In neuro class today, our teacher gave us the miracle fruit tablets which claimed to make sour and bitter food taste sweet. To test out the tablets, we prepared food which different combinations of tastes and texture, including sweet pickles, vinegar flavored chips, sour gummies, lemons, limes, raspberries, pineapples, grapes, apple cider, and grapefruit juice(As shown in Figure 2). After melting the tablet on my tongue, I tried the lemon first. It was not sour at all, instead it’s sweet and fruity, almost like sweetened lemonade. I can still taste the lemon flavor, but no sourness. I went on and tried the lime and got similar results except the lime was slightly more bitter. The raspberry and the pineapple just taste like confection to me. Interestingly, I only tasted saltiness from the salt and vinegar flavored chips. If I am not told the flavor of the chips, I would think that the chips are in original flavor. I didn’t realize the gummy bear are sour because I couldn’t sense the sour coating. And the sweet pickle tasted weird since pickles are always sour and salty to me. Then I moved on to the drink. I had a sip of the apple cider, and it immediately starts burning on my tongue and down my throat. The grapefruit juice tasted like normal.
After this fun tasting activity, we wrote down lots of questions on sticky notes and separated them by categories. Some of them are: Did the miracle berries tablet reduce the ability to taste sourness or enhance the sensitivity to sweetness? If so, how? Which part of the neurons is influenced by the tablet? Sensory neuron, or interneuron? What’s the process of making the tablets? Do we know what chemicals are involved in changing how food taste? Does everyone taste differently? How did we learn to recognize and differentiate different tastes when we were young?
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We were given version A of a “mystery tube” in class on Tuesday and asked to simply make observations and explore this mysterious item as much as we can. It was a white hollow cylinder with a string that could be pulled out on both sides. Then we realized that on the left side of the mystery tube, the string could be pulled out longer, 24cm, almost twice as long as the right side. The total length of the tube was around 18 cm long, and the string that could extend out from the right side is around 11.5cm long. The string on both sides could be pushed in, too. We also noticed that string wrapped around the left cap of the tube. There was noise when pulling, but no loud noise when shaking. We tried to test the magnetism with a magnetic, and the tube was not magnetic. After making detailed observations, we moved on to making inference. We initially thought about using two moving pulleys, which made it possible to have a string that moves in the same direction but on the two ends of the tube. Then we realized that as long as there’s only one string inside the tube, the two ends of the single string must move at the same speed, which contradicts with the observations. We then came up with the two string version of the sketch model: one around a single moving pulley, another attach the center of the pulley as the sketch will show below. After posting our poster and getting awesome suggestions, questions, and comments from my classmates, we decided that the diameter of the pulley should be as big as the diameter of the tube so that there will be no loud noise when shaking the tube. We started building our scratch model from card paper tube. We cut some circles and glue them together to build a pulley. We put tape around the pulley so that one string can stay within the gap. Here’s a picture of our draft model! We strictly followed the size, shape and length ratio in order to construct our model as similar as the original mystery tube, but we still encountered some problems at the end such as that the pulley didn’t rotate very well and it didn’t always rotate in right angle. The whole string pulling process is not as smooth as the original mystery tube.
“All models are wrong, some are useful”. We can never construct a model that is a hundred percent accurate in every aspect of the object. However, we can learn a lot by simply observing, writing and sketching down inference and possible structure, building the model, and reflect how much alike it is to the original mystery tube. In the process of discovering new species, scientists observe certain traits and build the models based on hypothesis and furthur improve the model as they observe more. It’s possible to get closer to the actual object or organism by improving the models, but It’s unlikely that the models are the exact copies of the objects. However, scientists learn from constantly changing and improving the models. |
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November 2018
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