pandas – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Stories filed under: "pandas"

DailyDirt: What You Don't Know About Sneezing

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

There are a lot of things about ourselves we just don’t know. Why do we need sleep? How does general anesthesia work? A whole bunch of involuntary reactions are still mysterious. Partial explanations exist to describe what happens when these things occur, but that’s not a fully satisfactory understanding. So what about sneezing? Think you know all about it?

• Sneezing clears out your nose when you’re sick, but what if you don’t have a cold/flu? Some people sneeze after they exercise or eat a good meal or.. have sex? Sneezing can also accompany seizures and some psychiatric disorders. [url]
• A few doctors report seeing patients with constant sneezing fits, lasting days or weeks. Some of them have been ‘cured‘ with psychiatric treatments, and one diagnosis is called PANDAS (Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcal Infections) which can be treated with intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG) and prophylactic antibiotics. [url]
• Do you sneeze when you look at a bright light or the sun? That’s a ‘photic sneeze reflex’ which could be genetic. Researchers have been flashing lights at photic and non-photic sneezers while looking at their brain scans.. and hopefully, they clean up the spittle in between measurements. [url]

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Filed Under: health, involuntary response, pandas, pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders associated with streptococcal infections, photic sneeze reflex, psychiatric disorders, sneezing

DailyDirt: This Tastes Funny… Here Try It

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

There’s no accounting for taste — unless of course you have to quantify it with sensory panels and professional tasters. It’s not quite an exact science which is sorta why you can never get 4 out of 5 dentists to agree on anything, but researchers are still trying their best to learn about how we perceive different tastes. If you’re a serious foodie or just curious, check out some of these links on flavors and how we sense them.

• One hypothesis for why people have bitter receptors is that early humans needed to avoid poisonous plants, but that explanation hasn’t been supported by much evidence. It’s a mystery why we can perceive bitter as a taste because the ability doesn’t seem to correlate at all with diet and a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. [url]
• Red pandas apparently like the taste of aspartame (and other artificial sweeteners), and these bears are the first non-primate mammals known to have such a preference. The researchers who made this discovery placed a sweet solution and a control of plain water in front of animals in a zoo for a day, and a preference was observed if the animals drank more of the sweet solution rather than plain water. Recently, giant pandas were also found to like sugar, even though they typically eat mostly bamboo. [url]
• Maybe you remember learning about a tongue map where sweet receptors are on the tip of your tongue and bitter receptors are on the back? Sorry, but researchers say that map is wrong. The ability to taste bitter, sour, sweet, salty and umami can be found all over the tongue, in the same areas. [url]

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: artificial sweeteners, aspartame, bitter, flavors, food, pandas, sweet, taste, tongue