Museum Candy Fun

Our health museum is having a candy exhibit this summer. We went to a "show" which was really fun. I saw my first, live demo of Mentos in Diet Coke. Wow! What an explosion! I might have to buy the little dispensor to do this "science demo" on my own.

Alexandra had fun jumping on a huge "tongue." Each colorful circle represented one of the 4 tastes and it would say what taste (ex. salty) when you jumped on it. I loved one of the signs near the exhibit. This is what it said: "Could your schoolbooks be wrong? You may have learned in school that your tongue has taste zones. Each zone was supposed to recognize one of the four basic tastes: sweet... sour... salty... bitter. You might have even seen a tongue map like this. (shows traditional tongue map) Well, guess what? If you jump on the tongue, you'll see that receptors for all four tastes are scattered everywhere. Taste receptors are in the taste buds. Researchers have known since the mid-70s that the tongue map was not exactly right. But it's been printed and reprinted in textbooks since the late 1800's." Wow! It also says we might have a 5th taste called "savoury" which tastes meaty flavors.