BFM 89.9, the Business Station. My name is Rich Bradbury. Welcome to Matt's Blain, more weird science today, which even means Matt's had her ideas or he's found a bunch of stories that he's so excited about. He needs to tell us all about them quickly and in a flurry.
Hey, Richard. Well, obviously it's the latter as this first story is going to aptly illustrate. We're going to start today with one of the biggest breakthroughs, I think, in Science of the Year. None of this Twitter or X nonsense, none of this stuff about crypto kings going on trial.
This is a genuine scientific breakthrough. Was my dramatic pause long enough? Well, you could have had longer if you wanted. No, no, I don't want to risk it.
That's right. Well, thanks to the tireless work of practically the entire scientific community of the world, we now know why cats per. Yep. I can hear the collective gasps from the smart speakers that send me all your deepest and darkest thoughts.
You see, while we sort of knew how and why cats per. There was always the mystery of why those purrs should be so low-pitched in such a small animal, because it's long been accepted that larger animals that have longer vocal folds will produce lower frequency sounds. So consequently, you might expect cats because they're smaller, so they have smaller vocal folds. You would expect their purrs to resonate at a higher pitch, but for some reason, they don't.
But isn't that kind of what cats do, the opposite of what you expect them to do? That's kind of what it means to be a cat, right? Well, that is a valid point. And it's not just love of cats that has had scientists researching this, given their size and, as we said, the length of their vocal folds, they should be incapable of producing such low-pitched purrs.
So this in-congruity is what led a team from the University of Vienna to go down this rabbit hole. I thought it'd be a joke about cats and rabbit holes here somewhere. No, when you've cleaned up as many severed rabbit heads as I have, there's really nothing to joke about. Although scientists should be researching how cats get in almost wild rabbits through cat flaps and into your kitchen living room.
Although I think that's more of a task for mathematics and physics rather than biology. My theory is that they just transport from one side of the door to the other when no one's looking, which of course supports my cats are alien's hypothesis. Back to the purring, please. Okay, I never thought he'd say that to me.
I'm touched. The Austrian team has proposed a hypothesis centered around muscle contractions in the larynx, believing that this might be the secret ingredient enabling cats to produce that signature purr. So this story comes by the new scientist by the way. To validate this, they conducted an experiment involving the larynxes of eight domestic cats.
And in case anyone is wondering whether there was any cruelty involved, they were taken from cats who had to be put down because of illness. So the team discovered that even without muscle contractions, the larynxes could produce a purring sound when air was passed through them. Now the reason why, yeah, turned out to be a special connective tissue embedded within the vocal folds, which effectively lowers the frequency of the sounds they produce, enabling the creation of the wonderfully cute purring that all right minded people love. While this connective tissue has been identified in cats before, it hadn't been thought to be linked to the actual frequency of the purring.
Okay, but has there been any advance in knowing the reason for the purring? Well, as you know, very few animals, cheaters and links are two animals who are known to purr, but again, science doesn't really know why. A lot of theories have been put forward. One of the most popular is that purring is a display of contentment and can be interpreted as an invitation for continued interaction.
So, you know, that's why cats purr when they're around people, but cats also purr in other contexts, the moments of pain, moments of distress, suggesting that it is actually a more complex reflex mechanism. There are theories that the purring could serve as a way to suit the animal, potentially even promoting healing after an injury due to the vibrations it produces. So the frequency of the vibrations might actually help healing. And another I've heard is that the low pairs of domestic cats might be an adaptation to sounds that humans prefer, because the low rumble is more soothing than an animal that sounds like a band saw every time you use stroke it.
So, as I said before, I'm hoping that the whole of the world's scientific community is going to develop itself to answering these feline questions very soon. All right. I guess before we move on, then do we have any more related news? Yeah, this is the latest report from a culture pops own newly launched research center.
And now this is known as knife, which was set up to cut through the massive disinformation that is out there. All right, before we get too excited, what exactly does knife stand for? The No Nothing Institute of Factual Examination. Right.
Business is usually. Well, yes. We just released a survey that has conclusively found that dog owners are controlling psychopaths. Now, this is this is proper research.
We follow rigid test criteria. In fact, we're remaking industry best practices and we even have a comprehensive peer reviewing system. So, in other words, you just make it up, you review it and then you publish it. Just because the survey sample is limited to me, that doesn't make it any less valid.
And there's going to be more data from knife coming in future episodes. So watch this space. Now, seeing how much cats and dogs like to lick their owners, I thought this next story would be quite appropriate. This is a robot tongue because who wouldn't want a disembodied machine tongue hanging around in the kitchen?
It would be like having a rolling stones poster that actually does stuff. In fact, I'm actually hoping that the Rolling Stones lips and tongue logo is the model that scientists have used for that because that would be cool. My word. Okay.
Before we disappear down another storm draining, Matt's psyche. Why is someone making a robot tongue? Well, researchers at Penn State are engineering the electric tongue that can detect gas and chemical molecules with components that adjust a few atoms thick. Now, obviously, this is for industrial rather than domestic use and its purpose is to provide precise taste analysis without that element of human subjectivity.
So, if you think about the food industry, for example, tasters are required to test every stage or every minute change in the recipe of the foods we buy in supermarkets. Now, while I can't imagine these machines replacing them completely, they could, of course, easily weed out the obviously unpleasant ones, the ones that might be too salty or too bitter or the kind of thing. I'm just thinking about tasting crisps as a new career move. Anyway, but I guess technology like this then could be used to influence our diets or even curate restaurant menus, stuff like that.
That kind of thing, or to, as you said, taste crisps. Clap until now, trying to replicate how we respond to taste has been beyond the capacity of machines. They can measure the amount of salt or other elements that are in something, but not really, you know, not really pass or understand what those results mean. Because, you know, human eating habits and taste preferences are very complex.
They're influenced not just by those nutritional needs, but also by psychological and emotional factors. So, as the Penn team notes, that human behavior, while it's observable, is actually challenging to measure and replicate in robots because it requires some amount of emotional intelligence. This new tool is designed to be adaptable enough to, if not provide that emotional intelligence, then at least cater to all the five major taste profiles, you know, salty, sour, bitter, sweet, and of course, wimami. I'm always just a little bit reticent to ask how these things work in case you say something horrific.
Well, okay, I know I've kind of muddied the waters a bit by talking about disembodied tongues. So, it's really just a sensor or an array of sensors. So, yes, exactly. So, I know that's what the tongue is too, but the tongue is a lot more than that, you know, it's a major organ.
It helps us talk blah, blah, blah. So, the robo tongue is described as a flat square electronic gustatory complex. Wait, is that what they call it? The robo tongue?
Well, they're calling it the robo tongue. Yes, but it is an electronic gustatory complex. Oh, is this something that knife researchers come up with? No, no, no.
This is genuine from the actual story. He said genuine, which means that knife research is in mind, we'll get that later. Knife research is genuine, but it comes with a disclaimer like some billionaires' statements of value. Anyway, back to the robo tongue.
Yeah, it combines graphene based, chematransistors, sensors that detect gas and chemical molecules with, now, I can't even say this, let alone understand what it means. Mollib dinner disulfide men transistors, which apparently are possible of simulating neurons. So, like I said, I don't pretend to understand the science, but these components work together to simulate the human ability to taste molecular inputs. So, the hope is that in the future, we can train AI systems to provide that kind of consistency in tasting.
I already mentioned quality control in food development, a machine that provides consistent and biased feedback. There's potential for that, I think, in so many industries, not just the food industries. Anyway, another story. Can I give you a hand going into the break?
I'm not entirely sure how to take that. It's a kind of sentence design that might strike fear into any seasoned presenter's heart. I mean, don't be dramatic. I mean, a literal hand.
In the past, we've talked about the progress in robotic hands and grip, usually in industrial robots and prosthetics. We've talked about improving the sensors and cameras surrounding the machines so that they have more awareness of where they exist relative to the subject or the object that they're trying to manipulate. We've talked about development and pressure sensors that enable them to grip small or fragile objects without crushing them. But I don't think we've ever had an assistive hand on the show before.
That seems to be what researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are in the process of developing a robotic hand that can manipulate complex objects, things like toy planes, even Rubik's cubes, without dropping them. And there's a really cool video of the hand in operation on new scientists' YouTube channel if you want to take a look. I do now. What enables it to be so dexterous then?
Well, unlike a lot of previous systems, this hand has the ability to rotate objects along three axes. So it's moving in more directions. Traditional robotic grasping calculates the center of mass and it has a general idea about how an object should be placed. The University of California team has given it more information about where it is and how it should behave.
So to get the hand to work, the team had to develop a sophisticated computer algorithm known as Rototelt. And again, genuine, not something I've made up. They trained a learning model in a simulation. They provided it with details about objects, shapes and sizes.
And they taught it to rotate the object in the simulation as extensively as possible. So they know they have as much information as they possibly can about the shape and about the landscape that surrounds it. For the real world tests, the system was fed visual and touch inputs, enabling the robotic hand to manipulate objects with enhanced precision. And the result is a machine that can not only handle unusually shaped objects or objects that need to be manipulated in strange ways.
It can actually change its grasp on an object once it's been picked up, which is again, something that humans do as second nature, but something that machines find very, very difficult. I'm thinking of a whole bunch of industries that this can go into, but let's keep it clean. It's obviously something that can be very useful for stuff like automated manufacturing lines and processes. Yeah, smart factories, RPA, that kind of thing.
So it means that the components don't have to be placed in an ordered manner, because the system is adaptable. So it's much more like a human worker. So there is potentially to increase efficiency in things like smart factories. Now, the team acknowledges it's still quite limited.
It currently struggles with slender objects like pencils and screwdrivers, because that requires a different kind or different set of dexterity skills. And if you're still a little bit confused about what the idea of a home hand might be useful for, other than creepy Adams family references and jokes, although I mean, that's a pretty good good reason. I don't have a hand on D. A pillow when you wake up in the morning.
But imagine all those things that you've always wished you had an extra hand around with, you know, things like doing plumbing or other DIY work where you need an extra hand to hold the screwdriver or the wrench or the nut, the same with car maintenance work, anything where you need extra fingers to get into hard to reach places. I mean, gardening, imagine a hand on a pole to help cut hard to reach branches or plants, the same with painting doing fine painting work up on ceiling or around light fittings where you need very high ladders and it's very difficult to reach. I mean, I tell you, Elon Musk should buy this patent and get his robotics division to churn this out because this, I think, has the potential to be massive. Wow, well there you have it folks.
The first time a segment on Matt's plane has ended with a huge hand for Elon Musk. It's not even worth speculating on what's coming after the break though. Of course, you're tuning into Matt's plane here on BFM, 89.9 The Business Station. BFM, 89.9 The Business Station.
My name is Rich Bradbury. Welcome to Matt's plane. More weird science today, which either means Matt's out of ideas or he's found a bunch of stories that he's so excited about. He needs to tell us all about them quickly and in the flurry.
Hey, Richard. Well, obviously it's the latter as this first story is going to aptly illustrate. We're going to start today with one of the biggest breakthroughs, I think, in Science of the Year. None of this Twitter or X nonsense, none of this stuff about crypto kings going on trial.
This is a genuine scientific breakthrough. Was my dramatic cause long enough? Well, you can come out longer if you wanted. No, no, I don't want to risk it.
That's right. Well, thanks to the tireless work of practically the entire scientific community of the world, we now know why cats. I can hear the collective gasps from the smart speakers that send you all your deepest and darkest thoughts. You see, while we knew how and why cats per, there was always the mystery of why those purrs should be so low pitched in such a small animal.
Because it's long been accepted that larger animals that have longer vocal folds will produce lower frequency sounds. So consequently, you might expect cats because they're smaller, so they have smaller vocal folds. You would expect their purrs to resonate at a higher pitch, but for some reason, they don't. But isn't that kind of what cats do, the opposite of what you expect them to do?
That's kind of what it means to be a cat, right? Well, that is a valid point. And it's not just love of cats that has had scientists researching this, given their size and as we said, the length of their vocal folds, they should be incapable of producing such low-pitched purrs. So this in-congruity is what's led a team from the University of Vienna to go down this rabbit hole.
I thought there'd be a joke about cats and rabbit holes here somewhere. No, when you've cleaned up as many severed rabbit heads as I have, there's really nothing to joke about. Although scientists should be researching how cats get in enormous wild rabbits through catflaps and into your kitchen living room. Although, I think that's more of a task for mathematics and physics rather than biology.
My theory is that they just transport from one side of the door to the other when no one's looking, which of course supports my cats are aliens' hypothesis. Okay, back to the purring, please. Okay, I never thought I'd say that to me. I'm touched.
The Austrian team has proposed a hypothesis centered around muscle contractions in the larynx, believing that this might be the secret ingredient enabling cats to produce that signature purr. So this story comes by the new scientists, by the way. To validate this, they conducted an experiment involving the larynxes of eight domestic cats, and in case anyone is wondering whether there was any cruelty involved, they were taken from cats who had to be put down because of illness. So the team discovered that even without muscle contractions, the larynxes could produce a purring sound when air was passed through them.
Now, the reason why, yeah, it turned out to be a special connective tissue embedded within the vocal folds, which effectively lowers the frequency of the sounds they produce, enabling the creation of, the wonderfully cute purring that all right-minded people love. While this connective tissue has been identified in cats before, it hadn't been thought to be linked to the actual frequency of the purring. Okay, but has there been any advance in knowing the reason for the purring? Well, as you know, very few animals purr.
Cheetahs and links are two animals who are known to purr, but again, science doesn't really know why. A lot of theories have been put forward. One of the most popular is that purring is a display of contentment and can be interpreted as an invitation for continued interaction. So, you know, that's why cats purr when they're around people, but cats also purr in other contexts.
The moments of pain, moments of distress, suggesting that it is actually a more complex reflex mechanism. There are theories that the purring could serve as a way to soothe the animal, potentially even promoting healing after an injury due to the vibrations it produces. So the frequency of the vibrations might actually help healing. And another I've heard is that the low pairs of domestic cats might be an adaptation to sounds that humans prefer, because the low rumble is more soothing than an animal that sounds like a band saw every time you stroke it.
So, as I said before, I'm hoping that the whole of the world's scientific community is going to develop itself to answering these feline questions very soon. All right. I guess before we move on, then do we have any more related news? Yeah.
This is the latest report from a culture bot's own newly launched research center. And now this is known as Nife, which was set up to cut through the massive disinformation that is out there. All right. Before we get too excited, what exactly does Nife stand for?
The No Nothing Institute of Factual Examination. Right. Business is usually... Well, yes.
We just released a survey that has conclusively found that dog owners are controlling psychopaths. Now, this is proper research. We follow rigid test criteria. In fact, we're remaking industry best practices.
And we even have a comprehensive peer reviewing system. So, in other words, you just make it up. You review it and then you publish it. Just because the survey sample is limited to me, that doesn't make it any less valid.
And there's going to be more data from Nife coming in future episodes. So, watch this space. Now, seeing how much cats and dogs like to lick their owners, I thought this next story would be quite appropriate. This is a robot tongue.
Because who wouldn't want a disembodied machine tongue hanging around in the kitchen? It would be like having a Rolling Stones poster that actually does stuff. In fact, I'm actually hoping that the Rolling Stones lips and tongue logo is the model that scientists have used for that. Because that would be cool.
My word. Okay. Before we disappear down another storm drain in Matt's psyche. Why is someone making a robot tongue?
Well, researchers at Penn State are engineering the electric tongue that can detect gas and chemical molecules with components that adjust a few atoms thick. Now, obviously, this is for industrial rather than domestic use. And its purpose is to provide precise taste analysis without that element of human subjectivity. So, if you think about the food industry, for example, tasters are required to test every stage or every minute change in the recipe of the foods we buy in supermarkets.
Now, while I can't imagine these machines replacing them completely, they could, of course, easily weed out the obviously unpleasant ones, the ones that might be too salty or too bitter or the kind of thing. I'm just thinking about tasting crisps as a new career move. Anyway, but I guess technology like this that could be used to influence our diets or even curate restaurant menu stuff like that. That kind of thing, or to, as you said, taste crisps up until now, trying to replicate how we respond to taste has been beyond the capacity of machines.
They can measure the amount of salt or other elements that are in something, but not really pass or understand what those results mean. Because human eating habits and taste preferences are very complex. They're influenced not just by those nutritional needs, but also by psychological and emotional factors. So, as the pen team notes, that human behavior, while it's observable, is actually challenging to measure and replicate in robots because it requires some amount of emotional intelligence.
This new tool is designed to be adaptable enough to, if not provide that emotional intelligence, then at least cater to all the five major taste profiles, salty, sour, bitter, sweet, and of course, umami. I'm always just a little bit reticent to ask how these things work in case you say something horrific. Okay, I know I've kind of muddied the waters a bit by talking about a disembodied tongue. So, it's really just a sensor or an array of sensors.
So, there you go. Yes, exactly. So, I know that's what the tongue is too, but the tongue is a lot more than that. It's a major organ.
It helps us talk, blah, blah, blah. So, the robo tongue is described as a flat square, electronic, gustatory complex. Wait, is that what they call it, the robo tongue? Well, they're calling it the robo tongue.
Yes, but it is an electronic gustatory complex. Or is this something that knife research has come up with? No, no, this is genuine from the actual story. You said genuine, which means that knife research is in mind, we'll get to that later.
Knife research is genuine, but it comes with a disclaimer like some billionaires statements of value. Anyway, back to the robo tongue. Yeah, it combines graphene based, chematransistors, sensors that detect gas and chemical molecules. With, now, I can't even say this let alone, understand what it means.
Mollib dinner disulfide men transistors, which apparently are possible of simulating neurons. So, like I said, I don't pretend to understand the science, but these components work together to simulate the human ability to taste molecular inputs. So, the hope is that in the future, we can train AI systems to provide that kind of consistency in tasting. I already mentioned quality control in food development, a machine that provides consistent unbiased feedback.
There's potential for that, I think, in so many industries, not just the food industries. Anyway, another story. Can I give you a hand going into the break? I'm not entirely sure how to take that kind of sentence design that might strike fear into any seasoned presenters heart.
I mean, don't be dramatic. I mean, a literal hand. In the past, we've talked about the progress in robotic hands and grip, usually in industrial robots and prosthetics. We've talked about improving the sensors and cameras surrounding the machines so that they have more awareness of where they exist relative to the subject or the object that they're trying to manipulate.
We've talked about development and pressure sensors that enable them to grip small or fragile objects without crushing them. But I don't think we've ever had an assistive hand on the show before. But yeah, that seems to be what researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are in the process of developing a robotic hand that can manipulate complex objects, things like toy planes, even Rubik's cubes, without dropping them. And there's a really cool video of the hand in operation on new scientists, YouTube channel, if you want to take a look.
I do now. What enables it to be so extra slim? Well, unlike a lot of previous systems, this hand has the ability to rotate objects along three axes. So it's moving in more directions.
Traditional robotic grasping calculates the center of mass and it has a general idea about how an object should be placed. The University of California team has given it more information about where it is and how it should behave. So to get the hand to work, the team had to develop a sophisticated computer algorithm known as Rotatelt. And again, genuine, not something I've made up, they trained a learning model in a simulation.
They provided it with details about objects, shapes and sizes. And they taught it to rotate the object in the simulation as extensively as possible. So they know they have as much information as they possibly can about the shape and about the landscape that surrounds it. For the real world tests, the system was fed visual and touch inputs, enabling the robotic hand to manipulate objects with enhanced precision.
And the result is a machine that can not only handle unusually shaped objects or objects that need to be manipulated in strange ways, it can actually change its grasp on an object once it's been picked up, which is again, something that humans do as second nature, but something that machines find very, very difficult. I'm thinking of a whole bunch of industries that this can go into, but let's keep it clean. It's obviously something that can be very useful for stuff like automated manufacturing lines and processes. Yeah, smart factories, RPA, that kind of thing.
So it means that the components don't have to be placed in an ordered manner, because the system is adaptable. So it's much more like a human worker. So there is potentially to increase efficiency in things like smart factories. Now, the team acknowledges it's still quite limited.
It currently struggles with slender objects, like pencils and screwdrivers, because that requires a different kind or different set of dexterity skills. And if you're still a little bit confused about what the idea of a home hand might be useful for, other than creepy Adam's family references and jokes, although I mean, that's a pretty good reason. A hand-down diapillo when you wake up in the morning. But imagine all those things that you've always wished you had an extra hand around to help with, things like doing plumbing or other DIY work where you need an extra hand to hold the screwdriver or the wrench or the nut, the same with car maintenance work, anything where you need extra fingers to get into hard-to-reach places.
I mean, gardening, imagine a hand on a pole to help cut hard-to-reach branches or plants, the same with painting, doing fine painting work up and ceiling or around light fittings where you need very high ladders and it's very difficult to reach. I mean, I tell you, Elon Musk should buy this patent and get his robotics division to churn this out, because this, I think, has the potential to be massive. Wow, well, there you have it folks. The first time a segment on Matt's plane has ended with a huge hand for Elon Musk.
It's not even worth speculating on what's coming after the break-off. Of course, you're tuning to Matt's plane here on BFM, 89.9, the business station.