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 […]

Electric meringue recipe, public relations equation, and two sleepy superpowers

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Power meringue — Researchers in South Korea and the US have cooked up a recipe for meringue that you can then use to make electrical batteries…. Public relations equation — “It will cost up to $21.5 […]

Deep Oesophagus, Snoozing Grumpy Face, Deep Secrets

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 […]

Sleeping in the Audience at Science Meetings

At least one co-author of this study stayed awake while the data for the research was being collected. Probably. The study is: “Dreaming During Scientific Papers: Effects of Added Extrinsic Material,” Richard F. Harvey, Melvin B. Schullinger, Alexis Stassinopoulos, and Erica Winkle, British Medical Journal (Clinical Research Edition), vol. 287, no. 6409, 1983, pp. 1916-1919. […]

Gently Rocking Fruit Flies to Sleep

Innovation seldom ceases in the global effort to learn better ways to get flies, and perhaps people, to get to sleep. “Sleep Induction by Mechanosensory Stimulation in Drosophila,” Arzu Ozturk-Colak, Sho Inami, Joseph R. Buchler, Patrick D. McClanahan, Andri Cruz, Christopher Fang-Yen, and Kyunghee Koh, Cell, vol. 33, no. 108462, 2020. The authors, at Thomas […]

Using Odor to Try to Optimize Learning During Sleep

“To smell again, perchance to learn better” would be a poetical way to speak of this study about teaching sleeping children in Germany how to read and write better English: “How Odor Cues Help to Optimize Learning During Sleep in a Real Life-Setting,” Franziska Neumann, Vitus Oberhauser, and Jürgen Kornmeier, Scientific Reports, vol. 10, no. […]

Podcast Episode #205: “Color Preferences in the Insane”

Color Preference in the Insane, Can Consumers Recognize the Taste of their Favorite Beer?, Effect of Audience Boredom on the Power Hungry, You Never Sleep Alone, Improbable Medical Review, Extracting the Wrong Tooth, and Telephones for Animals. In episode #206, Marc Abrahams shows some unfamiliar research studies to Jean Berko Gleason, Chris Cotsapas, Maggie Lettvin, […]

Sleep to forget teacher, or sleep to remember grandmother?

It seems that a lack of sleep may prevent the brain from forgetting unimportant information. A lack of sleep may also prevent the brain from remembering important information. How can scientists make sense of this seemingly-nonsensical seeming-contradiction? Imagine you just met your child’s teacher, who is named Gwen. The name Gwen, however, is firmly associated […]