yuck

"It didn't tickle. But when it happened it didn't hurt anywhere near as much as pushing them back and getting them wired together to make the trip home. That was yuck... painful."

Truelove and Rhodes Yepsen, the executive director of the bioplastic institute, also point to compost bin and can liners, noting that many people won’t participate in separating out their food waste if they can’t put it in a bag — the “yuck” factor.

In RoboCop, our yuck factor is carefully held at bay by the cyborg's tough, robotic exterior, but when Peter Weller, playing Adam Murphy/RoboCop, removes his helmet and we, and his partner Anne Lewis, truly see how his human body has been forcibly meshed with mechanical parts, it's not for nothing that he tells her "you may not like what you see."

But Xu argues that the yuck factor is not a sound basis for deducing what's ethical and what's not.

There's also what Nicole Xu, a bioengineer and research scientist who runs the Xu lab at the University of Colorado Boulder, calls the "yuck factor" — the reflexive sense of revulsion many of us feel at the mere idea of an animal, even an insect, modified with mechanical parts and stripped of free will.