Crisps packaging color associations in 3 countries

Ig Nobel Prize winner (he was honored in 2008 for electronically modifying the sound of a potato chip to make the person chewing the chip believe it to be crisper and fresher than it really is) Charles Spence and colleagues report a new, very specific advance in understanding consumers’ understanding and preference for certain aspects of packaging for crisps (known […]

The taste of electric currents (part 2 of 2)

Improbable recently profiled the work of the Miyashita Laboratory at Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan, where research is underway into the possibilities offered by ‘electro-gustation’. The lab has not only invented the electric chopsticks but has also investigated a possible way of encouraging diners to use less salt on their potato chips – with the aid […]

Advice: To chew or not to chew

It is not an absolute, inviolable rule that one should always chew one’s food. Whether or not this Time report is accurate, its advice at the end is basic and good: A fishmonger in southern China found a live bomb inside one of his squid. The man — identified only as Mr. Huang by the Guangzhou Daily — said that while […]