By tinkering with the sound a food makes while it is being eaten can make it seem crunchier or softer in the mouth.

The sound diners hear while they are eating food can change the way they think it tastes, scientists have discovered.
Researchers have also found that changing the color of a food can influence the flavor experienced by consumers, Telegraph wrote.
Food manufacturers are now hoping to exploit the findings in a bid to make their foods more appealing.
Previously it was thought that the sense of taste and smell were the only human senses that played a role in experiencing flavor. Professor Charles Spence, a sensory psychologist at Oxford University, believes it is possible to change the flavor of food simply by exciting people’s sense of hearing and vision.
He has found that by tinkering with the sound a food makes while it is being eaten can make it seem crunchier or softer in the mouth.
Playing sounds of the seaside while diners are eating can make them detect seafood flavors while the sound of clucking chickens or sizzling steak brings out the taste of eggs or steak.
Professor Spence has also discovered that simply changing the color of a food can influence the way it tastes. He found that by changing the color of a drink to a deep red color, it is possible to make it taste up to 12 percent sweeter than it really is.
He said, “Deep red colors have strong associations with the ripening of fruit and the sweetness that comes with that. The color orange also has strong flavor associations to the degree that just changing the amount of orange on the packaging can increase the acidic flavor.
“For some foods sound is incredibly important, particularly if the food makes a sound itself when it is eaten. With carbonated drinks for example a lot of the fizzy flavor comes from the sound of bubbles popping.
“We have also looked at the crispiness of crisps and biscuits and found that by boosting certain high frequency sounds when volunteers bit into them we could make them taste crunchier, and they became softer if we dampened those frequencies.“
Professor Spence will reveal his research at the Cheltenham Science Festival in June, which is being sponsored by the Telegraph.
He is also now working with several food companies, including Nestle and Unilever, to help them find new ways of creating flavor in their foods. Celebrity chef Heston Blumental has also worked with Professor Spence to develop some most popular dishes.
Many companies are now employing neuroscientists to help them develop new tricks for altering the flavor of their products.
Earlier this month food giants Unilever unveiled a new centre for research and development of drinks and experts there have used brain scanning equipment to identify the parts of the brain that are activated by foods such as ice cream.
Dr. Francis McGlone, lead neuroscientist for Unilever, believes the change in texture that ice cream undergoes in the mouth as it melts is part of what makes it so enjoyable.
He said: “Flavor is not just as simple as the way it tastes as all the other sense come into play and some can dominate the way the brain interprets a food.

The trouble with tiny bubbles is they pop, but US researchers have made bubbles that last as long as a year--a finding that could improve many consumer and industrial products, they said.
Bubbles lend an airy texture to foods, cosmetics and other products, but the smaller the bubble, the more likely it is to shrink and pop, succumbing to gas pressure and surface tension, Reuters said.
By adding a sugary coating, Harvard University graduate engineering student Emilie Dressaire and colleagues reported in the journal Science that they made bubbles that could last up to 12 months.
They got the idea from a talk given in 2005 by Dr. Rodney Bee, a chemist with the Anglo-Dutch company Unilever, who had been looking for a way to improve the texture of light ice cream.
Bee showed a slide of a special formation of extremely tiny bubbles he made during his research using a simple kitchen mixer.
The bubbles were a micrometer in size, which is 1-millionth of a meter. On their surface were scores of tiny hexagon shapes, making them resemble soccer balls.
“Small bubbles on that scale never last because of surface tension--they instantly disappear. What Rodney showed on that screen was extraordinary,“ said Dressaire’s Harvard professor, Howard Stone, in a statement.
Stone bought a kitchen mixer for his lab and Dressaire went to work.
She concocted a syrupy mixture of simple sugars and water. When whipped, that formed a foam with a crystalline structure that protected the bubbles from popping.

A new analysis of the Martian rock that gave hints of water on the Red Planet--and, therefore, optimism about the prospect of life--now suggests the water was more likely a thick brine, far too salty to support life as we know it.
The finding, by scientists at Harvard University and Stony Brook University, is detailed this week in the journal Science, Physorg said.
“Liquid water is required by all species on Earth and we’ve assumed that water is the very least that would be necessary for life on Mars,“ says Nicholas J. Tosca, a postdoctoral researcher in Harvard’s Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology.
Together with co-authors Andrew H. Knoll and Scott M. McLennan, Tosca analyzed salt deposits in four-billion-year-old Martian rock explored by NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover, Opportunity, and by orbiting spacecraft. It was the Mars Rover whose reports back to Earth stoked excitement over water on the ancient surface of the Red Planet.
The new analysis suggests that even billions of years ago, when there was unquestionably some water on Mars, its salinity commonly exceeded the levels in which terrestrial life can arise, survive, or thrive.

Closed-circuit television (CCTV0 cameras are bringing more and more public places under surveillance--and passenger aircraft could be next.
According to NewScientist, a prototype European system uses multiple cameras and “Big Brother“ software to try and automatically detect terrorists or other dangers caused by passengers.
The European Union’s Security of Aircraft in the Future European Environment (SAFEE) project uses a camera in every passenger’s seat, with six wide-angle cameras to survey the aisles.
Software then analyses the footage to detect developing terrorist activity or “air-rage“ incidents, by tracking passengers’ facial expressions.
The system performed well in tests this January that simulated terrorist and unruly passenger behavior scenarios in a fake Airbus A380 fuselage, say the researchers that built it.
Systems to analyze CCTV footage--for example, to detect violence (with video) or alert CCTV operators to unusual events--have been designed before. But the SAFEE software must cope with the particularly challenging environment of a full aircraft cabin.