“Workers, even those with interesting high status jobs, really are happier on the weekend” – that’s the finding of a new research project from Richard Ryan, Professor of Psychology, Psychiatry, & Education and colleagues at the University of Rochester NY. The team set up an experiment which tracked the mood of 74 working adults over […]
About: Martin Gardiner
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Posts by Martin Gardiner:
Nomadic plants
Many plants tend to spend most of their lives rooted to the spot – and this lack of mobility could perhaps be seen as an evolutionary disadvantage. To counter this, Mexico-based Gilberto Esparza is working towards plant mobility with his Nomadic Plants project. “An ecosystem contained in a biotechnological robot built for plants and micro-organisms […]
Musical Madeleines
“In this paper, we consider musical cell-phone ringtones as virtual, communicative and cultural performances.” The paper is entitled ‘The Musical Madeleine: Communication, Performance, and Identity in Musical Ringtones’ and is published in Popular Music and Society, Volume 33, Issue 1 February 2010. The authors, at the Department of New Media and Digital Culture Studies of […]
Progress in Fake-Finger Thwarting
Shortly after the introduction of automated fingerprint recognition systems came the invention of fake fingers. As this research paper from May 2009 explains, fake fingers made from gelatine soon appeared, quickly followed by Play-Doh™. The authors review the “…state-of-the-art of fake finger materials and disclose the power of a, let’s say, brand new material in […]
Ramp, King of Stink – endangered?
As this US Library of Congress document points out “The ramp’s flavor, though sweet with a hint of garlic, is accompanied by a potent odor so objectionable [that] school children with ‘ramp odor’ were known to have been excused from school for a few days.” For those outside the Appalachian area, who may be unfamiliar […]
Towards quantifying snoring annoyance
“There exists no gold standard for the measurement of snoring.” But a joint research project from the Human Sleep Research Laboratory at the Stanford Research Institute in the US and Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich, Germany has recently made progress. With research towards quantifying snoring annoyance which asked – “Is the annoyance of snoring a reliable tool for […]
Wheeled, It Sings What It Reads
There have been several implementations of two wheeled balancing robots [example]. And several which can read sheet music via a camera [example]. Others can ‘sing’ [example] – but the number of two-wheeled balancing robots that can autonomously read music and sing songs is low – possibly numbering just one. A research team from the Department […]
Hungry people prefer maturer mates?
Professor Terry F. Pettijohn II from the Coastal Carolina University, along with colleagues from Miami University and West Virginia University recently decided to investigate whether people’s preferences for a mate might vary according to whether they feel hungry or not. For, according to the Environmental Security Hypothesis (ESH) individuals’ interpersonal preferences may partially depend on […]
OM sweet OM
Our attentiveness and our concentration are pilfered from us by the proceedings [which] take place around us in the world in recent times. According to research from Sipna’s College of Engineering & Technology, Amravati University, Maharashtra, India, this pilfering might be reduced, if not entirely eliminated, by regularly chanting ‘OM’. Professors Ajay Anil Gurjar and […]
Havoc Waves in the Netherlands
Electronic musical instrument researcher Rob Hordijk first started experimenting with his Runglers back in the early 1980s. A ‘Rungler‘ is, in essence, a pseudorandom Chaos Wave Generator – which (in its simplest form) can be realised with a recirculating digital shift register that is clocked by one oscillator whilst receiving its data input from another. […]