Looks like the phone still works after this sort-of-upsetting experiment, which is nice and all, but I would rather the video ended with the guy taking the fish out of the phone and putting them safely back in their tank. Disco Stu is not a figure to be emulated, Random Chinese Dude in Possibly Promotional Video. [Engadget]

When you look past the annoying voice of the fish, the technology is pretty cool. Dan Ros implanted a MBED chip in the fish and added an SD card with .wav files. But having the fish say recorded phrases was just boring so he came up with the Twitter idea, attached an Ethernet wire and wrote some MBED code.

Apparently the fish is offline now, but you can Twitter to him and he will say the words out loud. Is it just me or does anyone want him to just start singing “Don’t Worry Be Happy” again? [MBED via Slashgear]

The fish he treats are ornamental—fancy ones for aquariums—so I guess there are a lot of people with exotic fish around Chandannagore. But man, how surreal is that photo of the goldfish receiving an injection? Normally when a goldfish gets sick the prescription is one dose of going down the toilet. Be sure to click through to Life to see the rest of the series of images. Amazing stuff. [Life via Notcot]

Equipment: A dishwasher. To make sure I got a good sense of the process, I tested out two machines, one from probably 1975 and one that’s maybe two or three years old. Both relatively cheap.

Ingredients:
For the Fish
• Two smallish fillets of salmon, about 4oz.
• Olive oil, salt, pepper

For the Cilantro Sauce (from Salon)
• 1 tbsp butter, lots of salt and pepper
• 1 leek, finely chopped
• 1 shallot, minced
• 1 jalapeño chile, seeds removed and diced
• 1.5 cups chicken stock
• 2 cups lightly packed cilantro leaves
• 3 tbsp lime juice
• 3 tbsp sour cream

Notes: This recipe cheats a little bit. The fish is cooked in the dishwasher, yes, but the sauce is made in usual boring fashion with a saucepan and a blender. A more MacGyverian side: Vegetables (asparagus, broccoli, etc) can be cooked in the dishwasher, sealed in a foil packet with butter, though you’ll have to take them out before the dry cycle kicks in or they’ll be overdone.

Step 1: Pull out three 30cm square sheets of aluminium foil, and coat the shiny side of two of them with butter, oil or that aerosol spray stuff. Put both salmon fillets on one of these sheets and season with lime, salt and pepper.

Step 2: Put the other coated sheet of foil, coated side down, on top of the fillets, then press the two sheets of foil together and roll tightly from all four sides. Make sure your foil doesn’t tear or your dishwasher will smell like fish for at least a week. Wrap the last sheet of aluminium foil around the packet, as a last measure to keep your landlady from knowing you put fish in her dishwasher.

Step 3: Stick the double-wrapped foil packet on the top shelf of your dishwasher. (You can also stick dishes in there if you want.) Turn on the dishwasher, both a wash and a dry cycle. The key, says the original recipe, is to disable the Energy Star power saver mode (it won’t get hot enough) but to use the regular cycle instead of “pots and pans” (which makes it too hot).

Step 4: Start making your sauce. I followed the sauce instructions from Salon to a tee—it’s an easy sauce to make and tastes pretty good, though I think it’d be better on a taco than on delicately steamed fish. It’ll be done by the time your fish is out of the dishwasher.

Step 5: Here’s where things started to go wrong for me. The first dishwasher I tried is probably 30 years old and on a normal cycle can barely clean dishes. After a full wash and dry, my first attempt at dishwasher steamed salmon yielded…

Sashimi. Dammit. Lucky for me, I happened to move that very weekend, and my new place has a newish dishwasher that I immediately broke in by following steps 1 through 3. Little did I know that this was no ordinary dishwasher.

There must have been some kind of nuclear reaction happening in this dishwasher because it overcooked the crap out of my fish. We’re talking straight-up cat food here. At least I could just stick the undercooked fish in a frying pan and then have dinner. Not very MacGyver, but still dinner. This time, the dried-out piece of gross orange fish carcass was in no way salvageable.

The Results: After two disasters in a row, I can pronounce dishwasher salmon too finicky to be worth MacGyvering. I’m sure I could have played around with it and gotten it right (ruining several whole salmon in the process), but I just don’t think it’s worth it. Dishwashers are just too varied in heat to reliably steam fish, even one as forgiving as salmon. If you have tried it yourself, and can shed some light, please share in the comments.

After the bland success of coffee-maker poached chicken, dishwasher salmon was a big disappointment.

Taste Test is our week-long tribute to the leaps that occur when technology meets cuisine, spanning everything from the historic breakthroughs that made food tastier and safer to the Earl Grey-friendly replicators we impatiently await in the future.

Designed by scientists at MIT, this mechanised trout shares a lot in common with the British robo-carp we saw earlier this year. For one, its primary use is to carry sensors and monitor industrial projects that present accessibility problems for divers and larger submersibles. It’s also colourful, ornate and exceedingly fishlike, which is fun for us, but probably doesn’t do a whole lot for its effectiveness as an industrial chemical sniffer.

Unlike the carp, though, these fish aren’t comically huge, nor are they very complicated: Each one has just 10 parts, draws just a few watts of power, measures in at between 12 and 20 centimetres long, and moves in a startlingly lifelike way. (Video below.) The fish are just a research project for now, but the university has firm plans to use these same techniques to build robotised salamanders and manta rays. You know, for science! [CNET]

A British scientist is working on a device to represent dolphin communication as a sort of hieroglyph, but we can save him the suspense: They’re just thanking us for all the fish.

The Cymascope, which is the creation of acoustics engineer John Stuart Reid and American dolphin researcher Jack Kassewitz, allows dolphin vocalizations to vibrate a very small pool of water, which is then converted by software into a graphic on the screen. The visual aspect is new and very important; humans aren’t capable of hearing much of the dolphin’s vocal range.

They’ll then, presumably, crack the code by putting these new symbols in context. It doesn’t necessarily seem like they’ll be able to pick up on specific dolphin social cues or the no doubt subtle nuances of dolphin discourse, but with any luck they’ll be able to figure out how to say “DUDE! CHECK OUT THIS FISH!” in dolphin. [News and Star]

Created by engineers at the University of Essex, they measure about 8 feet long, can swim at roughly 2.5kph and feature real fish-like undulating action. Each fish has its own navigation system, so they can swim around the port without human control. When their batteries are running low, they return to dock at the charging station.

So what’s the cost for these fishy pollution sniffers? About $US30,000. Yeesh. Didn’t anyone tell these guys that money doesn’t grow on seas? [The Register via Crunchgear]

It turns out, a 25-pound cod ate his phone and was then caught by fishermen. They found the phone, pulled out the SIM card and put it in another phone and called his girlfriend.

They got his old phone back to him, and he claims after drying it out it still worked. That’s a dubious claim at best, but hey, if true that says a lot for Nokia phones. I guess. I mean, if you’re planning on having your phone eaten by a fish, that may be the brand to go with, otherwise it probably won’t change your opinion one way or another. [The Sun via The Daily What]

The fish tank has a deep concave bottom like a wine bottle, so that the bird can fly up “into” the tank. I don’t know what kind of enjoyment the fish would get out of this, but I imagine the birds would be entertained, up till the moment they realise that fish can suddenly fly higher than they can. The fish, on the other hand, won’t notice a damn thing. Cuz they’re fish.

There are some structural issues I have with the design, issues you might have as well. The disc-shaped base of the thing had better weigh a ton to support not only the very tall bird cage, but the heavy water-filled (glass?) bowl atop it. And anyone who’s ever owned birds or fish will be wondering about how to clean the damn Duplex—one hopes at least that the fish tank’s green gunk build-up reaches the point of intolerability at the exact same the bird droppings do, but chances are you’ll be disassembling that thing all the time just to keep your little lovelies from croaking. [Yanko Designs]

The choir consists of at least 200 singing fish attached to an old Volvo and juiced up with five miles of wire, five 6-volt golf cart batteries, a screw drive mechanism using 12v DC reversible motor, a scratch-made lifting frame and a Linux server controlling the show. [Sashimi Tabernacle Choir via Geeks are Sexy vie Geek Dad]