This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has three segments. Here are bits of each of them: Nihilism and hypergunk — Irreducibly collective existence and bottomless nihilism aren’t for everyone. Or maybe they are. Jonas Werner, a philosopher at the University of Bern, Switzerland, published a crisp, perhaps irresistible, 16-page-long jotting called “Irreducibly […]
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 […]
Two recent bits of news, unrelated to each other, about people who celebratedly taste wine: 1. The 2018 Ig Nobel Prize for biology was awarded to Paul Becher, Sebastien Lebreton, Erika Wallin, Erik Hedenstrom, Felipe Borrero-Echeverry, Marie Bengtsson, Volker Jorger, and Peter Witzgall, for demonstrating that wine experts can reliably identify, by smell, the presence […]
Electricity can add spice, so to speak, to taste. That is the implication of this new research study about electrified chopsticks, an electrified soup bowl, and other electrified eating utensils: “Augmented Flavours: Modulation of Flavour Experiences Through Electric Taste Augmentation,” Nimesha Ranasinghe, David Tolley, Thi Ngoc Tram, Nguyen, Liangkun Yan, Barry Chew [pictured here], and […]
Do people delude themselves about prizing — or even recognizing — recognizing the taste of their favorite beer? A research study explores that very question, and we explore that study, in this week’s Improbable Research podcast. SUBSCRIBE on Play.it, iTunes, or Spotify to get a new episode every week, free. This week, Marc Abrahams discusses a published taste-this-beer, taste-that-beer study. Yale/MIT/Harvard biomedical researcher Chris Cotsapas lends his voice, and his scientific expertise, […]
This study probes in some detail the sentiment that “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down”: “The bad taste of medicines: overview of basic research on bitter taste,” Julie A. Mennella [pictured here], Alan C. Spector, Danielle R. Reed, and Susan E. Coldwell, Clinical therapeutics, vol. 35, no. 8 (2013): 1225-1246. The authors, […]
The taste of tomato juice has been tested at high levels —or, rather, at simulated high levels. This study contains details about that: “Odor and taste perception at normal and low atmospheric pressure in a simulated aircraft cabin,” Andrea Burdack-Freitag, Dino Bullinger, Florian Mayer, Klaus Breuer, Journal für Verbraucherschutz und Lebensmittelsicherheit, March 2011, Volume 6, […]
Improbable recently profiled the work of the Miyashita Laboratory at Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan, where research is underway into the possibilities offered by ‘electro-gustation’. The lab has not only invented the electric chopsticks but has also investigated a possible way of encouraging diners to use less salt on their potato chips – with the aid […]
It was sometime around 1752 that Johann Georg Sulzer decided (for reasons best known to himself) to put the tip of his tongue between two plates of (different) metal whose edges were in contact. The results were, quite literally, shocking. He’d not only inadvertently stumbled across one of the world’s first electrolytic batteries, but it […]
Joe Staton’s classic article “Tastes Like Chicken” was the subject of a question on the September 25, 2013 edition of the “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” TV program: The question posed to contestants on that program: “Since the animals are thought to be distant relatives, biology professor Joe Staton once wrote ‘chances are that […]