HOW CAN I SEE THE DRACONID METEOR SHOWER? DO HUMANS HAVE A GENETICALLY INHERITED PREFERENCE FOR TASTE?
WHEN: 7-11 OCTOBER
Meteor showers occur when Earth passes through a trail of debris that has been left behind by a passing comet or asteroid. As these remnants – mostly the size of a grain of sand – enter Earth’s atmosphere, they create bright streaks across the sky as they burn up.
With two meteor showers, October is the perfect time to wrap up, grab a hot drink, and lie back to enjoy the show, preferably somewhere dark (it will take about 15 minutes for your eyes to adjust).
The Draconid meteor shower is visible between 7-11 October, peaking on the night of 8 October. Sometimes known as a ‘minor’ shower, it may only produce about 10 meteors an hour, although it has spewed out many more in the past. For instance, stargazers in 2012 noted several thousand per hour!
If that isn’t enough to convince you to try your luck, the Draconids make an appearance early in the evening, as darkness falls from around 8pm. This is quite different from other meteor showers, which often peak after midnight. The reason for this is that the radiant – the point in the sky where the meteors appear to burst from – is already high in the northern sky, in the constellation of Draco the Dragon. One easy way to navigate to Draco is to draw an imaginary line upwards through the stars Altair and Vega in the asterism known as the Summer Triangle. As night progresses, Draco will appear lower in the sky, eventually sitting below Vega.
The second meteor shower of the month is the Orionids on 21-22 October, where you can expect to see up to 20 meteors an hour. However, by then the Moon will be full, making fainter shooting stars a challenge to spot. The best time to watch this shower will be after midnight, looking slightly to the left of Orion, which can be sighted in the east to southeastern sky.
Meteors could appear anywhere in the surrounding area to the constellation, so keep your gaze wide!
We do. Thanks to studies monitoring identical twins, and surveys of gene data from personal genomic companies, we know that there are genes that affect our sense of taste, our sense of smell, and even the reward centres in the brain. For instance, our likelihood of thinking that coriander tastes soapy is thanks to the variant of the odour receptor gene OR6AS that you inherit.
Genes can influence whether you can taste the bitter compound phenylthiocarbamide or not (about 30 per cent of Europeans have the variation of the taste receptor gene TAS2R38 that makes them ‘taste blind’ to this cabbage flavour). Even the extent to which your brain’s reward centres respond to bacon could come down to DNA (blame your variant of CNTN5 if you’re addicted to this meaty treat).
But our food preferences don’t just come from our genes. We know that babies in the uterus will ‘breathe’ amniotic fluid – and that newborns prefer the taste and smell of compounds that their mothers ate a lot of in pregnancy.
And even though we’re all genetically predisposed to be suspicious of bitter compounds – they’re usually toxic to humans – most of us learn to tolerate, or even love, bitter things like coffee, chocolate or alcohol once we’ve discovered their fringe benefits. So your genes may have a lot of influence but they’re far from the whole story.