I bet many of you out there can’t tell an under-ripe or an overripe fruit apart from the good ones. At least not as proficient as Mum. But help is here as Professor Mark Riley from University of Arizona has invented a sticker that changes in color to indicate the ripeness of the fruit.
“Right now, picking fruit is more of an art than it is a science,” Riley said.
Named the RediRipe stickers, each one is stuck on a fruit, and it detects the ethylene gas that is released by fruits when they ripen. The sticker changes color from white to blue, and the darker the blue, the riper the fruit. But the color shift is not instantaneous, taking about 24 to 48 hours.
At this moment, the development has yet to be completed. The stickers will need to be able to distinguish rotten fruits from overripe ones. And not all fruits produce enough ethylene to be detected by the sticker.
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