This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Cannabis for construction workers — A Nigerian study from 2015 hints at a cannabis boost to efficiency. Manasseh Iroegbu at the University of Uyo, Nigeria, is lead author of “Exploring the performance of mason workers in the […]
This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has three segments. Here are bits of each of them: Deep Oesophagus — Scientists, as a group, like to think they behave in ways a little distinct from the herd. The herd, as a herd, likes to think so, too. From time to time, Feedback receives furtive […]
Words can be used to describe things. A study published in 2019 presents a striking example: “Transformative resources of the terminological internationalization (on the material of German and English),” Vladimir V. Elkin [pictured here], Elena N. Melnikova, and Anna M. Klyoster, in The International Conference Going Global through Social Sciences and Humanities, Springer, Cham, 2019. […]
It can be difficult to recognize someone from a photo of their face if it’s turned upside-down, or presented as a negative. But what if the photos are distorted – fairground-mirror style? Or deliberately blurred? To find out, Dr Graham Hole and colleagues at the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, University of Sussex, UK, performed […]
The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that make people LAUGH, then THINK. In the Ig Informal Lectures, some days after the ceremony, the new Ig Nobel Prize winners attempt to explain what they did, and why they did it. We are releasing these lectures one at a time. The 2021 Ig Nobel Peace Prize was […]
Over the years, a number of scholars have reported on the implications of ‘Car Face’ design. For a recent example, see the work of Xueyuan Zhang, Liqing Huang and Mingzhu Li of the School of Art, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang, China, who report, in E3S Web of Conferences 236, 02042 (2021) regarding Research on the Shape […]
“Until now the full capacity of horse facial expressions to convey a range of information has been largely overlooked.” This lack of capacity was addressed by the most recent (2015) addition to the AnimalFACS system. (FACS stands for Facial Action Coding System) EquiFACS which is “a scientific observational tool for identifying and coding facial movements […]
“In spite of the presumed relevance of wrinkles on facial age, the topic has received little attention in empirical literature.” Prompting J.Antonio Aznar-Casanova (University of Barcelona, Spain) along with Nelson Alves (Universidade Federal da Paraíba, Brazil) and Sérgio S Fukusima (University of São Paulo, Brazil) to perform a set of two experiments to help clarify […]
Some people might find it difficult to recognize the insights in this new study about whether people find it more difficult to recognize faces that are obscured by masks: “The COVID-19 pandemic masks the way people perceive faces,” Erez Freud, Andreja Stajduhar, R. Shayna Rosenbaum, Galia Avidan, and Tzvi Ganel, Scientific Reports, vol. 10, no. […]
How to get people to pay more attention to NOT touching their eyes, nostrils, or mouth? We invited people, in a gathering, to say “FACE” whenever they saw a speaker touching a hand to their face. And most of those people said “FACE”, cheerily—appreciating that they were talking to themselves as much as to the […]