Brains & naps / Sloth hair / Apples & Onions / Meeting eclipse

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Time for a nap — Brainy people get to dream a little more than not-quite-so-brainy people, correlationally speaking, if their brains and genomes accord with the findings of researchers from the University of the Republic in Uruguay, University […]

Comparing apples and pears, apples and oranges

People full endlessly about whether and how to compare apples and pears, or apples and oranges, or whatever similar comparison is popular in their culture. Here’s a comparatively new approach: “Comparing Apples and Pears in Studies on Magnitude Estimations,” Mirjam Ebersbach [pictured here], Koen Luwel and Lieven Verschaffe, Frontiers in Cognitive Science, June 18, 2013. […]

Sound: Apple crispness, crunchiness

“Sound generated during eating of apples plays important role in its texture evaluation by consumers.” A finding which has recently been backed up a Polish research team at the Institute of Agrophysics, Lublin, working in conjunction with the Research Institute of Pomology and Floriculture, at Skierniewice. The investigators employed recently developed Contact Acoustic Emission (AE) […]