Techno Plus World

The tremendous advancement in modern technology has made the life style of every individual to be very flexible and faster. The advancement has risen to the stage in which you can perform all your essential activities with your physical absence. You can get things done through online, mobile etc. All this is possible just through technology and the advancement in it. Mobile phones have come in to the existence many years back. Many models employing high technologies are being established and the recent model which has gained much popularity is “smart phones”. These phones have tremendously increased the connectivity of the people across the globe.

Astrology enthusiasts are gaining much through these phones as they can get their horoscopes to their phones browsing through http://www.horoscopes.org.uk. “Daily phone horoscopes” are designed in a way that they will be sent to that particular person according to their birth date. Basically, sending horoscope to a mobile will be a subscription basis. People who love to know their horoscope and are busy with their daily schedules can receive their horoscope through phone horoscope. Phone horoscopes help you to be free from buying horoscope magazines, visiting horoscope sites and meeting astrologers. All these risks can be avoided through phone horoscopes as you will be getting your daily horoscope in a smooth and easy way. Receiving horoscopes through phone is convenient, safe, flexible and affordable. You need to just give your name, zodiac sign and your contact number to receive your horoscope in your phone.

Nokia, the Finnish cellphone manufacturer, is back with a new cellphone which will cater to the entry-level range. We’re talking about the super slim Nokia X3  Touch and Type, where it will come with a touchscreen display as well as a traditional 12 button phone keypad. While touchscreen displays tend to make an appearance in the higher end range of handsets, this one is an entry-level model. Touted to be Nokia’s first ‘Touch and Type’ phone, the Nokia X3 enables users to tap quickly on the bright color touchscreen display without losing out on the familiarity of the full keypad for quick fire text messages and phone calls. Expect the Nokia X3 to hit the market sometime in the third quarter of the year, where it will retail for around 125 Euros sans taxes and subsidies.

Just how slim is it? Well, it measures less than 1cm thin – 9.6mm, to be exact, placing it in the echelon of the slimmest Nokia handsets to date. It can slip easily into the purse or the pocket, and won’t look out of place in the office despite being entry-level, thanks to a brushed aluminum back cover alongside a choice of five vibrant colors that were specially designed to suit any mood or wardrobe. You won’t find it short on connectivity options though, as it will feature both 3G and Wi-Fi support, not to mention a built-in music player and an integrated FM radio just in case you have exhausted your collection of MP3s on it. A 5-megapixel camera is also thrown into the mix, featuring 4x digital zoom with the ability to capture video and photos.

To remain up to date, the Nokia X3 will also come with Ovi Mail, consumer email and chat accounts which can be pushed direct to the phone via Nokia Messaging. Depending on the market where the X3 is launched, it might come with Ovi MusicUnlimited, letting one access a virtually limitless range of the latest hit music, where you will have a field day filling up a 16GB memory card. If you’ve been searching for a no-frills handset with a touchscreen display and yet don’t want to break the bank, the Nokia X3 might be just the ticket.

From summer blockbusters to sensational science headlines, modern culture is constantly inundated with tales of time travel. But when you boil down the physics involved, is it possible to travel through time?

To answer this question, I tracked down theoretical physicist and cosmologist Paul Davies, author of “How to Build a Time Machine.”

SLIDE SHOW: What are the favored time travel methods as used in science fiction?

We are all time travelers

“The short answer is that time travel into the future is not only possible, it’s been done, and we’ve known about it for over a century,” says Davies. “The reason that the public doesn’t seem to know about it is because the amount of time travel involved is so pitifully small that it doesn’t make for a ‘Doctor Who’ style adventure.”

A phenomenon called time dilation is the key here. Time passes more slowly the closer you approach the speed of light — an unbreakable cosmic speed limit. As such, the hands of a clock in a speeding train would move more slowly than those in a stationary clock. The difference would not be humanly noticeable, but when the train pulled back into the station, the two clocks would be off by billionths of a second. If such a train could attain 99.999 percent light speed, only 1 year would pass onboard for every 223 years back at the train station.

But speed isn’t the only factor that affects time. On a much smaller scale, mass also influences time. Time slows down the closer you are to the center of a massive object.

“Time runs a little bit faster in space than it does down on Earth,” Davies says. “It runs a little faster on the roof than it does in the basement, and that’s a measurable effect.”

A clock aboard an orbiting satellite experiences time dilation due to both the speed of its orbit and its greater distance from the center of Earth’s gravity.

“Both gravity and speed can give you a means of jumping ahead,” Davies says. “So in principle, if you had enough money, you could get to the year 3000 in as short a time as you like — one year, one month, whatever it takes. It is only a question of money and engineering.”

SLIDE SHOW: Which time traveling movies are the most feasible? We ask physics author Ron Mallett for his top 5 sci-fi films.

Forward, not back?

Time travel into the future is an established and fundamental aspect of Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. Scientists have tested and retested this in both experimental and practical settings. But what about time travel in the opposite direction?

“Going back in to the past is a whole different kettle of fish.” Davies says. “There’s nothing in Einstein’s theory, which is the best theory that we have about the nature of time, which precludes it. There’s nothing in even his general theory of relativity, published in 1915, which precludes travel back into the past, but many scientists are deeply uneasy about it because of all the well-known paradoxes that it unleashes.”

For instance, imagine going back in time and killing your own mother. Then she’d never give birth to you, and just how would you have been able to travel back in time to commit matricide in the first place?

WIDE ANGLE: Is sci-fi time travel possible?

Wormholes as spacetime shortcuts

Davies surmises that, given our current understanding of the nature of time and physics, time travel into the past simply isn’t possible. But the universe is full of mysteries, and one of them — the hypothetical wormhole — might just permit such a journey.

“This is a little bit like a tunnel or shortcut between two distant points,” Davies says, “So for example, if I had a wormhole here in my hotel room and I jumped through it I wouldn’t come out on Pennsylvania Avenue, I’d maybe come out near the other side of the galaxy.”

Scientists have theorized that such a shortcut through time and space could be turned into a time machine.

“If a worm hole could exist and could be traversable, then it would provide a means of going back in time,” Davies says. “So it all hinges on whether stable wormholes are a reality or if there’s some aspect of physics — not relativity, because there’s nothing wrong from that point of view — but some other aspect of physics might intercede and prevent the wormhole from forming. That’s an open question.”

World-famous theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking has proposed that wormholes occurring at a quantum level could theoretically provide a foothold for time travel, but University of California at Santa Barbara physicist Andrew Cleland urges caution on that front.

“I’m an experimentalist, and physics is ultimately an experimental science,” Cleland says. “Any predictions that are made based on mathematics or on philosophical or intellectual speculation have to pass the test of experiment, and I am certainly not aware of any experiment that demonstrated the possibility of traveling backward in time.”

Cause and effect

Cleland also points out that the fundamental principle of causality stands in the way of travel into the past. The entire universe, as we understand it, is beholden to this rule.

“Something occurs first and the outcome of that occurrence happens afterward,” Cleland says, “and there has never to my knowledge been an experiment that came out different from that. I am not aware of any experimental tests of quantum mechanics that have shown any violation of causality, in spite of the fact that many experiments could reveal such a violation.”

Still, in the same way that time dilation isn’t flashy enough to seem like time travel into the future, the public often overlooks a very common means of “traveling” into the past.

“In a sense, astronomers are always traveling backward in time, but it is in a way that most people are not so excited about,” Cleland says. “When we measure the cosmic microwave background, we’re looking back more than 10 billion years in time. That’s how long it took for the light to reach us.”

A number of questions about time travel remain unanswered. Will time tourists from the future ever show up to help us out? We’ll just have to wait and see. But if they come here using a wormhole time machine, we’ll have to build one first. After all, you couldn’t cross a bridge if only one side had been completed, right?

“Theoretically, it would take more than 100 years to create a 100-years’ time difference between the two ends of a wormhole,” Davies says, “so there’s no way that our descendants could come back and tell us we’re wrong about this.”

The future of green energy is written in the wind.

As the U.S. energy industry inches away from reliance on fossil fuels, experts have heralded various greener technologies, such as ethanol, solar and geothermal power, as choice alternatives. And while each of those alternatives holds marked environmental advantages over dirty oil and coal, none match wind power’s squeaky clean performance.

“Based on the review looking at the major energy technologies and environmental impact, wind came out on top,” said Mark Z. Jacobson, an engineer at Stanford University. “But it was pretty close with concentrated solar, geothermal, tidal, wave and hydroelectric sources.”

Last year, Jacobson and a colleague from the University of California, Davis, drafted a global blueprint for converting 100 percent of the world’s energy use to renewable sources. Wind power is leading the charge due to its minimal carbon footprint compared to energy output.

In a nutshell, wind power systems consist of tall, free-standing turbines that convert moving air into usable electricity. As wind pushes the turbine blades around, the spinning motion turns the turbine rotor, which then drives the shaft of an electric generator housed within the turbine. Transmission lines can then deliver the wind-generated electricity from prime wind energy areas, like the Great Plains, to various locations.

In fact, just 15 percent of the land on Earth has enough wind speed capacity to meet global energy needs many times over, Jacobson said.

Consequently, U.S. energy policy calls for 20 percent of the nation’s total energy use to come from wind power by 2030, which is a modest proposal in light of its impressive potential.

“You can power the entire U.S. vehicle fleet if you converted it to electric with about 100,000 5-megawatt wind turbines,” Jacobson told Discovery News.

The actual ground space required for such a project? According to Jacobson’s calculation, less than 2 square kilometers.

That doesn’t include the spacing between turbines, but well-designed wind power systems can preserve the integrity of green space surrounding turbines and minimize any disruptions to indigenous wildlife, especially compared to habitat destruction associated with coal mining and fossil fuel drilling.

“The land area required for wind is by far the lowest of all alternative energy technologies. It’s just the turbine touching the ground,” Jacobson said.

As wind energy technology improves, offshore turbines situated in the ocean could further reduce the total land space required for wind energy systems.

“It’s easier and, so far, less costly to install wind turbines on land than to install them offshore,” said James Manwell, director of the Renewable Energy Research Laboratory at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “The cost difference will probably go down as the offshore technology is further developed, but the ocean will always be a difficult environment.”

Whether on land or in sea, once turbine and transmission systems are in place, wind harvesting relies on no other natural resources, such as water required to irrigate fields for ethanol manufacturing, and produces virtually zero carbon emissions.

Even after wind turbines reach the end of their 30-year lifecycles, the materials can be recycled.

“The required time, in terms of months of operation, to pay back the energy used in the production of a wind turbine is less than most other renewable energy options, such as photovoltaics,”  Manwell told Discovery News.

And speaking of payback, the wind technology developments over recent decades have drastically lowered the associated costs, which is why wind energy has been the second-largest new source of electric power after natural gas for the past four years.

But due to still competition from other energy sectors and a lack of a cohesive government push toward wind energy development, the U.S. has a long way to go in order to meet that goal of 20 percent wind power by 2030.

“Technically, it’s certainly feasible to supply 20 percent — and actually even more — of U.S. electricity from the wind by 2030,” Manwell said. “The question is, does the U.S. have the political will to do so?”

Meeting that marker demands a laundry list of additional efforts, Manwell says, including educating the public and legislators on the environmental value of wind energy, retraining manufacturers to facilitate wind energy capture and providing government incentives for building wind turbine systems.

Jacobson at Stanford University exhibits similar reservation when forecasting the future of wind energy.

“It’s certainly feasible,” Jacobson explained. “It’s technically feasible to have 50 percent or more. It just becomes again an issue of politics because to promote something like that you need subsidies, political willpower and a plan at a government level.”

But considering wind energy’s bright green track record and power supply potential, he remains hopeful that favorable political winds will blow in its direction.

“I’m going to be optimistic and say ‘yes’ (the U.S. can achieve the 20 percent goal), but obviously there’s uncertainty,” Jacobson said. “Not technical uncertainty, but uncertainty about policy.”

The chances of giving birth safely with IVF increases if women have just one embryo transplanted, research finds.

• For many women undergoing in-vitro fertilization, it may be safest to transfer just one embryo at a time.
• The number of embryos women ultimately choose to use will depend on many personal and medical factors.

By the time women turn to in-vitro fertilization to conceive, any pregnancy sounds like a good pregnancy. As a result, women often choose to have multiple embryos transferred into their wombs in order to increase their chances of having at least one baby.

But, according to a new study, the likelihood of having a healthy, full-term infant is five times higher in women who have just one embryo transferred than in women who opt for putting in two at once — at least for certain groups.

That’s mostly because doubling the embryo number vastly increases the chance of having twins, which carry far more complications than singletons do.

And even though transferring two embryos increased the overall chance of having a baby, the study found that the difference just about disappeared when women followed a failed round of IVF with another attempt using a single frozen embryo.

As a growing number of people turn to assisted reproductive technologies, the new findings suggest that — putting financial complications aside — the safest strategy for many moms and babies is to try IVF with just one embryo at a time.

“The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority in the U.K. and The Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada both advocate the use of single-embryo transfer,” said David McLernon, a medical statistician with a focus on population health at the University of Aberdeen in the United Kingdom. “This evidence we find in our paper basically solidified that.”

Ever since the first IVF baby was born in 1978, the biggest risk to the procedure has been the high chance of having multiples. Carrying twins or more increases rates of pregnancy complications, premature births, low-birth weights, developmental issues, certain birth defects, and even death for the mother.

Today, the chance of having multiples with IVF in the United States ranges from 25 to 35 percent, compared to a less than 2 percent chance of conceiving twins naturally.

“The gold-standard outcome for IVF should be a singleton,” said Aaron K. Styer, a reproductive endocrinologist at Massachusetts General Hospital Fertility Center in Boston. “A twin pregnancy is a complication of IVF, and is something we are all working diligently to reduce.”

With that goal in mind, clinics around the world have reduced the average number of embryos they transfer during IVF from three or more to two. Starting in Scandinavia, there has been a more recent push to do just one at a time.

To see how the strategies compare in the kinds of outcomes they produce, McLernon and colleagues collaborated with eight European fertility clinics that had conducted trials in which women were assigned to get either one or two embryos during an IVF procedure.

The researchers combined all of the results into one big data set that included more than 1,300 women, allowing them to make the most detailed comparison yet between single and double transfers.

When it came to simply having a baby on the first try, women who had two embryos fared better, the researchers report today in the British medical journal BMJ. Forty-two percent of women gave birth after a double transfer, compared with 27 percent who received just one embryo.

But when the single transfer didn’t work on the first try and women went through another round with just one frozen embryo, their ultimate rate of giving birth ended up being about the same as those who received two embryos on the first round.

What’s more, the chance of having a healthy, full-term single baby was five times higher in women who got one embryo compared to women who got two.

The findings highlight the benefits of transferring just one embryo at a time, Styer said, but the strategy might not be best for all women. In particular, putting in multiple embryos might actually be best for women who are older than 35, have already tried more than once and failed to conceive with IVF, or whose embryo quality isn’t great, among other situations.

In the United States, money also plays a big role in the kinds of decisions people make about IVF. With the exception of a few states, most governments and insurance companies here refuse to pay for infertility treatments, meaning that women often feel like they have just one expensive, but all-important shot to start a family.

Ultimately, Styer said, clinics need to start using singletons as their measure of success, rather than all pregnancies. And doctors and counselors need to work closely with patients to explain all of the benefits and risks involved, depending on the woman’s personal situation.

In healthy women under 35, he added, the chances of conceiving are the same whether women have one embryo transplanted or two.

“The majority of twin pregnancies deliver well, but there is a proportion that do not, and some patients do not understand that,” Styer said. “Everyone thinks they’re going to come out on the good end of the deal, but there’s really no way to predict that.”

Do you have a wild streak in you that intends to go off on an adventure at every single opportunity? If that is the case, then apart from owning a nice four wheel drive to get you and your family to a faraway destination, chances are you will need a communications tool which will be able to keep up with you. Of course, an iPhone 4 is nice and all, but will it be able to last the distance when you’re busy tracking bears and living it out in nature? Those who are looking for a companion phone under such trying circumstances need not look any further, thanks to Kyocera churning out the new Sanyo Taho that not only looks good at first glance, it is also more than capable of taking a beating.

Don’t be fooled by its exterior that exudes calm, put it through its paces and in spite of all the harshest elements that it experiences, it will still work reliably enough for you to call for help should such a situation arise. Not only that, you can even take a nice 29 minute bath at the river with the Sanyo Taho fully immersed within and it will still work after that – just don’t wade into water that is more than a meter deep and the Taho will be all right, at least for half an hour. This fully submersible device can be yours for a cent shy of a Benjamin – we’re talking about $99.99 after a $50 mail-in rebate and agreeing to a new 2-year contract. Of course, all of this won’t happen until January 9, 2011, when it hits the official market then.

This no-nonsense handset won’t come with the latest features though, so you will have to make do with its 2-megapixel camera with flash and camcorder capability, which is a far cry of what other smartphones can do these days. Apart from that, you will be well pleased with its military standard 810G certification, where it is able to stand up to dust, shock, vibration, extreme temperatures, blowing rain and water immersion. This clamshell phone also sports applications such as Sprint Navigation and Sprint Family Locator for added value.

African great apes play that ever-popular kids’ game as a way to learn how to keep a competitive edge.

• Gorillas and other African great apes have been videotaped playing tag.
• The game hones communication skills and helps test the limits of others, researchers believe.
• Young dogs, coyotes and wolves also play tag, other research suggests.

Young gorillas and other African great apes play a lot of tag, suggesting that this common childhood pastime has deep primate roots, according to a new study.

Tag is based on hit-and-run behavior, and the study, published in the latest Royal Society Biology Letters, presents the first evidence that non-human species try to maintain their competitive advantage when responding to an unfair situation.

What’s unfair about tag? One individual gets tagged — or when played by gorillas, slugged — while the other individual doesn’t.

“The hitting can be very hard and still be part of play,” co-author Marina Davila Ross, a research fellow in the Department of Psychology at the University of Portsmouth, told Discovery News. “Apes play overall much rougher than humans.”

She and colleagues Edwin van Leeuwen and Elke Zimmermann studied play-fighting videos of 21 gorillas from six colonies in five European zoos. The researchers filmed and collected the videos over three years.

Like human tag, one gorilla runs up to another and taps, hits, or outright punches the second. The hitter then usually runs away, attempting to avoid being hit back. Davila Ross and her colleagues also noticed that, like kids, the gorillas would reverse roles, so sometimes the first hitter would be the tagger, and vice versa.

All African great apes appear to play tag, and younger apes play it much more often than their elders. Tree-dwelling orangutans likely also play a similar game, but not on the ground, according to Davila Ross.

“I believe that this kind of behavior helps young gorillas to improve their social and cognitive skills,” she said. “It is likely to help them to learn how far they can go with others and where the boundaries are for the different members of their groups.”

Since kids play nearly the exact same game, she theorizes that the “ability of humans to modify their behaviors for their own advantage in unfair situations might therefore have its roots in non-human primate evolution.”

She and her team additionally think the childhood game helps apes, including humans, deal with later real conflict. By role-playing, the chaser and the chased appear to develop more refined and sophisticated communication skills.

Among gorillas, for example, the initial hitter usually shows what is called a “play face.” Its eyes and mouth are open, but lips are relaxed and sometimes held over the teeth. This expression in apes is often accompanied by a rhythmic vocalization resembling human laughter.

Marc Bekoff is a professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and is co-author of the book “Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals.”

Bekoff told Discovery News that the new study “is very important” because it was “performed in the field and provides interesting information on how gorillas, and, I am sure, other animals, assess inequities and then behave either to maintain them or to reduce them.”

“I observed this during play behavior in infant domestic dogs, coyotes and gray wolves and wrote about it in our book,” he added, “so it is not surprising that non-human primates also engage in this type of behavior.”

“We need these data to assess how animals make choices either to compete or to play fairly with one another,” Bekoff said.

The physics blogosphere is buzzing about a new paper by cosmologist Craig Hogan — the subject of a long feature by Ron Cowen in Science News — proposing that our universe is a hologram, made up of pixels of spacetime. The so-called holographic principle has been around since the 1990s: it basically holds that the 2D surface area enclosing a 3D volume of spacetime pretty much encodes all the information contained within that volume — just like a standard hologram.

Holograms are 3-D images that have been projected and captured on a 2-D surface. The most common ones are found on things like credit cards, designed to foil potential forgers. but with the right tools, it’s possible to create your own holograms at home: all you need is a laser (red is best), lenses to spread out the beam, mirrors to direct the beam to the desired locations, a beam splitter, and holographic film, which has a finer grain than regular film and thus can record light at much greater resolution. Oh, and you’ll also need these handy instructions, courtesy of How Stuff Works.

Basically, you point the laser at the beam splitter, dividing the beam into two part. You will have carefully placed your mirrors in such a way to direct those beams of light to their targets. The targets: two lenses that serve to diffuse the narrow beams of coherent laser light. One beam (the object beam) reflects off whatever object you’re imaging — say, Princess Leia recording an urgent message for Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars — and lands on the holographic film, while the second (reference) beam hits the film directly, without reflecting off the object.

Hogan is suggesting that something similar happens in the fabric of spacetime, which might be far more “grainy” and uneven than scientists have thought to date, generating scarcely detectable “noise.” (They’re already dubbing it “Hogan’s Noise.”) And that graininess (noise) becomes larger (louder) when it is observed across a great distance, much like a movie projected onto a big screen is magnified or playing your iPod through a speaker amplifies the sound waves. As Cowen puts it:

Hogan combines the idea of pixelated spacetime with the notion, borrowed from string theory and quantum mechanics, that the universe is equivalent to a hologram. That notion holds that a surface enclosing a volume of space encodes all the information contained in that volume. Just as the hologram imprinted on a credit card reveals a third dimension, so too does an imaginary surface in spacetime appear to create an extra dimension.

It’s a tantalizing notion but there is plenty of reason to be skeptical. Cowen outlines the caveats in more detail, but basically, (1) Hogan’s hypothesis  violates a tenet of special relativity known as locality, which holds that something happening in one region of spacetime can only affect what happens in an adjacent region; (2) Hogan’s analysis is primarily conceptual, rather than presenting a rigorous mathematical theory; and (3) the tiny pixels of spacetime are so small (at the Planck length), they cannot be detected directly by any experiment.

Actually, that last caveat might not hold true. There’s a machine in Hannover, Germany called GEO600 that is designed to search for the ripples in the fabric of spacetime known as gravitational waves. It has yet to find any, but about a year ago, the detector recorded a signal that contained some unexplained noise.

Could it be Hogan’s Noise? It currently seems unlikely, since the sources for much of that noise have now been accounted for, but there is just enough uncertainty in those results to leave open the possibility. In fact, GEO600′s team of scientists are now analyzing higher frequencies in search of the “jitter” Hogan’s hypothesis predicts. Even if they succeed, more evidence will be needed. A new experiment currently being built at Fermilab might have just enough sensitivity to detect this fuzzy holographic spacetime at an unprecedented tiny scale.

And who knows? Maybe there are violations of special relativity at the quantum scale. It would certainly make pursuit of a quantum theory of gravity a tiny bit easier for physicists if they could toss out that pesky locality limitation, and assume that two areas of spacetime can influence each other even if they are separated by vast distances. That’s the potentially grander impact of Hogan’s Noise: it could give rise to revolutionary advance in quantum gravity research and get us that much closer to a theory of everything that merges quantum mechanics and relativity.

About 25 percent of people experience flavors more vibrantly than everyone else.

• Some people are genetically predisposed to have a harder time cutting salt out of their diets.
• No matter how hard it is, you can learn to like foods with less sodium.
• Nearly all of us eat too much salt.

As hard as you may try to eat less salt, low-sodium foods can taste awful — especially, suggests a new study, if you have a genetic predisposition to dislike them.

People who are particularly sensitive to bitter flavors, the study found, tend to eat more salt and have a harder time eating less of it, because salt masks bitterness. As experts urge Americans to cut their intake by more than half to 2,300 milligrams (about a teaspoon) of sodium a day or less, insights like these might help identify the people who will need the most help.

Despite evidence that cutting down on salt could improve heart health and save 100,000 American lives each year, our consumption has only crept upward.

“Not everyone lives in the same taste world,” said John Hayes, a biophysiologist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park. “With all of these efforts to reduce sodium, some people are going to have a much harder time with that.”

About 25 percent of people experience flavors more vibrantly than everyone else, thanks to differences in the tiny bumps that house taste buds on our tongues. The gastronomic world is more extreme to these people, known as supertasters. Fats taste creamier. Sugar tastes sweeter. Chilies taste spicier. Even green, leafy vegetables taste more bitter.

Hayes and colleagues expected that supertasters would also taste salt more intensely, and that in turn, they would need less of it to get the same salty satisfaction as someone with a more average palate. But when the researchers asked 87 healthy men and women to keep detailed food diaries for five days, they were surprised to find that supertasters consumed the most sodium throughout the week.

In follow-up taste tests, the scientists also report today in the journal Physiology & Behavior that supertasters were more likely to notice the difference between varying sodium levels in a range of foods including soy sauce, potato chips and chicken broth. They were also generally more turned off by low-sodium products, like cheese and pretzels.

Besides adding saltiness, sodium blocks bitterness and balances flavors and textures in everything from bread to yogurt drinks, which helps explain why more than 80 percent of the sodium we eat is in processed foods and restaurant meals. But even as manufacturers work to lower sodium levels in their products, subtle differences in salt sensitivity might end up affecting the way we eat.

“How foods taste affects how much you like it,” Hayes said. “How much you like it affects how much you eat. And how much you eat affects your health.

Still, even if your genes make you a supertaster, you are not forever doomed to a high-sodium diet and a stressed heart. Studies show that experiences play a large part in determining which foods people like, said Gary Beauchamp, director of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. And anyone can learn to prefer less salt.

The new work suggests that some people might simply need to find different ways to avoid and mask the bitter flavors that are so sensitive to.

“This is a really important topic because this is a major public health problem,” Beauchamp said. “The more we understand about the basis for why people consume excess salt, the better our chances of finding ways to reduce it.”