Taste

The Map of Tastes on Your Tongue You Learned at School Is All Wrong

Everybody has seen the tongue map – that little diagram of the tongue with different sections neatly cordoned off for different taste receptors. Sweet in the front, salty and sour on the sides and bitter at the back. It’s possibly the most recognizable symbol in the study of taste, but it’s wrong. In fact, it…

Why You Crave Tomato Juice on an Airplane

I’m writing this seated on a plane heading to San Francisco. We’ve been in the air for under an hour, and the drink cart is just starting to make its way down the aisle. As the cart rolls nearer I’m forced to decide what drink I’ll be having. Since the cups are miniscule, and the…

The Taste Of Coffee Can Be Influenced By The Color Of Your Cup

If your morning brew tastes more bitter than usual, you may want to consider changing the color of your mug instead of adding more sugar. In a paper recently published in the journal Flavour, Australian scientists sought to learn if our perception of coffee could be influenced by the color of the cup from which…

Why Does Orange Juice Taste Terrible After Brushing Your Teeth?

Orange juice is many things: A fine source of Vitamin C, easy to get ahold of, and a pretty decent accompaniment to most items in the pantheon of great breakfast foods. What it is not at all, however, is a good thing to drink right after brushing your teeth. The American Chemical Society’s Reactions series…

This Artificial Tongue Can Taste the Tannins in Wine

Wine tasting notes are famous for their verbal flourishes—for example, “kirsch, dried beef and baker’s chocolate,”—but the liquid is ultimately just a collection of molecules, some sour, some bitter, some dry. And we’re getting better at quantifying taste. A newly developed artificial tongue uses the very proteins from our mouthes to measure the dryness of…

Cat owners may claim that their pets love ice cream and doughnuts, but it’s the fat they enjoy. The taste receptor for sweet is encoded in two genes. In cats, a chance mutation appears to have broken one of these genes. That’s why tigers, lions, and your kitty will never have a sweet tooth.

Just How Good Is A Dog’s Sense Of Taste?

If you’ve ever had a dog that was a particularly finicky eater or marveled at just how appetizing they seem to find those endless bowls of kibble, you’ve probably wondered: Just how sensitive is a dog’s sense of taste? Over in the New York Times’ Q&A section, they’re taking on the question of just how…

Tangents: Visualizing Reich, Seinfeld x Conet, Tortoise Nostalgia, …

Tangents is an occasional collection of short, lightly annotated mentions of sound-related activities. Stunning Phase: Alexander Chen has posted at this visualizaton of Steve Reich’s 1967 composition “Piano Phase.” It’s not just a lovely rendering of the original, but it connects to the notion of a graphic score, and also assists in appreciation of the…

A Weekend Of Dark Beer With The World’s Greatest Stout Glass

It’s just not fair: every single grape varietal and wine style, including some that no one has ever even heard of (Kalterer See Auslese, anyone?), has its own specially designed glass. Even Coca-Cola now has one. But, for beer, your standard mouth-delivery vehicle is the same, whether you’re drinking the wateriest Bud Lite or a…

The Futuristic Liquid Nitrogen Machine That Makes Ice Cream To Order

Despite the warm wood and cheery red accents, Smitten Ice Cream can feel a bit like a mad scientist’s shop. There’s the industrial-sized tank of liquid nitrogen that greets you inside the entrance of its new flagship location in Oakland. And there’s the billowing clouds of nitrogen when the stainless steel ice cream machines churn…

Why Toothpaste Makes Things Taste So Awful

You may think it might be the common mint flavor of toothpaste clashing with other flavors, but in the case of orange juice and many other things, this isn’t actually what’s going on. The culprit here is thought to be two compounds almost universally added to toothpastes -sodium lauryl sulfate and sodium lauryl ether sulfate,…

Seriously, folks, you need to stop refrigerating your tomatoes

A fresh tomato is a delight — until it’s spent a few days in the refrigerator. Then it transforms into a mushy, tasteless mess. Here’s the scientific reason why you should never, ever refrigerate your tomatoes. But — if you absolutely must — there is a way to do it. The Chemistry of a Tomato…

Are there some vegetables you can’t stand? It may be genetic.

Ever wonder why some people think cilantro tastes like detergent while others scatter it over everything? Or why brussels sprouts are delectable to some and disgusting to others? Part of that difference of opinion may lay in our genes. Is food preference genetic? To some extent. There is still a lot about human perceptions of…

What Causes Aftertaste?

Ever wonder why certain foods seem to hang around after you swallow them? Aftertaste is generally classified as any taste that remains in your mouth after your food or drink has been swallowed or spit out. The exact mechanism that causes these sensations isn’t fully understood. In fact, understanding how our brains perceive specifics tastes…

The Science Behind Why Fat Tastes So Good

It’s the end of January, and that means New Year’s resolutions swearing off chocolate and fries and all the other delicious fatty foods are just starting to bend. Who can blame you, really? Here’s a rundown on the science of fat, and why it’s so hard to resist. It Feels and (Sounds!) Good in Your…

Taste Virtual Food By Touching This Silver Electrode To Your Tongue

Amazon lets you flip through many of the books in their online store, while iTunes lets you listen to a preview of a song you’re thinking of downloading. And soon, online grocery stores could let you sample their wares as well, thanks to this unique synthesizer that can simulate various tastes on your tongue. Developed…

The human nose can sense 10 basic smells

We’ve got categories to describe our perceptions of taste, colors, and sounds. But things aren’t as clear-cut when it comes to our sense of smell. Looking to overcome this surprising limitation, a team of researchers have proposed a list of 10 basic smells. Indeed, we’re all set when it comes to describing the way our…

The World’s First Lab-Grown Meat Burger Tastes Terrible (Surprise!)

The world’s premier artificial, $300,000 3D-printed burger lab-grown finally its way into human mouths today. Turns out it tastes pretty weird. Go figure. https://gizmodo.com/a-3d-printed-hamburger-would-cost-you-300-000-5977593 BBC correspondant Pallab Ghosh was present at the meat’s inaugural tasting event, and has been live-tweeting the tasters metered reaction to the lab-grown meat. Apparently the appearance and texture are both…

If you can’t taste sugary foods, you could be at risk for sterility

Genetics can get really weird sometimes, particularly when two seemingly unrelated traits are connected by a common thread. In a recent and completely unexpected finding, scientists linked male sterility to a genetic inability to taste sweet and savory foods. It’s actually quite rare for cells to use just one signalling pathway. Evolution doesn’t like to…

The Cutlery You Use Changes the Way Your Food Tastes

Be careful next time you reach for a spoon: your choice of cutlery could significantly affect the way your food tastes. That’s according to new research published in the open access journal Flavour, which suggests that the size, shape and color of cutlery changes the way we perceive. Performing a number of experiments, the researchers…