Media Mentions

The New York Times: The Textbooks Were Wrong About How Your Tongue Works

Think for a minute about the little bumps on your tongue. You probably saw a diagram of those taste bud arrangements once in a biology textbook — sweet sensors at the tip, salty on either side, sour behind them, bitter in the back. But the idea...

29 May, 2024

Huffington Post: Don’t Even Think About Putting Ketchup On A Hot Dog

Americans love their hot dogs, eating about 7 billion from Memorial Day to Labor Day, according to the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council. And Hulu’s hit show “The Bear” has not only sparked a great thirst for handsome line cooks, but it has also...

26 May, 2024

The Food Chain (BBC): To Salt or Not to Salt

Do you know how much salt you should be eating? And if I tell you it’s less than 5 grams a day, do you know how much that is? Ruth Alexander explores the wonder of salt and why chefs think their job would be pointless without it...

25 April, 2024

The Washington Post: Five Trusted Ways to Get Rid of Cooking Odors

Bacon. Cauliflower. Seafood. Anything fried. These are some of my favorite things to cook and eat, but while their aromas can be enticing in the moment, no one wants to smell these foods hours or even days after they’ve been cooked and consumed. Why? “When we...

05 April, 2024

The Washington Post: How Fake Sugars Sneak into Foods and Disrupt Metabolic Health

Many people are cutting back on their sugar intake for health reasons. But the food industry has found another way to give consumers their sweet fix. It is quietly replacing the sugar in many packaged foods with sucralose, stevia, allulose, erythritol and a wide variety of...

07 March, 2024

The Scientist: Maternal Diet Affects an Offspring’s Neuronal Taste Circuit

Taste, like other senses, is mediated by finely tuned circuits of neurons. These circuits are formed during embryonic development, when many extra neuronal synapses that will not exist in the fully mature brain arise. The process of removing these extra connections, neuronal pruning, takes place...

06 March, 2024

ABC News: Bad Smells May Be Leading to Some of the Reported Symptoms in East Palestine

Psychosomatic effects may be contributing to the symptoms of headaches, fatigue, or respiratory issues being reported by some residents of East Palestine, Ohio, following a hazardous chemical spill last month, experts say. But "psychosomatic" does not mean that the symptoms are made up, according to experts....

04 March, 2024

The Philadelphia Inquirer: Paul Giamatti’s ‘Holdovers’ character smells like fish. That’s a real condition, with a Philly backstory

In The Holdovers, Oscar-nominated actor Paul Giamatti plays cantankerous boarding-school teacher Mr. Hunham, who reveals that he struggles with body odor due to a condition called trimethylaminuria. It’s a real condition, and for decades, a Philadelphia scientist was one of the world’s leading experts. George Preti, a...

11 February, 2024

The Washington Post: Love Spicy Food? Hate It? Watch a Hot Wing’s Trip Through Your Body.

A bite of spicy food kicks off a wild adventure from one end of your body’s machinery to the other. Why some people enjoy the fiery ride and others dread it depends on all kinds of factors, from your genes and your personality to where you...

09 February, 2024

The Cut: Can My Perfume Really Attract a Partner?

In animals, pheromones (like androstenone) are chemical signals released externally to elicit behavioral responses from other animals, whereas hormones (like oxytocin) are chemicals released internally to regulate body functions. In perfume bottles, these pheromones and hormones … have not been proven to do much of...

08 February, 2024