Altered Pinna [study]

  Unlike dogs, cats, rabbits, bats, donkeys, zebras, gerbils and very many other mammals, most humans have great difficulty in independently orienting their outer ears ( pinnae ) towards sounds of interest. But what if we could?   This study demonstrates that by opening and closing the human pinna, we can change the direction of […]

The Kajimoto laboratory (part 3): Pull the ears to navigate

If you’ve ever had difficulty navigating your way around a complex department store, or experienced difficulty with a tricky transfer at a subway station, you may be interested in one of the many cross-modal human/computer research projects [see previous article in this series] which have been developed by the Kajimoto laboratory (a department of The […]

Van Gogh, Lady Gaga and the implications of eccentricity (study)

Attn. artists! Can you get a higher appraisal for yourself and your art by behaving more eccentrically? Say, by hacking off your own earlobe or “cavorting around in little more than a thong”? Such questions have been examined in a new study from Dr. Eric R. Igou (University of Limerick, Ireland) and Dr. Wijnand A […]

Extraocular Phototransduction: more than meets the eye? (part 2)

We recently drew attention to the 1998 discovery at Cornell regarding the possibility of tweaking one’s cicadian rhythms by shining a bright light at the back of one’s knees. But continuing research into extraocular (outside the eye) light stimuli has turned to the possibility of a more direct route. Why not shine a light directly […]

Unconstrained ear recognition progress

“Ears are a particularly appealing approach to noncontact biometrics because they are relatively constant over a person’s life and are unaffected by expressions, unlike faces.” – explain researchers from the Image Processing and Computer Vision dept. at the University of Southampton, UK in a recent article for IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (A). […]