Question: how do taste buds help us taste

Reka Nagy answered on 16 Nov 2016:

Our taste buds are a little bit like locks – they contain sites where taste molecules of different shapes and sizes can bind. When there is a match, the taste buds send a signal through our nerves to our brain, which decodes these signals into the sensation of taste.

There is a fruit, called the miracle berry, that makes nearly everything you eat taste sweet – no matter what it is. This happens because this berry contains something that temporarily changes the shapes of these locks, tricking them into believing that they are bound to sweet-tasting molecules.