Better than the Scoville scale? Chili-shaped device can rate pepper hotness
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
the purpose is to provide value to the owners of the app.
Smartphones make things much easier for the developer.
Maybe the next version will have a display to show the number without a smartphone.
> The sensor consists of three components: (i) a small potentiostat device, (ii) an interface allowing connection to a smartphone for monitoring and control, and (iii) the sensor (an N-doped GrNPs/ePAD and detection chamber)
It sounds like the smartphone isn't a display. It's the main driver, data collector, and filter of the device.
So in order to use this right now, you need to dry and dissolve the chili? This definitely doesn't sound like something a normal consumer could use by e.g squeezing a chili and putting a few drops into the device... or does it?
From the abstract https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acsanm.0c02079
> Thus, this platform shows excellent potential for the development of portable sensors for capsaicin and future extension to different analytes.
Maybe that means the delivery method still has to be improved.
Separately, I do suspect that a lot of the serious gardeners growing chile peppers are already drying chiles anyway, as you get a lot more in a harvest than you'd want to eat immediately and the dried form stores and travels better. You can air dry them, oven dry them, use a dehydrator, etc. So I think the biggest problem here is the time lag before being able to make the measurement, depending on your drying method.
Also, anecdotally, I tend to cook a variety of cuisines from around the world, and the good majority of recipes use powdered, flaked, or dried chile peppers. When raw peppers are called for it's generally commonly available stuff like jalapenos, cayenne, and habanero.
All of that is to say that for the serious chile head, the kind of person who is the target market for this device, the vast majority of the chile peppers they're gonna have access to, especially the mail-ordered ones, are gonna come in dried form, so it makes sense to optimize the device for analyzing dried chiles. I'm a bit of a chile head myself and I wouldn't need to bother measuring the common fresh chiles that are available in grocery stores; I already have a good understanding of them (and frankly none of them are really that spicy in the grand scheme of things; this bag of dried ghost chilis that I have, on the other hand, I'd like to see a measurement on).
Outside of specialty online stores I haven’t even seen dried ones.
The only dried chilies I've come across are ancho.
Not really that important. +/-50% is no big deal. The range is pretty wide. Even with 50% error you're in no risk of confusing, say, a Jalapeno pepper for Cayenne. And those are both way-too-spicy peppers to my mom, or kinda everyday peppers in my household.
The hot sauces that I personally use cover about three orders of magnitude, I'm sure.
By your anecdotal judgement, sure. But for the rest of industry proper that actually cares about quantitative objectivity, there's ASTA Method 21.3 which supplants "trained tasting experts" for HPLC.
It's a wonderful cultivar which gives yellow fruit with a lemony flavour and about ten times the heat of a jalapeno.
My sister overheard my description of the flavour and heard me mention it was the mildest of the varieties I have. She interpreted this as it being a mild chilli pepper with citrus flavour and insisted on sampling one. Despite me asking if she was really sure she ended up quite upset.
Look at how useless decibels are for actually talking about sound.
Every article has to re-explain them.
I'd argue the biggest problem with noise pollution, which does a lot of harm to people and the environment, is it's logarithmic scale.
Scoville are about fun though so telling someone they normally have a 6 and this is just a 8 might be fun. The confusion might work in it's favour.
I guess for sound too people appear confused. For example I’ve met numerous people that think a 100w amplifier is twice as loud as a 50w.
1. 2x as loud
2. 10x as powerful (from sound pressure level)
Of course this means you have more headroom with 100w. But it’s also why a lot of guitar players prefer 50w as you can get to an overdriven tone without being as loud. And why in studio environments, 15w-25w amps are adored as you can push them to get overdrive but not be as loud as a 50w or 100w - but still pretty loud.