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We're going MAD for Science Week!
13 Mar 2019
Today we had a visit from the Mad Scientists. We had a man named Shane who helped us explore our senses. We focused on taste and smell in our workshop.
Firstly, we looked through a magnified glass at our partner’s tongues. We looked closely at their tongues to investigate what we could see.
Zac stated that he could see “little red dots”.
Shane then asked us how long we thought a taste bud lasts for.
- Sabri guessed 25 years.
- Shawn guessed 1 year.
- Aleeze said she thinks it depends on what you eat.
We then explored taste a little further. Shane placed six different cups of lemon water in front of us. The goal was, with your partner, to taste each one and record how strong we thought the flavor was. 1 was basically water and 6 was almost pure lemon.
1. Weak, watery lemon juice.
2. Nice, watery, sour, tangy.
3. Medium, watery, lime juice.
4. Strong lemon juice.
5. Quiet strong, lemon juice
6. Very strong, sour lemon.
Next Shane passed around a rack of test tubes filled with ‘smells’. Our task was to smell each test tube and then decide what we thought the smell was.
1. Vanilla extract
2. Lemon
3. Banana
4. Strawberry
5. Orange
It showed us that we all have a different sense of smell. Some people could guess most or all of the flavours but others could only do one or two.
Finally, we were given a sour sweet. We had to hold our nose, put the sweet in our mouth and start sucking the sweet. Then after about 20 seconds we let go of our noses and automatically the flavour changed and turned sour. It was awesome!
FUN FACTS:
- Children can taste 3 times more than adults.
- Children’s taste buds are 3 times more sensitive.
- Taste and flavour are not in fact the same thing!
- We have four different types of taste – umami, sour, sweet and salty.
- We have thousands and thousands of food receptors.
- Our taste buds die after 250 hours.
- Our taste buds in fact taste every taste. It has been recently proven that different parts of our tongue don’t taste different tastes or flavours.