You approach the food with suspicion, pick up a single tan-colored morsel, roll it between your digits to test its texture, perhaps sniff it a bit to see if it reminds you of anything you've eaten before ... and then, if you're brave, you might decide to cautiously put in your mouth.

There's a pleasant surprise, then, because Quorn tastes just like chicken. Or, depending on the kind of Quorn you're trying, it might taste just like beef. Either way, it's pretty good.

But Quorn is not chicken or beef, and even though it's pronounced KWORN, it doesn't have anything to do with corn. The meat substitute -- which has been popular in Europe for more than a decade and is now on the market in the United States -- is instead made from a substance called mycoprotein, which Marlow Foods, Quorn's manufacturer, says is one of the most nutritious and tasty foods ever discovered.

Starting this week, the Nebraska football team will be using the same technology NASA uses to monitor the body temperature of astronauts in space to protect players during the heat of summer.

The swallowable capsules house coils, circuits and a battery. The capsules transmit a low-frequency radio signal that varies with a patient's body temperature, and the information being picked up by a hand-held recorder.

An array of rat brain cells has successfully flown a virtual F-22 fighter jet. The cells could one day become a more sophisticated replacement for the computers that control uncrewed aerial vehicles or, in the nearer future, form a test-bed for drugs against brain diseases such as epilepsy.

Enzymes were used to extract neurons from the motor cortex of mature rat embryos and cells were then seeded onto a grid of gold electrodes patterned on a glass Petri dish. The cells grew microscopic interconnections, turning them into a “live computation device”, explains Thomas DeMarse, a biomedical engineer at the University of Florida in Gainesville, US, who carried out the research.

The most important aspect is how it learns to communicate and interact. Whereas we humans use the word ‘ball’ to refer to a ball, the AIBO dogs start from scratch to develop common agreement on a word to use to refer the ball. They also develop the language structures to express, for instance, that the ball is rolling to the left. The researchers achieved this through instilling their robots with a sense of ‘curiosity.’

Initially programmed to merely recognise stimuli from their sensors, the AIBOs learnt to distinguish between objects and how to interact with them over the course of several hours or days. The curiosity system, or ‘metabrain,’ continually forced the AIBOs to look for new and more challenging tasks, and to give up on activities that did not appear to lead anywhere. This in turn led them to learn how to perform more complex tasks, an indication of an open-ended learning capability much like that of human children.

Also like children, the AIBOs initially started babbling aimlessly until two or more settled on a sound to describe an object or aspect of their environment, gradually building a lexicon and grammatical rules through which to communicate.