The 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded today, to David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian “for their discoveries of receptors for temperature and touch”.
The idea for this graphic came to me whilst saving the chilli peppers from a forlorn looking, aphid-infested chilli plant that’s probably on its metaphorical last legs. I thought it would be quite interesting to look at the origin of the heat in chilli peppers, and how this can be quantified.