How our sense of taste evolves as we age

Kids are hardwired to prefer sweets over greens, with sweetness a shorthand for calorie-rich and bitter flavor warning of potentially noxious plants. This holds true even in the womb, where fetuses have been seen via ultrasound scans grimacing as their hosts consume kale capsules. As they age into double digits and beyond, their taste cells and sense of smell diminish, leading to broader and less sensitive palates.

The research that led to sour

Scientists are trying to figure out if there are unique receptors that respond to the molecules that make up flavors we associate with calcium, blood, batteries, and other items that often escape dinner menus. Taste researcher Dr. Danielle Reed says the minimum evidence for a taste category typically involves identifying dedicated receptors and then removing them to show the taste vanishes.

Many parts of the body, including the testicles, have bitter, sweet, and umami receptors

Taste receptors—the tiny cells that report the chemical makeup of external stimuli to the brain—in the testicles don't "taste" in the same way as the gustatory ones you use to determine if there's enough sugar in your tea. Research suggests that these "teste" receptors can sense bitter, sweet, and umami compounds and use that chemical input to control physiological processes or (literally) change direction. (Some users may experience a paywall.)

Humans have taste receptors throughout the body, including in the testes and lungs, but we don't taste what they detect because those areas lack taste buds.

Taste buds have evolved to fill a wide variety of functions

Taste buds do more than let you experience your favorite food. These peripheral organs can sense the chemical makeup, potential toxicity, and fleeting experience of flavor, giving the body a chance to respond to undesirable chemicals or tell the brain that you should reach for another scoop.

Bluefin tuna, now used in high-end sushi, was once reserved for cat food

Until the ‘70s, the enormous fish were the base for cat food or, at times, thrown into the trash. Now it’s the most expensive fish in the ocean and is a popular topping for nigiri sushi thanks to the abundance of fat in its belly.

Octopuses have taste receptors along their tentacles

Octopus suction cups are filled with modified sensory receptors that can bind with a greater variety of materials and transport a wider array of information, such as flavor, from tactile stimuli. These structures allow the animal to search for food as it crawls the ocean floor.

Ammonium may be the sixth basic taste

Researchers have proposed various candidates for the sixth official taste, including "fat." But research published in 2023 posits that ammonium should be considered the sixth taste since they found humans can apparently detect ammonium chloride, which the scientists describe as "bitter, salty, and a little sour." Detecting ammonia could be a survival mechanism to help detect when certain foods, including seafood, are no longer safe to eat. The work hinged on experiments with human cells exposed to ammonium chloride as well as rodent research.

Neural replays in mice help explain food aversions

Princeton University scientists published research in 2025 analyzing how mice learn to associate certain foods or flavors with feeling ill—even when there’s a time gap between eating something and feeling sick. The work, performed with grape Kool-Aid and injections of a substance that made mice sick, traced the literal “gut reaction” of how gut distress signals are linked to neural replays of what the mouse ate.

The idea of a tongue map has been discredited, but taste sensitivity can vary across the tongue.

Scientists are using CRISPR to genetically modify felines so they don't trigger allergies in humans.

How the methods of catching fish for food affects their taste

Commercially caught fish are often killed through suffocation, allowing the causing the fish extreme stress and flooding their bodies with stress hormones and lactic acid. These chemicals cause the fish's flesh to become bitter where it was once rich and quickens the rotting process.

The tongue evolved in animals roughly 350 million years ago

Creatures like fish rely on suction to consume food, flexing their gills to create water currents that vacuum up their meals. The evolution of the tongue enabled vertebrates to completely cut ties with the sea, moving onto land where they could sample new foods and ways to eat them.

How bitter taste receptors help guard against infection

Receptors for "bitter" tastes evolved to detect potentially harmful plant chemicals, such as nicotine. The receptors also trigger bacteria-fighting responses, including waving hairlike projections to bat away bacteria, ordering the release of bacteria-killing nitric oxide, and calling for antimicrobial protein reinforcements.

Fat is proposed as a candidate sixth basic taste

Oleogustus is Latin for "a taste for fat," and researchers proposed in 2015 that it should be accepted as the sixth basic taste. This article teases apart exactly what it would take to officially be considered the sixth taste and why researchers think the fat taste may be a strong candidate.

Babies taste food in the womb via amniotic fluid, and it may influence future taste buds.

How science came to understand umami

Before Dr. Kikunae Ikeda sat down in 1907 and pondered the taste of dashi, scientists typically agreed upon four types of taste: sweet, salty, bitter, and sour. He boiled 90 pounds of kelp into a resin that he then stripped of different compounds until he was left with a single ounce of brown crystals. Testing later revealed these crystals were glutamate, an amino acid and one of the protein's building blocks.

Multiple sugar substitutes were accidental discoveries when lab workers didn't wash their hands.

A timeline of the science of taste discoveries

The tongue is made up of four types of papillae—elevated, nipple-like projections that give the organ its rough texture. In the early 1900s, initial research into the tongue's varying taste sensitivity led to a misleading map of the tongue and its taste regions. Over the decades, researchers fleshed out five distinct tastes (and more recently, a sixth).

These cells 'taste' danger, trigger immune responses

Taste receptor-coated tuft cells are found throughout the body, where they communicate with and take part in a growing list of biological processes. In the intestines, these taste receptor-studded cells can sense byproducts of parasite metabolisms. This causes the taste receptors to release chemicals that alert the immune system, order nearby goblet cells to produce mucus, and trigger muscle contractions in attempts to launch the parasites from the intestines.

Miracle berries make things that normally taste acidic or sour, such as lemons, taste sweet, like sugar-coated candy, by binding a special protein called miraculin to taste buds.

The fish can climb walls

Scientists in Brazil captured rare footage of bumblebee catfish climbing waterfalls. How they do it is clear, but why remains a mystery.

Exposing fetuses to certain flavors in the womb could lead to children being less picky eaters

A new study found that 3-year-olds were less averse to the smell of vegetables they had been repeatedly exposed to in utero, suggesting that what mothers eat in late pregnancy can leave a lasting imprint on their children's tastes.

Some animals possess sensitive hearing to help pinpoint prey and map the world

Bats and dolphins produce sound to reflect off surfaces and create a mental image of their surroundings. Owls' faces are dish-shaped to help funnel sounds to their ears, including that of mice moving along leaves or snow. Pinnipeds, such as seals and walruses, hear in both air and water.

Although consuming saltwater can dehydrate and kill organisms, some fish survive by using specialized gills that leach excess salt from their bodies back into the surrounding water.

Poison frogs get their toxins from eating insects and mice

Other animals, including royal ground snakes, are able to survive eating poison. Scientists study the creative antitoxin defenses in these animals to discover treatments for poisoning.

Your DNA may determine whether you like coffee or tea

Whether people prefer coffee or tea may boil down to a matter of taste genetics. People with a version of a gene that increases sensitivity to the bitter flavor of caffeine tend to be coffee drinkers, according to a report. Read on for more.

Cats evolved from arid land animals, contributing to their aversion to water

Although positive water experiences can make some cats water-loving, they usually self-clean, making baths unnecessary.

Each taste bud has 10 to 50 sensory cells that form a flower-like capsule

At the top of the structure are thin filaments known as "taste hairs" that bind taste-producing substances to the surfaces of the cell, after which corresponding electrical signals are sent to the brain. Adults have 2,000 to 4,000 taste buds on their tongue.

The flavor of food can be enhanced by combining chemicals known to trigger umami taste receptors with nucleotides—building blocks of DNA and RNA—triggering an effect called umami synergy.

Supertoxic rat poisons are wreaking havoc on unintended targets, including predator birds, mammals, amphibians, crustaceans, and insects.

Hereditary hyperosmia is the official term for being a super-smeller

Some sniffers with this rare trait may be more sensitive to pleasant smells, while others may be more attuned to unpleasant scents. Some research suggests that certain genetic mutations are associated with a heightened sense of smell.

Breaking down various tongue disorders, from infections to genetics

Taste is one of our fundamental senses, but can be impeded by a wide variety of conditions including glossitis, angioedema, and black hairy tongue. Most are characterized by their color, shape, and sometimes change in function. Causes range from vitamin or mineral deficiencies to fluid accumulation, fungal infection, or more.

Our love of chocolate may have more to do with how it ferments than previously realized—with specific microbes associated with more fruity or acetic tastes.

Humans are more genetically similar to cats than to dogs

While humans are not closely related to either cats or dogs from an evolutionary standpoint, scientists find that human and cat chromosomes are organized more similarly to each other than human and dog chromosomes, making cats a better model for studying human diseases.

How goldfish cause significant environmental damage when released

Researchers have found that goldfish cause "regime shifts" in habitats as they search for food in places like lake beds, kicking up sediment that muddies the water and disrupts small invertebrates. They can also outcompete native species to further destabilize existing food webs.

Individuals with synesthesia experience involuntarily overlapping sensations

Tasting words or seeing colors in music results from the brain retaining extrasensory connections from infancy. While most lose these neural pathways during development, about 4% of people are synesthetes, maintaining them without realizing it's unusual.

Animal brain studies show brain activity similar to what we'd expect during dreams, but parsing whether animals are truly dreaming depends on how one defines dreaming and how scientists could prove it.

The purpose of narwhal tusks has mystified researchers for centuries

Nicknamed the "unicorn of the sea," narwhals have no teeth aside from two canines that grow directly forward as tusks. For roughly 85% of females, they stay embedded in the bone. For males, they grow into large, spirally tusks that are full of nerve endings and blood vessels. Scientists today believe that tusks likely formed for sexual selection purposes and eventually evolved to assist in other processes, such as hunting.