Quantum of Science

When we talk about flavours, it is commonly stated that there are four types of flavours that humans can sense: sweet, salty, sour and bitter. However, there is another type of flavour, for which there are receptors, called umami , and it is the taste of meat. The closest to describing is that it would be the taste of soya sauce. The existence of such flavour and receptors for it is internationally recognized in the academic community in 1987 at the scientific meeting of the Umami International Symposium held in Hawaii. Which molecules produce umami?  We know that hydrogen ion,  H +, make a sense of sour, some other ions are responsible for salty flavour, sugars are for sweet, but what makes "umami"? It is a flavor of glutamate, or more precisely, the amino acid L-glutamate and its salts eg. sodium glutamate, the usual food flavour enhancing additive - or various 5'-nucleotides such as guanosine monophosphate (GMP) or inosine monophosphate (IMP). The ...

Authors: Bojan Šošić and Jelena Kalinić  This title might look very uncomfortable, but we won't be talking about anything as horrid as the title suggests. I wanted to write a few words about these two acronyms, PUS and PEST, which concern the promotion of science in the public. The trend of acronyms which “mean something” doesn't always have to have the happiest results. PUS stands for “Public Understanding of Science”, while PEST stands for “Public Engagement with/in Science and Technology. Then we also have PAS – which stands for “Public Awareness of Science”. Behind these, not very pleasant sounding names, stands what we call science advocacy – one of those hard-to-translate phrases. However, behind the translation into our local languages, there is a series of question marks because the translation itself does not explain what it actually means. Essentially, it means all engagement and efforts to bring certain scientific terms, occurrences and processe...

The word “sex” is usually associated with TV channels and web sites containing tricky content. However, in science, this term is a synonym for gender, male and female, but according to some new interpretations – gender is all those more or less expressed forms of gender ambiguity.  The emergence of gender is linked to the emergence of sexual reproduction, one of the most important moments in the evolution of the living world, and not without a reason: this process enabled gene recombination, and with that the genetic diversity in a species. Sexual reproduction allows for natural selection to occur and represents a strong evolutionary force. The oldest fossil proof of sexual reproduction comes from the Stenian era, a geological period 1.2 billion years ago, and is a specimen of a red algae species, called Bangiomorpha pubescens . However, people have been fascinated by sexual dimorphism even in the ancient ages; the existence of the female and male sexes, which were obv...

Source: Google+ Fight against ignorance, anachronistic ideas and anti-science is needed today more than ever. Last week in Serbia controversy arose due to a petition to revise the teachings of theory evolution in Serbian universities and schools. The petition was signed by 52 academics and a number of advisers, artists, singers, engineers, philologists, philosophers and five priests. The first page of this petition states: “Globalists and atheists in influential positions in the world, due to personal and globalist reasons, affirm the theory of evolution and finance the promoters of this idea. We are witnessing more and more famous scientists throughout the world stepping out and warning that the theory of evolution is a hypothesis whose attitudes on the creation of the world, life and man are scientifically unprovable or contrary to scientific facts”. It is clear that a petition like this is only a pamphlet created by people who, in fact, don't understand what i...

March for Science started out as the “Scientists' march on Washington”, an initiative in January 2017, just before the inauguration of Donald Trump and after the “Women's March”. The March was first suggested in a Reddit conversation in January, which not long after got around a million followers and then spread to other social networks. The drop that spilled the cup was the announcements of budget cuts and the ignorant attitude of the new administration towards science and scientific facts. In the period before the elections and the inauguration, Donald Trump publicly met people known for their anti-science attitudes, attitudes that can endanger health and the future not only of the American nation, but the whole human population. For example, he met Robert Kennedy on the issue of vaccines – rather than going to the scientific community and ask facts on immunization, he met someone who is not an expert in that field, but a self proclaimed “antivaxx” activist. Also...

I don't know why you're not there I give you my love, but you don't care So what is right? And what is wrong? Gimme a sign What is love? Baby, don't hurt me Don't hurt me no more Valentine's Day is the ideal opportunity for us, who talk science, to use the moment and write something on neurochemistry of love, passion, attraction, sex, and relationships. Why do we need love? Evolutionary biology has given us some answers: love, and more precisely, the connection between partners, is an important advantage for the Homo sapiens species, because the species' young grow up slowly, and their childhood and adolescence last a lot longer than with other species. So, the children need their parents much longer, and the child has the best chance of survival if both parents are present. Some species are monogamous, like a lot of birds species, and it's a rarity to see the pair 'separate', and if one of the partners...

Even those not keen on the western movie genre nor movie-lovers, know about the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, a 1957. movie starring Burt Lancaster (Wyatt Earp) and Kirk Douglas (Doc Holliday). The better informed ones know that the movie is based on a real event – a shootout that lasted 30 seconds with 30 shots fired, on October 26, 1881. in a small town of Tombstone, Arizona. Why write about the shootout at O.K. Corral on this blog? Be patient, continue reading and learn something. This showdown between the frontier marshals and a group of cowboys who refused to obey the laws had a distant echo in the modern American history. That was a time when the Wild West started losing some of its' wildness and the beginning of law enforcement. Cowboys were less considered to be loners with the occasional livestock protection jobs, and more to be scatterbrains, bullies and people who opposed the introduction of the rule of law to territories they occupied, limited as their...