Why do things have flavours?

Everyone loves food, whether it be a manly munch of a plate of bacon, or a child eating chocolate, taste goes hand-in-hand with life.


Taste doesn't seem as complicated as sight, hearing or touch. No nodes or bones or anything are involved, just chemical reactions. But it's the sense we know least about.


We have senses due to stimuli. When you have a stimuli (a change in the environment), your sensory neuron shoots up to the relay neuron in your nervous system. That then talks to your motor neuron which tells your body how to react.

For example- someone has farted, your sensory neuron tells your relay neuron that there's a fart in the air, and your nervous system then tells you to move away from the smelly person. (I hope)

Taste is exactly the same, however it involves more chemistry in it.

Back to instincts


It all goes back to basic survival instinct! Taste helped us identify what to eat/drink, and if it would kill us or just send us to the toilet for a week.

• Sweetness - If things were sweet, they usually contained calories, a source of energy. (Think of sweets)
• Bitterness - Oftenly, bitter foods were poisonous. Come to think of it, does anyone like bitter foods? I thought not! Also why most people don't really like sprouts or celery.
• Sourness - Sour foods were regarded healthy, such as orange but also resembled spoilt food like out of date milk.
• Saltiness - Important minerals and vitamins were often salty. Your body needs 6g of salt a day to function well!

The chemical culprits

All tastes are caused by certain molecules.

• Saltiness - caused by the presence of Sodium ions (Na). The formula for table-salt is (NaCl).
• Bitterness - Caused by the molecule Quinine. Only a tiny amount is needed, for those of you who do chemistry, the bitter taste threshold is 0.000008M.
• Sweetness - The most common molecule is Glucose. And for you chemistry people, sweetness is linked to Aldehydes and Ketone groups. (Both involve oxygen)
• Sourness - Basically acidity, the lower the pH the more sour it is. Again, for you people interested in chemistry, it's the amount of H+ ions.

Why do we like unhealthy foods so much?

We all love fast food, my personal one being the heavenly Big 'n' Tasty from Mcdonalds or 12 piece bargain bucket from KFC! 

Fast food are processed, we all agree on that, but the disadvantage with that is that there is an illusion of false nutritions which we don't get when we eat them.

A fifth flavour?

You all know the 4 tastes; Salty, bitter, sweet and sour. But some guys over in  Singapore believe they isolated a fifth taste!

Food is a combination of the 4 tastes. For example, chocolate could be 80% sweet, 15% bitter, 3% sour and 2% salty. 

However there is a seaweed that Japanese scientists found that couldn't be combined with the 4 tastes. They named the fifth umami. 

This fifth taste is apparently present in tomatoes and some meat as well!

So now you know why things have flavours, next time you sprinkle some salt on your chips, just think of all the NaCl you're putting on it!

Playing a musical instrument slows ageing/ why does our brain get worse?

Play piano, guitar, trumpet, horn or anything else? There's evidence you'll age slower!


Music is a huge part of our lives and when we learn to produce it our brain improves!

The clearest sign of ageing is failure to respond quickly or trouble hearing, even though naturally your senses get worse and worse as you age, playing an instrument can slow this down!

Why does memory degrade as we get older?


It's not a case of our brains getting overloaded with information, it's a case of processing it! 


The capacity of our brain!

Some scientists found the number of neurons connected to each other in our brain found it calculated we have a capacity of around 2.5 petabytes!

For those of you who don't do prefixes, it's about 447392427 songs, which when played (a song lasting for roughly 3 minutes) will play for about 2554 years!

A study undertaken at a neuroscience laboratory investigated the effects of starting music early.

• They got 18 musicians and 19 non-musicians, all between age 45-65.
• Asked them to partake in activities regarding auditory working memory and visual memory.
• The musician group outperformed the non-musicians in all categories but visual (they were identical).

This suggests that a continuous exercise of the auditory senses improves the memory!

What else does learning music do?

To put it bluntly, it actually makes you cleverer, studies in several different countries have concluded a correlation between music players and IQ. 

• Active learning in music develops a bit in your brain called the cerebral cortex, a part which other academic subjects just don't affect.
• Develops co-ordination, motor skills and social skills (really).
• Improves spatial reasoning (basically thinking 'outside the box')

So if you want better memory and potentially to make yourself even cleverer than you already are, take up an instrument!

Skin cells transformed into Brain cells

The magic here is that it didn't happen in a few processes, the Skin cells were transformed directly into Brain cells!


The skin cell, also known as an Epidermal cell is the outer layer of an organism. It's a cell which the body can keep reproducing as we all know, but it's potential is high!

Epidermal cells and brain cells have the same DNA, but the way it's interpreted gives it different functions.

Neural Precursor cells are sort of like stem cells, they can differentiate into 3 other kinds:

• Neurons
• Astrocytes
• Oligodrendocytes

Neurons - The nerve cell, it allows impulses to be sent and is responsible for every action in your body.

Astrocytes - These are the ones which supply nutrients to nervous tissue. (..not tissue which is nervous).

Oligodrendocytes - These insulate the impulses sent over long distances.

So what?

• The Epidermal cells were injected with a virus containing high factors relative to precursor cells. (To make that easier, think of it like you want a cat to be a dog, so you inject some cat properties into the dog).
• After around 3 weeks, 1 in 10 of these infected cells turned into a precursor cell. [the sort of stem cell thing I was talking about before. (yeah, it's cool right?)]
• Even better, the precursor cells undergo Mitosis rapidly! 

So you're either now thinking

This mouse isn't happy that his family is bred for experiments :(

• Whoa that's awesome!
• or great, what good is that?

Well actually, scientists did some testing on rats, (It's always the rats..) and basically, they got some rats which were missing a part of their brain which controls the nervous system, retrieved some of their skin cells, turned them into brain cells and got the missing part growing, back up and running!

Now if this can be done in humans, it will be a breakthrough in medicine.

The big BUT..

But there are a few problems

• Using your own skin cells for this results in triggering the cancer gene, and we all know that's not good.
• We could use stem cells, but then we might as well use them for creating new cells in the first place.
• If not your own, then who's cells? That raises a big ethical question to where we should get them from.

At the end of the day

Huge discovery, and many potential treatments for diseases such as motor neuron disease, stroke and more.

Anyone fancy trading skin for a brain?