to ban Twitter and photos during their football games. Seriously? Also China got a Dell phone. But will they want it?

For SEC, tech-savvy fans might be biggest threats to media exclusivity http://www.tampabay.com/news/article1027680.ece… Read more

ICANN has won a major battle over the abusive tactic of domain tasting, said the organization in a report released Wednesday.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is responsible for managing and doling out Internet domain names.

It's not an easy job. And making it harder was a scheme used by some registrars known as domain tasting. Someone would buy up lots of domain names, try them out, and then get rid of the unprofitable ones, all without losing any money. As long as the registrar dumped the domains within the five-day grace period, known as the … Read more

It was touching to see that Douglas Bowman, Google's visual design leader, chose, in announcing his resignation, to stroll down Steve Wozniak Honesty Avenue.

In a blog post, he summed up his feelings, as all the best designers should, in one simple statement: "I won't miss a design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data."

He talked of how data was being collected (and one can only wonder what fine, laborious methods are used in the process) to judge the acceptability of a shade of blue, the width of a pixel, or … Read more

There are dozens of movie recommendation engines on the Web. Some require little or no input before they give you titles, while others want to find out exactly what your interests are. I've been using 10 movie recommendation engines on both sides of the equation. They're all different, but some are definitely better than others.

10. Netflix Netflix asks you to rate movies to determine which films you'll want to see next. And although it does make it easy to rate movies and it does return huge lists, there's too much duplication in … Read more

CopyTaste is a new service that lets you very quickly post text, photos, and videos to an anonymously hosted page. Think of it like blogging, but without a destination page, or any breadcrumbs that lead back to your identity.

The service features a WYSIWYG text editor, along with the option to insert videos and pictures into your post, the latter of which can be hosted on CopyTaste's servers. Heavy users can install a Firefox extension that lets you rip down the content from any page you're on and squirrel it away for viewing and sharing later on.

What … Read more

Nothing quite says "1950s' excess" like huge tail fins. Well, except maybe for acres of bright, shiny jukebox chrome. And exaggerated bumper bullets. No comparable trick has been used in automotive styling, except perhaps the picnic table-sized wings that were in vogue on cars like the Subaru WRX and Mitsubishi Lancer Evo a few years back.

Oversize wings besotted somewhat a smaller number of cars than the fins of 50 years before, but both fashions stem from motorsports. Hey, if it looks like it won on Sunday, maybe it'll sell on Monday...

Today, most varieties of pure … Read more