μblog: engineering from the trenches

Since Penn State University in in the middle of Pennsylvania and has adequate amounts of farm land, there is also an on-campus creamery which contains various dairy products. I typically visit for the cheese, not the ice cream. During my last visit, I had the novel idea of trying to determine if rodents have a predisposition to cheese, as we have been taught by movies, cartoons and rat-trap vendors.

One of the groups at CNE that I design electronics for is looking at navigation and memory in Long-Evans rats. These rats look like little cows as they have both black (or dark brown) and white splotches covering the whole body. The rats typically run on a maze where they have to make appropriate path selection based on training and one of the rewards that they receive are pieces of a high-sugar kids cereal like Fruit Loops. At first, the rats are hesitant to eat them as they have no idea what the strange loops are and they see that they are different from their typical “Feed 5000″. After being given the fruit loops a few times, the rats become more accustomed to them and visibly prefer them to their normal feed. With this observation in hand, we set out to roughly see if rats ad an a priori preference for cheese.

We bought a fresh package of white cheddar cheese and broke off a few small pieces to offer to several rats that were not participating in any experiments. We only did one trial, however, we fed the cheese to several animals. The results were very similar to the fruit loops where the rats were hesitant at first to this novel object but eventually warmed up to it and also demonstrated visible preference over their normal feed. The important result was that none of the rats habitually went for the cheese after identifying it as though they had some kind of built-in fondness for cheese. Some took a few nibbles and then discarded it until a later time. From a practical standpoint, cheese may be a good reward snack for a rodent provided they have enough exposure to it to appreciate it, however,  this poorly-controlled study leads me to believe that cheese would not attract rats like it does in cartoons (unless, of course, the rat had already been habitually eating the dairy product).

( Image is from the Spittoon. )

del.icio.us | digg

Some people say that instant noodles are the ultimate lazy person’s food, which may have indeed been the case until the invention of the rice-maker. To prepare for moving, I bought a rice cooker today so that I could try it out while I was in the DC area and could exchange it if it did not work too well. I settled on this “MICOM-FUZZY” from Zojirushi. The features are fast cook time (20 minutes) and extended “keep-warm” time which should be in the neighborhood of one day. The capacity for this unit is 5.5 “cups” (where one cup is 0.18L and a US cup is ~0.25L) which roughly translates to 2600 kcal of energy assuming standard, long grain, white rice. Given that washing the rice can be considered optional (assuming you are super lazy) so all you need to do is to put in the rice, add some water, push a button, and wait a little bit and voila, you have enough food (which lacks most nutrients other than energy) for one day. Sounds a bit quicker than having to cook noodles for breakfast, lunch and dinner!

del.icio.us | digg