Eating robots, Sliceable ketchup, Ketchup on glass, Financial smirks

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them:

Who eats whom? — Will robots eat us? Or will we eat robots? Both technophiles and -phobes have hungered to learn which will happen first. The answer has now arrived, in a report from a team at the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo and at Osaka University, Japan….Sliceable ketchup — Sliceable sauces of many kinds have yet to become popular. For the mo, technological hopes and resources are pouring onto ketchup. Ketchup eaters, as well as food technologists, can satisfy some of their hunger for knowledge by reading the study “Textural and rheological properties of sliceable ketchup“, published in the journal Gels. “There is a lack of knowledge on sliceable ketchup,” explain the authors…Ketchup on glass — Catching up on ketchup news that broke just as the covid-19 pandemic was seizing everyone’s attention, Feedback finds that in 2020, at the Seventh European Seminar on Precision Optics Manufacturing in Teisnach, Germany, manufacturers were told about the benefits of putting ketchup on glass. Max Schneckenburger and his colleagues at the Centre for Optical Technologies in Aalen, Germany, introduced their peers to what, for some, was a new concept: “High precision glass polishing with ketchup“….Financial smirks — You are correct if you suspect there are smirks inside the financial industry, deep behind the sombre, serious facades of buildings, business suits and coiffures. Many top finance analysts, in their daily work, investigate these smirks. What is a financial smirk? The Options Industry Council, which advises investors, explains, somewhat, that “When mapping implied volatility levels, the curve these points create is typically identified as either a ‘smile’ or a ‘smirk’ depending on the shape created by the level for out-of-the-money puts and calls“….