What Do Protons Taste Like? 

What is the reason different alkali (and earth alkali) chlorides (LiCl, NaCl, KCL, CsCl, MgCl2, CaCl2, SrCl2 and the odd NH4Cl) taste differently?

Hi Steve love your videos

@@woodruff4241 My best guess is how well that chemical or molecule gets A: dissolved into the saliva and B: how much of it passes through the protein tube (done might do it better than others.) Again this is a guess I have no idea, correct me if I'm wrong or my reasoning sounds weird

This was cool 😁👌

Cool idea with distinguishing senses by detected object. However, this had me thinking that, with this distinction, one would have to make a choice of splitting the electromagnetic spectrum in two in order to distinguish the sense of sight from the sense of warmth from heat radiation. But then again, senses are strongly tied to our feelings, so it is perhaps not too surprising if some amount of subjective choice is required :)

Zing!

Mm, this one tastes strange, and this tastes charn? Ooh and this one tastes like top and eugh

Top, bottom, strange, charm, blueberry, and lemon-lime

@@Sam_596 I thought those were up and down quarks, not blueberry and lemon-lime. (which BTW I really like because of the sourness.)

The charm ones are the best.

You ever eat something and think "huh, this tastes strange"?

@@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721 I ate a Higgs boson now I’m stuck in the stinky universe

I'm not sure I'd call 1/3 a little bit

Charming.

at least it doesn't taste like bottom

If you dissolve citric acid in some D2O and then recrystalize it, you'll have a significant amount of citric deuteracid. You can probably do this at home

hey buddy

Deuterons taste sour, just like protons. But probably not _exactly_ the same, since like you said, heavy water affects taste sensation, at least of sweetness, in ways we don't really understand.

There is one channel with a chemistry professor who said that "drinking whiskey with heavy-water soda will not get you so dizzy (but can kill you)"' ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-fyK6kPi8k78.html

Sooo....neutrons are sweet? Because of the extra neutrons, the proton was sour and the neutrons are sweet??

wait, is this always true for free H+ ions? e.g., are the protons moving in the electron transport chain of aerobic respiration also H3O+?

@@cartermilan yes, H+ ions are highly reactive, and so the lifetime that they exist for in an aqueous solution is extremely small. That said, in the case of the proton pumps in the electron transport chain, it is not moving a full hydronium ion. Instead, it is transferring a proton through the channel by passing it between a chain of amino acid residues. When it gets to the other side of the inner-mitochondrial membrane, you could expect that the proton will react with a water molecule to form hydronium.

@@TheRealQuickSilver and @Joan M M Thank you very much for a nice and thorough explanation. World is amazing :)

Thanks for clarifying, it does change my understanding of things. But I think the premise of the video still stands. If you were to put free protons on your mouth, you would taste sour in the same way that putting salt in your mouth would taste salty.

its a covalent bond

My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined

Presumably only the H+ ions travel through the ion channel though? Not sure though, good question!

@@rainbowevil ya he said that, i also don't think it will allow something other than h+

No you actually always taste electrons but they taste differently depending on which nerve they come from

@@daphenomenalz4100 I know Steve said that in the video, but he never mentioned hydronium, so the channels could actually let hydronium through and Steve made a mistake. I think it’s likely the channels only let actual H+ ions through, but I’m not sure.

That’s interesting and I quite like that definition. I’d never considered light and color to be separate senses but it makes total sense.

the other 2 might be proprioception and pain. proprioception is the awareness of body's orientation in 3d space. but i'm not sure...

Or Steve has seen the movie Inside Out.

Bitter is not always poison and not always averse. Bitter hops is almost universally added to beer. Many of us crave bitter greens--vitamins, not poison.

Read something about how genetics plays a role in how foods taste to you, people tend to use the cilantro argument where some people love it and others feels it tastes like soap or something, but dark green vegetables in general just don't taste good to some people based on their genetic makeup. I'm one of those people where dark greens just taste "wrong" (not sure what tastebud is the "wrong" taste bud sense) however the same exact food to my wife and kid are delicious.

@@Mike__B don’t overlook the role of habitual exposure in changing ones perception of taste (often called “acquiring a taste” for certain foods) For example, thousand-year-old eggs, or moldy cheese. Feed a French native a thousand-year egg and he will gag at the disgusting smell and taste, and the Chinese native will have the same reaction to Limburger cheese.

Green vegetables often have poisons that can hurt and in large doses even kill small rodents. They don't "want" to be eaten, contrary to fruits. Even though humans can digest those pretty well, our taste still tells us that those aren't healthy. Pair that with the evolutionary trained warning colour of green and it is easy to see why children many times don't like green vegetables.

@Integza, that's commitment to purpose!

Tomatoes are disgusting

@@ashutronomy3448 apple

The boss makes a dollar while I make a dime. Thats why I shit on company time.

@@fixitallpaul4847 feel free to think that robots don't poop

Hello brother skelital

Helps in vr when you can't see your body

In VR there is similar sense or side effect of that is affectionately known as "phantom touch" or "phantom sense"

Is that the same thing as if I’m laying on the couch and it feels like my legs are floating or arn’t there ?

Often overlooked in these kind of presentations. They say we only see in 2 dimensions and only perceive three dimensions when in fact we can touch and feel every side of a baseball with no problem.

Would he rather have a proton that's not sour?

hyposmia / parosmia :( I've experienced temporary anosmia with Covid, had no idea how important the sense was before that and how most of the "flavour" of food comes from not the "taste" by tongue but by smell by the nose.

Quinine. Tonic tastes like bitter deliciousness. Whatever is bitter in grapefruits is delicious too. But these two taste good in the gut more of. Not that I can taste there, it just feels good to have consumed it and thus I find the flavour extremely rewarding.

Humans: cultivate those plants and thereby preserve their genetic information Plants: woah, this turned out differently than expected

Not to mention the quadrillion dollar Hops industry.

@@mattfleming86 plants: Okay, yeah, this feels right and it feels familiar

You can always tell who's a normie/straightedge, because for a certain amount of the population, when we think of bitter stuff we put in our bodies, our minds go directly to a couple of choice powders... I mean who the hell thinks broccoli is *bitter???* Y'all should try some delicious post-nasal drip then come and say broccoli is bitter lol

3:00 amogus

@prakharmishra3000 bro 😭😭

Same question here

Maybe the channel only allows the H+ ion to pass through it and keep the H2O out ? I really don't know

Hey! I just have a Bachelor's in Chemistry-Biology, but I figured I'd take a crack at this question. This is a topic that is pretty central to biochemistry, so if you ever take a college level class in that, you'll learn about this in more detail. Basically, proton pumps are a special case. Most ion pumps (e.g. for Sodium, Calcium, etc.) are just a tube that the ion passes through. Proton pumps actually work by responding to acidity on one side of the membrane and inducing acidity on the other side. The part of the protein facing outside of the cell interacts with the hydrogen ions and changes its shape slightly, causing knock-on effects (conformational changes) that cause hydrogen ions to be released on the other side. If you were to follow a Sodium ion through a Sodium channel (epithelial sodium channel specifically), it would basically just be passed along a tube by various amino acids. However, an individual Hydrogen ion passing through a proton pump (otopetrin specifically) might stop somewhere within the membrane and a completely different hydrogen ion gets released within the cell. When the acidity resolves, the protein would get "reset" so that it's ready to react again to future acidity.

@@suspicaxrohde2310 Damn, it's genuinely amazing just how well science lets us imagine some minute details of everyday life. Thank you for your explanation!

@@suspicaxrohde2310 So would that hydrogen ion that was recently released inside the cell membrane bind to some water molecule floating around? By the way, thank you for the explanation. The subject was worthy of a video on it own

Remember the sourness detectors he talked about in this video? They absorb particles that indicate whether or not something is acidic. The magic fruit contains a protein called miraculin which essentially acts as an adaptor between those acid particles and the sweetness receptor. The protein binds to the sweetness receptor and when in contact with acid, it changes shape in such a way as to activate the receptor. So anything sour now activates your sweetness receptors.

need? 🤨

Havent watched the video, but any Proton is a H+ and H+ are what defines Acids. Meaning thats what your tongue actually think is "sour".

I knew I needed to know the answer to this, but I never took the time to learn.

yes please, a vid on capsaicin would be interesting

If I recall correctly spicy tastes come from whenever you eat something that is a (mild) neurotoxin, such as capsaicin or cinnamon, rather than any kind of additional taste bud. Though I suppose that begs the question then, is sarin spicy?

Capsaicin actually binds to thermoreceptors, not chemoreceptors. It's not a taste, it literally just makes your mouth feel hotter (which is why it can affect other mucous membranes and even skin).

@@Nosirrbro nicotine is definitely spicy

@@killerbee.13 and mint triggers things feeling cold. Feeling hot and feeling cold are two distinct sets of senses, so you can feel both hot and cold together.

Yes!

Cucumber ions

Could you imagine this being the next woo craze? "Protonized Water" (aka slightly acidic water) enhanced with protons for performance effect (it's an overpriced sports drink with electrolytes)

@@TheSentientCloud After seeing beauty creams with liposomes etc. I in fact can.

The word "sour" is so old-fashioned.

Lol yeah

Something something its all just quarks anyway

it's all in our brains anyway

@@johannesvahlkvist XD

@@johannesvahlkvist something something quarks is something something anyways. But quarks to something something something something. Something something something something something.... something something... something. Something!

When you think of a proton as an h+ anion it makes more sense

Guaranteed to win you a Michelin star.

Impressive, most impressive…

.. and rested..:)

He did just the usual shaving break. More probably, since he is still not shaved in the rest of the video, he finished the video, went to shaving, and while shaving he realized "Shit, I forgot something", and filmed that part.

but the shave held only for 2:25 minutes :-)

Amazing edit too, it was mid-sentence.

You warned me, and I still wasn’t ready.

Because it was so hot, right?

If I saw that in a stock footage library, I would do everything possible to work it into a video

@@Maazin5 ok yes, but what were they thinking when they MADE that LOLOL

Came here for this comment.

I saw these comments before I got to the @8:02 point in the video, it makes much more sense to watch the video and Then read the comments in this case.

Protons probably taste like chicken.

Can we have a Mouldlife crisis vid pls

While you are here, Med-bae, why do people take potassium salt for their heart and blood pressure? I mean, how does that work? A friend uses a mix of normal sodium chloride and potassium chloride on their food. Also I wonder if that should taste less salty then... Full collab with Steve? :)

If mould is so bad. Then why do they even put it in the bread in the first place. Seams like the government is working with the bakers to deliberately poisoning the public with bread that goes mouldy .

@@pedrosmith221 everything taste like chicken. Including chicken!

It could also arguably come under chemistry or biology 🤔

Props to him for taking a spoonful of salt for us

It would have been really cool if he had tried a spoonful of gravity..... :-)

"Dont! It is consentrated essense of soure! "Dont worry jimmy they didnt invent somthing that is too soure fot The Shin *big sip*

Tried eating a spoonful of citric acid. Once.

Zero-to-ten, how much pain are you currently in?

You should try putting hot sauce up there. You would *definitely* be able to detect that

They aren't connected the same way to your brain as the ones on your tongue, so you don't "taste" anything in a normal sense (same with the ones in your guts), they are just the same receptor used for non-conscious biological functions.

@@Garbaz Thank you for replying to the very serious comment with the appropriate very serious tone.

@@mpbx3003 hey man this is a science channel not a comedy one (not that you can't make jokes), but people like me actually want a explanation of why this is so I think it was appropriately informative.

And also a great thumbnail and catchy title! I already learned most of this, but this video gave me a new perspective and reiterated my knowledge

Dang bro have you ever tried memes

The autoionization of water is very very very rare. The Kw is something like 1x10^-14 .

is it? i mean, there are a few places where free protons are definitely required, like the electron transport chain, the oxidative phosphorylation, and anything else that involves pumping H+ across membranes

@@cadenorris4009 he's just talking about different ways to model the same thing. H3O+ is, for all intents and purposes, the same as H+ in an aqueous solution.

“Under Article number one-hundred eighty-four of your “Interstellar Law”, I’m placing you under arrest. You are charged with assassinating the Chancellor of the High Council.”

@@johannesvahlkvist I don't think its about abstract 'modelling' of it - either there is a subatomic particle in isolation and *that* is what your receptors respond to, or they repond to a ion made out of 4 atoms... a pretty big and real difference don't you think?

Yeag like a metal feeling

I believe it is rather a taste of electrolysis products created from a current.

Probably a mixture of the electrodes dissolving in electrolysis from your saliva. A fun experiment would be if it tastes different depending on what wire material you use, copper, aluminum, iron, etc.

And then spit it out... cause that much salt is seriously bad for you xD

@@itsrachelfish 😂

Probably just sugar and he is faking it

Why

The salty taste comes from Na+ ionic canals from what I learned in Human physiology. Which is why I would be tempted to think KCl and MgCl2 wouldn't taste salty. I've heard the opposite though, so maybe there's more to the answer

@@MrTmb64 Doesn't chlorinated water taste salty?

i dont know the full answer, but i do k ow that our bodies need sodium (Na), potassium(k), magnesium(mg), and iron( fe)for most metalloprotein or ion based interaction. as they are essential to our aurvival it would make sense why we can taste them. also all of those creat positively charged ions which still interact with receptors on the cell.

@@Ninterd2 that's because it's Chlorinated with Sodium Hypochlorite, which intern breaks down to Sodium Chloride aka table salt

As far as I know, K+ interacts with the same Na+ receptors, but not as strongly, and that's why it doesn't taste exactly the same (and also leave a matallic aftertaste). Li+ interacts even better than Na+, and that's why it was used for a while as a salt replacement, but it presents some toxicity (to the kidney, if I remember correctly) and that's why it was discontinued to that purpose. As for Mg2+, I've never heard about it tasting salty, but actually bitter. I don't know how they work with the taste receptors.

Just what we need, more dead bat's and sharks...

MSG flavoured e-juice? Not gonna lie, I'd try it. xD

ew

@@SerrinTheElf might wanna try straight msg first... It's not very appetizing by itself. 😂

Just inject MSG straight into your eyeball, it'll get you way higher than nicotine

i wonder if it's that or the actual products of the electrolysis of saliva are sour

No, a battery moves negative charge, or electrons. Positive electricity does not exist.

@@zazethe6553 That's not the whole picture. It's true that electrons generate negative charges, and electrons are moving in a circuit. But really electrons only move about an inch a minute in a circuit, and what's really moving near the speed of light are the charges or charge differential, otherwise electricity would be slow! If you imagine a chain of single atoms with a blue negative charge circle around it and a red positive charge around it, if the system is stationary and in equilibrium, both charges just sit around their atoms completely overlapping (they would be purple in this example). If you start moving the only blue circles for example, you realize that they are simultaneously uncovering the red circles are they move off from the perfect overlap. It's kind of like cutting a bar magnet in half- you don't cut it into a north mono-pole and a south mono-pole, you just make both north and south by cutting it. In summary, if the circuit is moving you've got positive and negative charges everywhere in the wire, and I think you'd be able to taste these positive charges.

@@VictorGnoato could be!

electrolysis breaks water into hydrogen and oxygen, also will change the properties of proteins. dying taste buds and direct nerve stimulation could also play a role.

Action potential

Easily my favorite vocabulary term from psychology class.

Well if sour taste is composed of protons, that is a very positive outlook!

@@MrScorpianwarrior lmao

I think most languages would have the same word or very similar words for acidic and sour since it is in Arabic.

For Portuguese too, but it also has "azedo" for sour, which is more common.

Sour is "Agrio" in Spanish

Dutch uses "zuur" for both acid and sour. It obviously has the same origin as English "sour". Classic English choosing a foreign word for acid, though.

@@jpietersen519 germans use "sauer" for both too