This site looks at the science behind food and cooking. Learn about what happens when you eat sugar, bake bread, cook an egg, or pickle foods. Find out how muscle turns to meat, what makes meat tender, and what gives meat its flavor. Take tours of breads and spices of the world. Explore your sense of taste and smell.

Learn about art and the five senses. A lot of art is made to be seen — but what if you could touch, hear, and even smell works of art? In this episode, host Lauren Paullin shows you how to mix paints that smell like pastries and transform sounds into sketches. You'll also learn about a fascinating condition called synesthesia, which links multiple senses together in the brain so that some people can taste music, hear color, and smell words! Developed for students in grades 4- adults.

Few people are aware of how crucial the sense of smell is to identifying foods, or the adaptive value of being able to identify a food as being familiar and therefore safe to eat. In this lesson and activity, students conduct an experiment to determine whether or not the sense of smell is important to being able to recognize foods by taste. The teacher leads a discussion that allows students to explore why it might be adaptive for humans and other animals to be able to identify nutritious versus noxious foods. This is followed by a demonstration in which a volunteer tastes and identifies a familiar food, and then attempts to taste and identify a different familiar food while holding his or her nose and closing his or her eyes. Then, the class develops a hypothesis and a means to obtain quantitative results for an experiment to determine whether students can identify foods when the sense of smell has been eliminated.

In the first part of the activity, each student chews a piece of gum until it loses its sweetness, and then leaves the gum to dry for several days before weighing it to determine the amount of mass lost. This mass corresponds to the amount of sugar in the gum, and can be compared to the amount stated on the package label. In the second part of the activity, students work in groups to design and conduct new experiments based on questions of their own choosing. These questions arise naturally from observations during the first experiment, and from students' own experiences with and knowledge of the many varieties of chewing and bubble gums available.

Learn about the five senses. Mary and Mike are out and about, using their five senses to explore a city park. Mary collects leaves and watches the squirrels busily gathering acorns, while Mike eats snacks from his bag. Back in the studio, they find new ways to make music and even try some improvisation. Special guest, Ms. McCollough, shows us how to make our very own fizzy volcanoes. How will you be brave and curious today?

Students design and create sensory integration toys for young children with developmental disabilities an engineering challenge that combines the topics of biomedical engineering, engineering design and human senses. Students learn the steps of the engineering design process (EDP) and how to use it for problem solving. After learning about the human sensory system, student teams apply the EDP to their sensory toy projects. They design and make plans within given project constraints, choose materials, fabricate prototypes, evaluate the prototypes, and give and receive peer feedback. Students experience the entire design-build-test-redesign process and conclude with a class presentation in which they summarize their experiences with the EDP steps and their sensory toy project development.

Students conduct an experiment to determine whether or not the sense of smell is important to being able to recognize foods by taste. They do this by attempting to identify several different foods that have similar textures. For some of the attempts, students hold their noses and close their eyes, while for others they only close their eyes. After they have conducted the experiment, they create bar graphs showing the number of correct and incorrect identifications for the two different experimental conditions tested.

Think of some of your favorite tastes: savory Thanksgiving turkey, buttery mashed potatoes, tangy cranberry sauce, and warmly spiced pumpkin pie. We perceive food's complex, layered flavors through the work of five* types of receptors on our tongues—those that detect either sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami (savory). These receptors bind to chemicals in our food and transmit the information about the chemicals to our brains, resulting in a healthy appreciation for the nuances of chocolate, coffee, strawberries, and more.