Ever bitten into a hot pie, yelped "Hothothot!" then had your taste buds go on strike for the next week? Taste buds are a sensitive bunch.

Taste buds are specialised sensory organs that facilitate the detection of chemical stimuli, ultimately guiding dietary preferences and enabling protective reflexes. Composed of distinct cell types – ...

We’ve all heard of the five tastes our tongues can detect: sweet, sour, bitter, savory-umami, and salty. But the real number is actually six, because we have two separate salt-taste systems. One of ...

The next time you crave a sweet treat, go ahead and buy a bag of jellybeans—guilt free. Your indulgence will be in the interest of science. Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest sci-tech news ...

Japanese scientist Kikunae Ikeda first proposed umami as a basic taste — in addition to sweet, sour, salty and bitter — in the early 1900s. About eight decades later, the scientific community ...

Researchers at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill School of Medicine have revealed the detailed structure of the bitter taste receptor, a protein called TAS2R14, and have shown ...

Taste is one of our most vital senses, shaping appetite, nutrition, and quality of life. Yet taste buds are fragile, relying heavily on the nerves that connect them to the brain. When those nerves are ...

“You don’t know what you’re missing till it’s gone” is a truism that certainly applies to taste. It took a pandemic for taste to get attention. Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 ...

PHILADELPHIA (May 16, 2024) – The rich research portfolio of the Monell Chemical Senses Center on sweet taste goes way back: Monell scientists were one of four teams in 2001 that found and described ...

In eastern Mexico’s underground caverns and streams, a blind fish undergoes a peculiar adolescence: as it approaches maturity, taste buds begin to sprout under its chin and on top of its head, ...