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Interactive: What we think it is...
 Look at the picture to the right. If it looks a little
small
, just click here for a
bigger
copy.
The results are in and our Mad Scientists have tested them out.
Emily from Boone, North Carolina thinks that the wires are used to make the lemon taste sweet.
That's an interesting idea! After all, lemons would be great if they weren't so sour all the time. To explore this possibility, our scientists must first define what sweet is (and sour, for that matter). Generally speaking, the "taste" of the lemon is caused by the stimulation of the appropriate taste buds in a person's mouth by a substance. We have lots of taste buds that each act as a specialized detector of "flavors" including sweet and sour. Therefore, our hypothesis is: lemons are sour but inserting these two metal wires into it converts it from sour to sweet. To test this, we have two lemons. One lemon, the control, will be tasted without inserting wires (a hole is punched into it using a thumb). The other lemon will be wired. After they are prepared, a strong hand is used to squeeze some juice to the surface where a brave soul tastes them by licking the juice. In our experiment, the taste of the wired lemon and the unwired lemon were both still sour! Try it for yourself and let us know if you have the same results. Our conclusion: unfortunately, the wires do not make lemons taste sweet.
Kelly from Rochester, Minnesota suggests that the lemon is an alien's head and the two wires are used to send signals to other aliens so they can talk to each other.
Now, this is a radical idea... and a hard one to really disprove! We will dissect this suggestion into two parts. The first part is the use of the wires to communicate and the second part is determining whether this is truly an alien. To explore the first possibility, we broke out an advanced radiometer (one that detects several forms of radiant energy - which these communications would probably fall into the spectrum of) to see if there were any transmissions emanating from the "antennae". We discovered no signals of any kind originating from the creature. This does not prove that they do not use them for transmission but it does show that we cannot detect it if they can. Secondly, to determine whether this is an alien's head would require a definition of "alien". We can roughly define alien in this context as "from another planet". We can assure you that this is, indeed, a Sunkist lemon. There are millions upon millions of these all across the world - growing on trees and waiting in supermarkets for unsuspecting buyers. If lemons are extraterrestrials then nobody had discovered it so far. In fact, we do not know of any certifiable tests to discover its true origins. So, while we can hope that these little oblong yellow fruits are natives, there is no 100% certain way to find out. Our conclusion: although it is possible that lemons are aliens and they use wires to communicate, it is highly unlikely.
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