Episode 6 Season 7: E-taste, Moon Landing, and Snacky Labs

The Science Podcast explores cutting-edge taste technology that lets you experience flavors in virtual reality through chemical delivery to your tongue, along with updates on private lunar missions and the genetic basis of Labrador retrievers' food obsession.

• New "eTaste" technology delivers five basic taste chemicals directly to users' tongues through a flexible conduit while in virtual reality
• Device successfully simulated complex flavors like lemonade, cake, fried egg, fish soup, and coffee with 87% accuracy
• Private lunar missions making history with Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost successfully landing on Mare Crisium
• Intuitive Machines' Athena Lander tipped over in a crater but still collected valuable data
• Researchers identified five genes linked to obesity in Labradors, most notably DENND1B which increases body fat by 8%
• Labs with high obesity-risk genes showed stronger food-seeking behaviors
• Strict feeding regimens by owners can maintain healthy weight even in genetically predisposed Labradors

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Transcript

Welcome and Pet Updates

Speaker 1 0:09

Hello science enthusiasts. I'm Jason Zukoski. And I'm Chris Zukoski, we're the pet parents of Bunsen, beaker, bernoulli and Ginger.

Speaker 2 0:18

The science animals on social media.

Speaker 1 0:21

If you love science.

Speaker 2 0:22

And you love pets.

Speaker 1 0:24

You've come to the right spot, so put on your safety glasses and hold on to your tail.

Speaker 1 0:29

This is the Science Podcast. Hi everybody and welcome back to the Science Podcast. We hope you're happy and healthy out there. This is episode six of season seven. The full melt was on last week but, old man, winter came right back. It has snowed a whole bunch and it's been chilly not super cold, but chilly enough that chris is again annoyed with the winter. It's chilly enough that if you go outside without a coat you get kind of cold. You might freeze. It's actually pretty cold today, with the sun shining. Sigh, hey, that's okay. It's great for the dogs to have more snow. March is usually the month we get the most snow and I think we're just. We just kind of block it from our minds that spring is right around the corner and we just forget that there's so much snow. That happens in march.

Virtual Reality Taste Technology

Speaker 1 1:14

Beaker joined bernoulli at doggy daycare last week, um for three days in the week, and she did so good and the photos that they're sending us this week are adorable of the two of them together. So it's really good to see Beaker come out of her shell a bit and be able to interact with dogs. She's doing great. All reports are. She's totally getting along with everybody, which is awesome. Bunsen, I think, has gotten a little bit better this week, so all of that rest is paying off. He's moving more confidently. He really wants to go outside, which is a bad thing because he wants to tear around and we got to keep him on rest, all right.

Speaker 1 1:50

Well, what's on the science podcast this week? We have three science articles. The first one is all about being able to taste things in virtual reality. The second is about all of the big landings or failures to land on the moon that's happened this month and in pet science. New genetic testing may link why Labrador retrievers are so hungry. All right, let's get on with the show. There's no time like Science Time. This week in science news, let's talk about virtual reality. Chris, have you ever, did you ever, come with us to play virtual reality in town?

Speaker 2 2:29

yeah, I sure did, absolutely I did.

Speaker 1 2:32

Do you remember what game it was that we, we were playing?

Speaker 2 2:34

I only remember when we went to the theater and it was a science, virtual reality where you were able to get the SBD orbitals out of the sky.

Speaker 1 2:48

Just as context, you had an atom and, depending on the atom, how many electrons it has, you could use your hands to throw or shoot electrons into the system and then they would appear in the very chaotic and weird orbitals that the quantum mechanical model of the atom has. It's quite nerdy, but I teach it in high school chemistry and it was really fun for the kids to do that. They thought that was cool. So you never actually played a virtual reality game, because I went with Adam a few times when he was young.

Speaker 2 3:20

Okay, maybe not. Can you explain what you did?

Speaker 1 3:22

There's. They had a couple of fun ones and it it's. You're in a room so you can move a little bit, but if you run too far anywhere you're going to smash into a wall. So you're allowed, you can dodge stuff. So it's like stuff is shooting at you and you can jump out of the way. But the one that Adam and I got addicted to and then our time ran out was I think it was called office work and you were just like in an office and then somebody came by and they're like you make 15 copies. So you had to somehow make 15 copies of a paper in the office and Adam just like grabbing stuff and chucking it around and making a mess, and then the boss would get upset so that actually sounds like an episode of the office, but Michael was throwing all the stuff around in accounting.

Speaker 1 4:09

Yeah.

Speaker 2 4:10

And then there was Dwight's regime, where he added a copy code that was 15 digits long and Kevin couldn't do it. Yeah, he kept screwing up, he kept screwing up, couldn't do it.

Speaker 1 4:21

Yeah, he kept screwing up. He kept screwing up, so to try to make 15 copies imagine that with that code, wow, all right, we're going down a little bit of a rabbit hole with this really fun news item, and it was actually reported in Science Advances at the end of February. Here's the picture, chris You've got those goggles on your face and you see a tasty treat like a cake. What's your favorite cake? It's not black forest.

Speaker 2 4:49

I always get that wrong no, I do not enjoy black forest cake right, right, what's your favorite cake?

Speaker 1 4:56

I don't know you don't have a favorite cake no, okay let's use me, because you know what my favorite cake is carrot cake carrot cake. Okay, so imagine, and you, you don't mind carrot cake either as long as it doesn't have raisins all right, okay. So imagine a raisin free carrot cake in your virtual world. You grab it with your virtual hands, you bring it to your and you can actually taste it. Now, this isn't a concept, it's real and it's created through a device called eTaste. It's called eTaste. That's hilarious.

Speaker 2 5:37

This actually delivers virtual tastes, but it squirts chemicals onto the tongue.

Speaker 1 5:43

Right. So it's not like shooting, like changing your brain chemistry, so you have the sensation of taste. It actually goes right onto your tongue, which sounds gross.

Speaker 2 5:54

So this advancement actually moves towards the next generation of human-machine interfaces with virtual reality. Machine interfaces with virtual reality and how eTaste works is where the system can detect chemicals in the different foodstuffs that we eat and they wirelessly transmit the information to a user's device and then that device delivers the same or equivalent chemicals to the user's tongue, which simulates the taste.

Speaker 1 6:33

So here's a little bit more. Etaste uses five edible chemicals to simulate some general flavors Glucose for sweet, citric acid for sour, sodium chloride for salty, magnesium chloride for bitter and glutamate for umami, which is savory, and those chemicals are infused into gels with the device, and the gels get mixed into little tiny channels and a pump delivers them to your tongue. Now how do they get on your tongue? A flexible ribbon-like conduit is inserted into your mouth, while you're doing the virtual reality, to administer the chemical mixture.

Speaker 2 7:15

So like a straw.

Speaker 1 7:17

It's a ribbon-like conduit straight onto your tongue. I don't know if this is something you want to share with family members. Like I'll play for five minutes, then you play and then you have to share the flexible, ribbon-like conduit.

Speaker 2 7:31

Oh, they probably have thought of that and have separate conduits.

Speaker 1 7:36

Okay, don't take our word for it. Let's take the word of the people in the study.

Speaker 2 7:41

Jason, the first test was done with 10 participants. So I don't know that's a really hearty sample size, but 10 participants did distinguish between five different intensities of sourness, which was produced by the device. So that was the first test. Was the sour test?

Speaker 1 8:01

Now to be fair, Chris, if you saw a flyer saying come, put a flexible ribbon-like conduit into your mouth, I'm not sure they'd get as many participants as hey, we're testing. If people are less stressed when they pet dogs, you're probably going to get more people for the dog study.

Speaker 2 8:19

Maybe unless they have allergies. The second test researchers simulated five complex tastes based on chemical compositions. They simulated lemonade, cake, fried egg, fish soup and coffee.

Speaker 1 8:33

Could you have fish soup? You're a vegetarian. Is that breaking the rules if it's simulated fish soup?

Speaker 2 8:41

Jason, I would avoid this test or this study. With a 10-foot pole, this is something I would not participate in. I had six trained participants in the second test.

Speaker 1 8:55

And the fish soup probably.

Speaker 2 8:57

Probably the fish soup was like no. So six trained participants learned to recognize those flavors, and participants achieved an 87% accuracy in identifying the correct flavors. Which ones were easier to identify?

Speaker 1 9:12

Probably sweet and sour.

Speaker 2 9:14

Lemonade and cake.

Speaker 1 9:15

Right.

Speaker 2 9:16

And then other ones were more difficult, like the fried egg.

Speaker 1 9:20

It sounds like an episode of Hell's Kitchen, where the chefs are blindfolded and Ramsey gives them different types of meat and then if they get the, if they give them pork and they say, oh, that's chicken, he just berates them. It's probably harder than it looks.

Speaker 2 9:36

I was thinking it was like an episode of Survivor where they did do those food things, where they spun a wheel or flicked a spinner and had to eat galoots.

Speaker 1 9:48

Oh yeah, super gross stuff.

Speaker 2 9:49

Super gross stuff.

Speaker 1 9:51

If you're thinking about how science has attempted to simulate taste before. There have been attempts using electrical stimulation, and it's worked, but not really, because scientists really don't know how taste perception works. This maybe works better because it's chemical and it provides a wider range of flavors than just zapping your tongue. There are some problems with this, though, because one of the big things that humans have with flavor is smell, though, because one of the big things that humans have with flavor is smell. If you've ever had a really bad cold before you lose your sense of smell, then you lose some of your ability to detect the flavor. Now, I don't know if that's what has happened to you, chris, but you've mentioned before. I was in that university study, and my sense of smell really helped me pass all of these tests when I had to be a guinea pig.

Speaker 2 10:47

And eating is a truly an immersive experience, including the smell and the texture and the temperature of the food and when you're, you know breaking bread with your family or your friends. It's all about the social aspect of eating. So researchers are working on incorporating smell into the e-test using gas sensors and machine learning. Okay, and I guess some possible applications of this technology could include immersive gaming experiences but, more interestingly, sensory rehabilitation, which, for example, is helping people who lost their sense of taste due to COVID-19.

Speaker 1 11:37

That's very altruistic. I was just thinking of the video game Skyrim. Do you remember Skyrim? Duncan, our older son, and I played this game game Skyrim. Do you remember Skyrim? Duncan, our older son, and I played this game called Skyrim.

Speaker 2 11:49

Jason, I could not forget because it was like the biggest world and you played it for a very long time because you got quite. I think you actually finished the game.

Speaker 1 12:00

I did, I finished Skyrim you betcha.

Speaker 2 12:02

Yeah, but.

Speaker 1 12:03

I've always said that there's so much walking in Skyrim that if somehow you could put me on like a 360 degree treadmill like in Ready Player One, I would have been in such good shape for how much moving I had to do. And then in Skyrim you can collect like a crazy amount of random objects that you just steal from homes and like. At one point I had 60 cheese wheels in my backpack so it might've been helpful If I was eating the cheese wheel to actually smell and taste it in the game.

Speaker 2 12:39

But is this the game that Jazargo says he has no more? Room to carry things.

Speaker 1 12:43

Yeah, jazargo has no more room to carry things.

Speaker 2 12:46

Yes, oh, okay.

Speaker 1 12:48

I gave him many of my cheese wheels.

Speaker 2 12:50

Yes, and he was protesting how much crap you were carrying around.

Speaker 1 12:58

I didn't want to. I was a kleptomaniac in that game. It's really hard to say goodbye to your loot. You never know when you're going to need the like the 60 books you stole from the library Anyways. So there's a huge problem with getting people to do this. I think we can all agree on what it is, and that's putting an unfamiliar device in your mouth hole. So again, you said you would have stayed away from this with a 10-foot pole. My guess like this if they had this, at best buy and it was like put this in your mouth and you can taste the cheese wheels. I'm not sure best buy or Amazon would sell a ton of these. So probably the design needs some significant improvements before it comes to a house near you.

Speaker 2 13:47

Now, I don't know what this device looks like in its current stages, but definitely the look, feel and comfort of the device is going to be paramount for the success of this device.

Speaker 1 14:01

I would try it, chris, I would try it.

Speaker 2 14:04

Jason, you would try anything cool. You're like, yeah, I'll try that, that's cool.

Speaker 1 14:09

Yeah, as long as I'm not going to get like hepatitis from it or something.

Speaker 2 14:13

Well, maybe meningitis.

Recent Moon Landing Missions

Speaker 1 14:13

Okay, as long as it's clean and it's what as long as it's clean and it's what. As long as it's clean, hygienic, I would put the thing in my mouth to taste the food in a game. I like me a fried egg without the calories. That's our first science article. All right, going from virtual reality to real reality. Chris, let's head to the moon it's very exciting.

Speaker 2 14:37

It's been a historic year for lunar landings on the moon go lunar landings on the moon.

Speaker 1 14:44

I hear it's the top destination. I wonder what the yelp views are. Five out of five beautiful views. One out of five no oxygen, something like that probably or one out of five.

Speaker 2 14:56

I landed on my side and now I can't recharge in terms of one of the one of the probes yeah, one of the landers yeah, we'll get to that though yeah, so the moon is a big destination.

Speaker 1 15:08

There's some a lot of exciting stuff that's happened lately because two private landers have touched down within a week of each other. Now, one of the landers did it. It was viral all over social media In fact, we covered it in Fun Facts with Bernoulli and that's a milestone for private spaceflight. Well, the other one tipped over on its side and sadly could not continue. Before we get to the success, let's talk about the one that didn't quite land. It got there, though.

Speaker 2 15:38

That's right, and so I think we should celebrate that success, because going to the moon is hard and as much as the other one is a success. They can learn from the failures, the mistakes or challenges that the failed attempt presented, and they can learn and change for the next attempt.

Speaker 2 16:00

So, having said that, the lander was named the Athena Lander and it was built by a Houston-based company, and the company was called Intuitive Machines, and it just landed, or the attempted land was on March 6th and it was going to be landed in Monsmouton, near the moon's south pole, and that's a flat top mountain believed to be older than the surrounding terrain on the moon, and it missed its intended landing site by 250 meters and, as you said, it ended up landing inside a crater and that caused the lander to tip over, which prevented any proper solar panel orientation, and the extreme cold and lack of sunlight inside the crater meant that, unfortunately, athena's batteries could not recharge.

Speaker 1 16:56

Oh, very sad.

Speaker 2 16:58

A day later the mission was declared over, but the teams are continuing to analyze data before there's total power loss.

Speaker 1 17:09

Yeah, it did get a day's worth of data. Like, even though it tipped over, it got there, it got data on the way down, it got data when it tipped over, it got data from inside a crater. That's cool. So, yeah, we'll see what comes out of that. A spokesperson for NASA, nikki Fox, says landing on the moon is extremely hard, so it makes sense. I took incredible amount of resources during the space race that John F Kennedy touched off in the 60s to get the Apollo program to the moon.

Speaker 2 17:40

It would have been exciting because D'Athena was attempting to land in an unexplored region, but there's still opportunity to explore unexplored regions of the moon.

Speaker 1 17:50

Just send another one At first. You don't succeed and you tip over, fly, fly again. That brings us to Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost, and this one did have a successful landing. I love the name Firefly because one of my favorite TV shows of all time is called Firefly.

Speaker 2 18:08

Can't take this guy from you.

Speaker 1 18:10

Blue Ghost landed on March 2nd and its landing site was Mare Chrism, which is a volcanic plain on the moon's near side. It launched on January 15th and it landed soft and safely, without crashing or tipping over, and there's a very cool image of it on the lunar surface with the Earth visible in the background. It's like such a cool shot because the thing was sent there by a private company. It's not a NASA probe, even though they work with NASA. It was a private company's probe.

Speaker 2 18:43

The image was a photo of its own shadow on the lunar surface. And then you're right Earth was visible in the background.

Speaker 1 18:50

This area was chosen because of the low magnetic activity compared to other regions on the moon, and that's what Blue Ghost wants to measure is lunar magnetism. And there's a whole bunch of doodads on it that are going to be looking at the upcoming total lunar eclipse. We're seeing that on March 14th, right, that's happening for us here in Canada on Thursday. Other sensors that it has on it are helping pave the way for the next mission coming to the moon, like with Jeremy Hans has on it, are helping pave the way for the next, the next mission coming to the moon, like with jeremy hansen on it, a canadian astronaut the artemis mission the artemis mission, so cool so we'll have more information about blue ghost as the data comes in.

Speaker 1 19:32

It literally just landed there. What like a week ago. There's been no real release of their findings and we'll keep everybody in the loop on that.

Speaker 2 19:41

But it's super cool and there's lots of future private lunar missions planned, lots planned throughout 2028. And Nikki Fox from NASA that you spoke of earlier says land all over the place.

Speaker 1 19:55

Yeah, super helpful for NASA with their Artemis missions. The next Artemis mission isn't going to land on the moon, but it's going to take a couple passes. It just reminds me of one of my favorite shows, and that's For All Mankind. I've watched that whole season a couple times through. We're getting to the point where having humans on the moon will be like an ongoing thing, like it was in the TV show, which is very cool for me.

Speaker 2 20:22

It's like your TV is becoming alive, very much like your virtual reality. You're going to be able to eat your cake.

Speaker 1 20:31

That's right. Oh, that would have helped. That'll help people on the moon. Maybe you can't have real cake, but you can put the thing in your mouth and have simulated virtual reality cake in space moon cake.

Speaker 2 20:46

Oh my goodness, moon cake. What was it called?

Labrador Retriever Food Genetics

Speaker 1 20:49

uh, a ribbon like put the ribbon thing in your mouth and then get some chemicals squirted in it. Yeah, anyways, that's science news for this week. This weekend pet science, let's talk about the labrador retriever. Aren't labs cute, chris? They're so cute they are so cute, I love them, but I love golden retrievers more we're biased because of beaker and calvin, but labrador retrievers are so friendly and they're just very what's the word I'm looking for. They're just like steady, happy dogs, like they're happy all the time.

Speaker 2 21:24

So you can count on them.

Speaker 1 21:26

Yeah, you can count on them. Now. Our study talks about their food obsession. We've posted, but maybe not done a thing, on the science podcast, but there was some idea that there's a genetic component to Labradors and their food obsession, because anybody who owns a Labrador knows that not all of them, but a large percentage of them go bananas for food.

Speaker 2 21:52

They do have persistent food-seeking behavior, begging under the table and stealing unattended food. Callum was good at that and as a result, labs are among the most overweight dog breeds, along with golden retrievers and cocker spaniels and beagles. So if we could connect that to a gene. But we're going to keep talking about it. But it's not like something that you should just test your dog for. There's other ways to mitigate that food obsession or like just don't feed them under the table yeah, watch the food.

Speaker 1 22:32

We really watch beakers weight and she is like slim and athletic, like she is like a dart. And we maybe didn't watch callan's weight sometimes and she got a little chonky but that was from the boys feeding her double breakfasts and double suppers sometimes Cause she was a good girl and very cute. And why not give Callan another breakfast? Cause you give kids jobs right when their jobs was to feed the dog and they're like no, you ate that awfully fast. Maybe you should have two scoops instead of one.

Speaker 2 23:03

Double scoop.

Speaker 1 23:04

Just like ice cream. This was published in science on march 6th, so a very recent article. I was led by eleanor raffin at the university of cambridge. Previous findings, before the study we're going to talk about, found that this po, there's a gene called the pomc gene, and it was linked to overeating in labradors, so the dogs that had it ate more food.

Speaker 2 23:28

However, this mutation of the POMC gene did not fully explain the breed's obesity risk, and here's where the new genetic discoveries from this study comes into play 241 British Labrador retrievers were part of the study, and the data that was collected included the body fat mass and the food seeking behavior, such as baking, and it also looked at how strictly owners controlled their dog's diet. They found, or they identified, five genes with the potential to be associated with obesity in Labradors, and the strongest link was found in a gene called DENND1B. So that's really easy to remember.

Speaker 1 24:19

DENND1B.

Speaker 2 24:20

Exactly DENND1B. Yeah, exactly. So labs with the DEND1B variant had 8% more body fat than those without it, and that gene actually also affects the human body mass index, which is the BMI, and our food response in the brain.

Speaker 1 24:45

Maybe that's why I'm hungry all the time. I'm a Labrador retriever.

Speaker 2 24:49

You are, you probably have the DEND1B gene.

Speaker 1 24:52

So from this, researchers developed a scoring system to assess Labrador obesity risk based on their genetic profile. You rank the Labradors based on inherited obesity-prone genes. Some labs inherit a whole bunch of the genes and some have few or none, so it's like you're probably going to get fat to your. Okay, I don't know what's. What kind of ranking system is that?

Speaker 2 25:17

You can rank all individuals based on whether they inherited a bunch of obesity prone genes or not.

Speaker 1 25:22

I guess you can zero.

Speaker 2 25:24

Yeah, five out of five Yelp review. You have the five.

Speaker 2 25:28

You were a hungry hippo, oh but there is impacts of genetics on food behavior. So they found that labs with high obesity risk genes were more likely to beg for food and they were more food motivated than low risk dogs. And I can see that, like when you're training with Beaker and how she loves to work for treats and the Burners they love to work for treats too. That makes me feel successful as a trainer when they are working so hard to please, working so hard to please. And I do have a friend who had a husky Athena that would not work for treats. She was so stubborn and it's huh Now. I know we're talking about totally different dog breeds, but I'm just talking about being the more food motivated and for me that excites me for training. But it's not good for labs that have the higher risk of those obesity genes.

Speaker 1 26:37

So food motivated dogs are generally a lot easier to train, but then that might lead to obesity.

Speaker 2 26:44

Right. So to combat that, a strict diet regulation by owners makes a huge difference. So the high risk labs with strict owners maintained a healthy weight, whereas more relaxed owners led to overweight dogs. But, interestingly, low risk labs stated a healthy weight regardless of how their owners fed them.

Speaker 1 27:12

Oh, that's just like people.

Speaker 2 27:14

That's not fair.

Speaker 1 27:15

It isn't fair. I'm hungry all the time and I'm like some people just are not hungry. What is wrong with you? Do you not wake up wanting to eat the world? That's what happens with me. I'm a lab, so should owners test their labs? Chris Should. If you've got a Labrador retriever, should you go test it for these five genes?

Speaker 2 27:32

Probably not. Oh, it's probably expensive. It probably is expensive, and a dog that constantly seeks food would definitely overeat if given the chance, and the best approach is to ration food carefully for dogs that are especially prone to obesity, and discipline is key.

Speaker 1 27:53

So don't give them second breakfasts and second suppers.

Speaker 2 27:56

Owners need to have that strict control over the food portions to prevent weight gain.

Episode Wrap-Up and Acknowledgments

Speaker 1 28:01

And we are very strict with our dogs. Now Bunsen and Bernoulli look like they're chubby but they are sleek. They are thin and trim and muscly. You remember how whenever Bunsen, as he's older, he's had to have IVs put in for things or his surgery, and we just you feel his body and he's just so muscly. He's so muscly and there's not like a lot of fat on that guy. No, there you go. If you have a lab, they're narrowing down the reasons why your lab wants food all the time and the conclusion is don't give them food all the time. That's pet science for this week. That's it for this week show. Thanks for coming back week after week to listen to us and a special shout out to the top dogs. That's the top tier of our patreon, like page the pop hack. We'd love your support. If you love what we do and you want to help us out and keep the podcast free, sign up. A perk is the top dogs get their name shouted out by chris at the end of the show.

Speaker 2 29:04

Take it away, chris amelia Fetig Rhi Oda, carol Hainel, jennifer Challen, linnea Janik Karen Chronister, vicky Otero, christy Walker, sarah Bram Wendy, diane Mason and Luke Helen Chin, elizabeth Bourgeois, marianne McNally, catherine Jordan, shelley Smith, laura Stephenson, tracy Leinbach.

Speaker 1 29:50

Anne Uchida For science, empathy and cuteness.