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It could be curtains for sour milk with bottle-cap ‘sniffing’ sensor

Reading an article on E&T's website about the development of sensors to tell you whether or not your milk has gone bad (without having to endure the awful smell of a manual nose test) by changing the colour of the plastic cap!


What a wonderful idea! I think this should be applied to all forms of food so a sticker or a patch on the food label changes colour to let you know if it's gone bad or not! Obviously for fresh items a quick inspection will tell you if they've gone rotten but what about tinned or bottled produce when you only know what state the contents are in once you've opened it...


Schrodinger's beans perhaps? ?
  • Yes I can see several uses for this. My only reservation  might be the integrity of the indicator patch if left in storage, poorly manhandled or womanhandled, prolonged temperature changes, chemical attack and corrosive effects, abuse and sabotarge in various ways.


    A further development might be to glue the patches onto known rascals foreheads which change colour when the person gets aggressive......chemical changes due to pherormones


    Legh
  • Former Community Member
    0 Former Community Member
    Will these bottle tops be recyclable  - or is this just another example of single use plastics being introduced because they can be


    I can see some value in certain (probably medical) applications - but for a plastic milk container it seems a bit pointless


    Regards


    OMS
  • Perfect for indicating when to make sour dough and/or possibly cheese.?....


    Legh.
  • I've noticed that the bottle top gets 'ripe' long before the milk itself is spoiled, although I guess it is an early indication that things are going west. Do we need more non-disposable plastics, circuitry, batteries etc. just to satisfy what our nose alone will tell us? Looks like a solution in search of a problem. Isn't it time we had an intelligent toaster instead, a task for which electronics and sensors could actually be useful?


  • Not sure if smart bottle tops would deter those of us from a certain generation...


    Having been brought up in the 60's and 70's, I remember glass milk bottles sitting happily in direct sunlight on the doorstep in the long hot summers of 76 and 77. It was already developing a bit of character when it was brought inside. Especially on Saturdays - we went for swimming lessons bright and early, and by the time we came home the milk was interesting to say the least. By the time the bottle was finally emptied, the contents would give a modern food inspector sleepless nights, but we seemed to thrive on it. And it tasted fine. 


    It may be nostalgia or rose-tinted glasses, but milk seemed different back then - today's milk doesn't seem to develop that wonderful layer of cream, and it seems to go rancid very quickly if it's not used straight away.
  • Modern milk doesn't have the cream on top because it's all homogenised.  The fat is broken into such small droplets that they never rise to the surface.  Milk these days is also "standardised".  They turn it all into skimmed milk, then add just enough cream to meet the legal minimum.  the excess cream is sold at a profit.


    Modern milk lasts a lot longer.  It will normally last a good week in the fridge after it's bought, even if opened.  That's one reason why nobody bothers with daily milk deliveries any more.