Scientific American 11-4-01--4-09的稿子.docVIP

Bitter Blocker Beats Broccoli A food additive that blocks our bitter taste receptors could make foods like broccoli more palatable. Karen Hopkin reports They say you should take the bitter with the sweet. But if you’re not a big fan of bitter, chemists have just the loophole for you. Oh, you’ll still have to take the bitter. But you won’t have to taste it. Because scientists have concocted a new and improved “bitter blocker.” They touted their triumph at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society. [Ioana Ungureanu et al., Discovery of a new generation of highly potent bitterness blockers] Our taste buds allow us to detect sweet and sour, salty and savory, and, of course, bitter. Of that set of taste sensations, bitterness, most agree, is the most disagreeable. And we can thank (or blame) evolution. We likely find bitter bad because many toxic substances are bitter. So an aversion to bitter may have helped our ancestors survive. Problem is, plenty of healthful foods are bitter, too. Take broccoli and kale. (Please.) The standard solution, drowning out the bitter with butter, sort of cancels out the veggies’ health food status. Rather than getting rid of the bitter, chemists came up with a compound that simply blocks our receptors for the bitter molecules, and our ability to taste them. So you may not need that spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down. Or the broccoli. —Karen Hopkin Adult Brain Shows Learning Changes Fast Less than two hours of training over a few days produced noticeable brain changes in adult learners. Cynthia Graber reports Sometimes people complain when trying to learn a new skill: “I’m not that young anymore. It’s harder to learn anything new.” But adult brains may be more pliable than we thought. Research has shown that adult brains can increase in gray matter over weeks or months. Now comes a study finding that it’s possible to increase the brain’s gray matter quite quickly—in only a matter of days. That’s according to research