Mmmm... it tastes like rain today. Or at least this toothpaste tastes like it's going to rain today. The toothpaste in question was created by the MIT Media lab as your own personal early morning weather station--it changes flavors based on the day's forecast. So when you're half asleep and drooling white toothpaste foam out of your mouth onto your clean shirt, at least you know which jacket you should bring to cover that toothpaste stain. Researchers Henry Holtzman and David Carr designed the toothpaste, which mixes different flavors to alert you to the weather outside. More cinnamon means it will be warmer, more mint means colder, and a blue stripe means it will rain. Brilliant, guys, but who wants to have mint and cinnamon toothpaste mixed together? That's just wrong. A computer checks the weather, then regulates the amounts of each of the toothpaste components. Every day is a flavor adventure! (Unless you live in Los Angeles.) Both this toothpaste and the "proverbial wallet" the team invented that made headlines a few weeks ago belong to a new category of "super-mechanical" products, which take something mundane and give it dynamic data-analyzing abilities. But would we use it if it shows up on the shelves? Related Content: Discoblog: Painless Plasma Jets Could Replace Dental Drills Discoblog: How to Forecast the Weather from a Half-Mile Underground: Watch for Muons DISCOVER: 10 Bizarre-Looking Tricks of the Weather (photo gallery) DISCOVER: 20 Things You Didn't Know About... Teeth DISCOVER: Tourist in a Taste Lab
Image: MIT Media lab
