Sweet, salty, sour, bitter, umami, and ‘window cleaner’? Scientists say they've discovered a sixth taste—but they're having a hard time describing it | Vaccines Slash Long COVID Risk | Christopher Nolan on the Promise and Peril of Technology | Why you have an accent in a foreign language

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Sweet, salty, sour, bitter, umami, and ‘window cleaner’? Scientists say they've discovered a sixth taste—but they're having a hard time describing it - Fortune Well

If you’re fortunate, all the flavors will be featured at this year’s holiday feasts—sweet, salty, sour, bitter, umami, and, perhaps, a sixth—ammonium chloride.

Let’s backtrack. First off: What is ammonium chloride, and what does it taste like? Also known as “salmiak salt,” it’s formed by ammonia and hydrogen chloride and serves as a key ingredient in salt licorice—a treat popular in countries like Sweden, Finland, Greenland, Norway, Iceland, and Denmark since the early 1900s.

Its taste, though difficult to pinpoint, can be described as “a combination of bitter, salty, and a little sour,” says University of Southern California neuroscientist Emily Liman, whose team proposed the potential sixth taste in a recently published article in Nature Communications. Some have suggested that it “tastes like window cleaner.”

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Vaccines Slash Long COVID Risk - TIME

People vaccinated before their first case of COVID-19 are diagnosed with Long COVID almost four times less than unvaccinated people, suggests a large new study published Nov. 22 in the BMJ.

That’s not an entirely new finding. For years, studies have shown that, while vaccinated people can and do develop Long COVID, they are at lower risk than people who haven’t had their shots. But researchers have come to drastically different estimates about exactly how much protection vaccines offer against Long COVID, with their findings ranging from about 15% efficacy to around 50%.

The new study offers encouraging evidence that people who get vaccinated before their first COVID-19 case are at significantly lower risk of developing long-term symptoms like brain fog and fatigue, with each additional dose received prior to infection offering extra protection. A single pre-infection dose of one of the original COVID-19 vaccines reduced the risk of Long COVID by 21%, two doses by 59%, and three or more doses by 73%, the researchers estimated.

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Christopher Nolan on the Promise and Peril of Technology - The Atlantic

By the time I sat down with Christopher Nolan in his posh hotel suite not far from the White House, I guessed that he was tired of Washington, D.C. The day before, he’d toured the Oval Office and had lunch on Capitol Hill. Later that night, I’d watched him receive an award from the Federation for American Scientists, an organization that counts Robert Oppenheimer, the subject of Nolan’s most recent film, among its founders. Onstage, he’d briefly jousted with Republican Senator Todd Young on the subject of AI regulation. He’d endured a joke, repeated too many times by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, about the subject of his next film—“It’s another biopic: Schumer.”

The award was sitting on an end table next to Nolan, who was dressed in brown slacks, a gray vest, and a navy suit jacket—his Anglo-formality undimmed by decades spent living in Los Angeles. “It’s heavy, and glass, and good for self-defense,” he said of the award, while filling his teacup. I suggested that it may not be the last trophy he receives this winter. Despite an R-rating and a three-hour runtime, Oppenheimer made nearly $1 billion at the box office, and it’s now the odds-on favorite to win Nolan his first Best Picture and Best Director statuettes at the Oscars.

I had come to ask Nolan about technology—both its promise and its perils—as a theme across his filmography. What follows is a condensed and edited transcript of our conversation, in which we discuss the similarities between Nikola Tesla and Robert Oppenheimer, the techno-optimism of Interstellar, how Inception anticipated the social-media age, and why he hasn’t yet made a film about artificial intelligence.

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Why you have an accent in a foreign language - The Economist

OPEN A TEXTBOOK for a foreign language, and one of the first things you see is an alphabet, enumerating the letters used in the writing system and the sounds they represent. This is obviously crucial for unfamiliar systems, say those of Greek or Russian. But even for languages that rely on the Latin alphabet, the guide will explain how diacritics such as accent marks change a letter’s pronunciation, and quirks such as the -ch- in German or -gl- in Italian. (The first often sounds like the ch in Scottish loch, the second like the -ll- in million.)

And with that, it’s off to master greetings, vocabulary and so on, with little further thought for pronunciation. This is a shame. There is much more to learning a foreign accent than the sounds that the letters on the page represent. To begin with, the rough equivalents given in English are often quite rough indeed. In French, the p in Paris sounds rather different from the p in English, a contrast often neglected in textbooks: the French version lacks the strong puff of air of the English one. (Hold your palm in front of your mouth and say “Paris” in English. Then try making the p without the puff, and you’ll get the French kind.)

Even when textbooks or instructors mention this sort of nuance, the next step is often missing. As with chemistry, the important thing is not just how the elements behave in isolation, but how they come together. Each language has rules for these combinations, which native speakers (and many teachers) generally grasp but don’t or can’t explain.

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