sci-tech
Whether you prefer
drinking tea or coffee may
come down to your genes.
University of Queensland
researchers studied the
relationship between taste
receptor genes and tea and
coffee consumption in over
430,000 men and women.
People taste bitter flavours
like caffeine, quinine and
an artificial substance called
propylthiouracil differently
according to the types of taste
receptor genes they have.
Participants with gene variants that made them taste
caffeine more strongly were 20 per cent more likely than
the average person to be heavy coffee drinkers. These
caffeine super-tasters were less likely to drink tea as
Arunachal Pradesh has gifted India with a fifth brown pit viper but with a reddish
tinge. Herpetologists discovered the new species of pit viper — a venomous
snake with a unique heat-sensing system — from a forest in West Kameng
district of Arunachal Pradesh. India has four other brown pit vipers — Malabar,
Horseshoe, Hump-nosed and Himalayan — discovered 70 years ago. The new
species, Trimeresurus arunachalensis, makes Arunachal Pradesh the only
Indian state to have a pit viper named after it. As only one male has been found
so far, this single known specimen of the species currently makes it the rarest
pit viper in the world.Smiling really can make
you feel happier
A team of researchers from the
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
(UT) has found that the simple act of
smiling can make people feel happier.
They analyzed nearly 50 years of data
on how facial expressions affect our
emotions.The researchers used a statistical
technique called ‘meta-analysis’— which allows researchers to combine data from
multiple studies — to examine the results of 138
studies involving more than 11,000 participants from
around the world. The study revealed that facial
expressions have a small, yet significant, impact
on feelings. Just as smiling makes people feel
happier, scowling makes them feel angrier or
frowning makes them feel sadder.“We don’t think that people can smile their
way to happiness. But these findings are
exciting because they provide a clue about
how the mind and the body interact to shape
our conscious experience of emotion,” said
the study author.people who are better
at detecting caffeine are
more prone to becoming
addicted to its stimulant
effects, and coffee contains
more caffeine than tea.Participants with gene
variants that made them
more sensitive to the
tastes of quinine and
propylthiouracil were 4
and 9 per cent more likely
than the average person
to be heavy tea drinkers
respectively. They were also less likely to drink coffee.
This may be because super-tasters of quinine and
propylthiouracil — both more bitter than caffeine — are
more sensitive to bitter tastes overall. They may find the
intense bitterness of coffee overwhelming and prefer the
gentler bitterness of tea.