Spacey & Timely Superpowers, Life in Triplicate, Man Sniffs Dog

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are the beginnings of each of them: Spacey superpowers — Some people have a superior knowledge, and maybe control, of space and direction. That is evident in the harvest from Feedback’s call to identify trivial superpowers – a person’s ability to reliably do […]

Podcast Episode #206: “Flatulence in Dogs”

Flatulence in Dogs, the Real-Life Wizard of Oz, Triskadekaphobia When People Buy a House, Boys Will Be Boys, Why Your Doctor Should Smell, Soft is Hard, You Bastard, and Personal Space at the Beach. In episode #206, Marc Abrahams shows some unfamiliar research studies to Nicole Sharp, Robin Abrahams, Melissa Franklin, Chris Cotsapas, Jean Berko […]

Wine expert expertise news (2 items)

Two recent bits of news, unrelated to each other, about people who celebratedly taste wine: 1. The 2018 Ig Nobel Prize for biology was awarded to Paul Becher, Sebastien Lebreton, Erika Wallin, Erik Hedenstrom, Felipe Borrero-Echeverry, Marie Bengtsson, Volker Jorger, and Peter Witzgall, for demonstrating that wine experts can reliably identify, by smell, the presence […]

Did You Smell the Coffee? [In the Footsteps of the Invisible Gorilla]

Charles Spence (Ig Nobel Prize winner for the electronically-modified-sound-of-a-potato-chip experiment) and a colleague have a new study that explores an unexplored aspect—smell—of what’s known as “inattentional blindness.’ Inattentional blindness became widely noticed because of the “invisible gorilla experiment” that won an Ig Nobel Prize for Chris Chabris and Dan Simons. The new study asks, in essence, […]

Some Kinds of Coffee Are More Fragrantly Attractive to Ants

Humans are not the only animals that (in many cases) are attracted by the smell of coffee. This study focuses on ants’ attraction to coffee smells: “Olfactory behavior and response of household ants (Hymenoptera) to different types of coffee odor: A coffee-based bait development prospect,” Abdul Hafiz Ab Majid, Hamady Dieng, Siti Salbiah Ellias, Faezah […]