Posts by Martin Gardiner:

Weekends good – weeks not so

“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 […]

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 […]

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 […]