Did your chewing gum lose its flavor on the bedpost overnight? If so, that might be a symptom of COVID-19. This medical thought is inspired by the song “Does Your Chewing Gum Lost Its Flavor“, released into the world in 1959. UPDATE: Investigator Mason Porter alerts us to the existence of an earlier (1924) version […]
Lavie Tridhar writes, in Nature, a gummy tribute of sorts to the 2021 Ig Nobel Ecology Prize winners, Leila Satari, Alba Guillén, Àngela Vidal-Verdú, and Manuel Porcar, who used genetic analysis to identify the different species of bacteria that reside in wads of discarded chewing gum stuck on pavements in various countries. Tridhar’s tribute begins: […]
If you have ever eaten a ‘Gummy Candy’ from Meiji Co., Ltd., Tokyo, Japan, in apple, grape, orange, [European] pear, pineapple, or strawberry flavours, it may have taken you a few seconds to recognise which one you were eating. If so, you are not alone. A 2018 study published in the journal Perception sought to […]
For advocates of chewing gum in school, if there are any, the past decade of research has brought data, and perhaps hope. A project called The Effects of Gum Chewing on Math Scores in Adolescents studied the mathematics grades and test scores of 53 teenage students who chewed gum and 58 who did not. Craig Johnston of the Baylor College of […]
Maybe don’t throw away your Geiger-counter just yet, but if you’re interested in a simple and convenient way to measure how much harmful radiation you (or others) might have been exposed to, then you could check out the work of the Department of Medical and Health Sciences, Linköping University, Sweden where a new methodology has […]
“Severe Weight Loss Caused by Chewing Gum,” Juergen Bauditz, Kristina Norman, Henrik Biering, Herbert Lochs, and Matthias Pirlich, British Medical Journal, vol. 336,no. 96–7, 2008, DOI:10.1136/bmj. 39280.657350.BE. (Thanks to Erwin Kompanje for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at Charite Universitatsmedizin in Berlin, Germany, report: Both our patients consumed large amounts of sorbitol, which […]