The sweet taste of unknown

© TWDK

I eat my artichoke-aubergine breakfast dish (my vegetarian take on Antigua and Barbuda’s traditional aubergine saltfish breakfast), and take a swig of water. It tastes sweet. But then, I’m not surprised by that. Water always tastes sweet after eating artichoke.

Why is that?

It turns out scientists don’t actually know. The theory goes that cynarin, an acid found in artichoke, inhibits our sweetness receptors. When washed away (e.g. by a nice glass of water), the sweet receptors reactivate. Just as if you taste a really sugary drink and then slightly sugary one, the slightly sugary one won’t taste sweet at all by contrast (try it!), the same thing happens here: your brain goes crazy now the receptors is no longer inhibited, and interprets the water as sweet.

What colour were the dinosaurs?

The discovery that some dinosaurs were feathered rather than the initially-assumed scaly took palaeontology by storm. But the question didn’t end there. We still don’t know the extent to which feathers were found across the dinosaur kingdom. Skin-impressions of some sauropods show hexagonal scales or bony plates, suggesting they were unfeathered, whilst others such as the tyrannosaurus were definitely feathered. And what colour were these scales or feathers? For the most part, we don’t know.

Feathered velociraptor. Matt Martyniuk via Wikipedia Commons