In mammals, sweet taste is mediated largely by a single receptor. New work shows that polymorphisms in the promoter region of one subunit contribute to variation in sweet perception in the human population.

This study compares two different profiles of synaesthesia. One group (N = 7) experiences synaesthetic colour and the other (N = 7) experiences taste. Both groups are significantly more consistent over time than control subjects asked to generate analogous associations. For the colour synaesthetes, almost every word elicits a colour photism and there are systematic relationships between the col...

Academic advisors confront many ethical problems and benefit from being able to draw on a system of ethical principles. Such principles, to be credible, should be philosophically defensible and not merely reflective of individual tastes. This article proposes such a set of principles, shows how they can be used to cope with ethical dilemmas, and explains why such dilemmas cannot be prevented. T...

Disputes between those holding differing political views are ubiquitous and deep-seated, and they often follow common, recognizable lines. The supporters of tradition and stability, sometimes referred to as conservatives, do battle with the supporters of innovation and reform, sometimes referred to as liberals. Understanding the correlates of those distinct political orientations is probably a ...

Life-cycle patterns of income, earnings, consumption, labor supply, and wealth vary systematically across educational groups. Human capital theory explains different educational choices in terms of parameters describing tastes and technology. We ask whether differences in these parameters are also consistent with other patterns of behavior. Our preliminary findings suggest that no single form o...

While it is well established that across-country taste differences are associated with "home market effects", there is very limited analysis of how such preference heterogeneity impacts the aggregate volume of trade and the welfare gains from liberalization. I develop a structural model of aggregate demand featuring products with heterogeneous attributes, consumers with heterogeneous tastes for...

The paper presents a formal analysis which incorporates returns to transportation into a Ricardian framework to predict trade patterns. The important point to be gained from this analysis is that increasing returns to transportation, coupled with appropriate distances between trading partners can be shown to reverse Ricardian predictions even when there are no international differences in taste...

Variation in taste perception of different chemical substances is a well-known phenomenon in both humans and animals. Recent advances in the understanding of sweet taste signaling have identified a number of proteins involved in this signal transduction. We evaluated the hypothesis that sequence variations occurring in genes encoding taste signaling molecules can influence sweet taste perceptio...

During food intake flavor perception results from simultaneous stimulation of the gustatory, olfactory and trigeminal systems. Olfactory stimulation occurs mainly through the retronasal pathway and the resulting perception is often interpreted as a taste perception, thus leading to the well-known sensory confusion between taste and olfaction. The present experiment was designed to study, with f...