Taste Testing Without Smell

We all know that some foods taste better than others but what gives us the ability to experience all these unique flavours? This simple experiment shows that there's a lot more to taste than you might have first thought.

What you'll need:

1. A small piece of peeled potato
2. A small piece of peeled apple (same shape as the potato so you can't tell the difference)

Instructions:

1. Close your eyes and mix up the piece of potato and the piece of apple so you don't know which is which.
2. Hold your nose and eat each piece, can you tell the difference? 

It is difficult to tell, right?

What's happening?

Holding your nose while tasting the potato and apple makes it hard to tell the difference between the two. Your nose and mouth are connected through the same airway which means that you taste and smell foods at the same time. Your sense of taste can recognize salty, sweet, bitter and sour but when you combine this with your sense of smell you can recognize many other individual 'tastes'. Take away your smell (and sight) and you limit your brains ability to tell the difference between certain foods.

Does an Orange Float or Sink?

Does an orange float or sink when placed in water? Seems like a fairly straight forward question, but is it? Give this fun density science experiment for kids a try and answer the question while learning a unique characteristic of oranges.

What you'll need:

1. An orange
2. A deep bowl or container
3. Water

 Instructions:

1. Fill the bowl with water.
2. Put the orange in the water and watch what happens.
3. Peel the rind from the orange and try the experiment again, what happens this time?

What's happening?

The first time you put the orange in the bowl of water it probably floated on the surface, after you removed the rind however, it probably sunk to the bottom, why?

The rind of an orange is full of tiny air pockets which help give it a lower density than water, making it float to the surface. Removing the rind (and all the air pockets) from the orange increases its density higher than that of water, making it sink.

Density is the mass of an object relative to its volume. Objects with a lot of matter in a certain volume have a high density, while objects with a small amount of matter in the same volume have a low density.

Fun Rabbit Facts for Kids

Check out our fun rabbit facts for kids. Learn about rabbit ears, where they live, what a young rabbit is called and much more.

Read on and enjoy a variety of interesting information about rabbits.

 

A female rabbit is called a doe.

A male rabbit is called a buck.

A young rabbit is called a kit (or kitten).

Rabbits live in groups.

The European rabbit lives underground, in burrows. A group of burrows is known as a warren.

More than half of the world’s rabbits live in North America.

Rabbits have long ears which can be as long as 10 cm (4 in).

Rabbits have a lifespan of around 10 years.

Rabbits are herbivores (plant eaters).

Pet rabbits that live inside are often referred to as ‘house rabbits’.

Rabbits reproduce very quickly. This can be a major headache for people living in agricultural areas where rabbits are seen as pests.

Rabbits are born with their eyes closed and without fur.