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 […]
One time-consuming way to make instant coffee from coffee—in a factory—involves removing most of the coffee aroma, then later adding it back to the coffee, so that later still—when someone makes the instant coffee in preparation for serving it to someone who will, still later still, drink it, it smells like coffee. A new study […]
Can we smell in ‘stereo’? Recent experiments performed at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing suggest that, to some extent, in some circumstances, the answer could be ‘yes’ – and, moreover, this stereo sense may be a navigational aid. The research team write that : “The human nose, the most protruding part of […]
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 […]
This study tells of a new (and perhaps the first) advance in the effort to explore the relationship between rats and laughter and odor: “Odour Conditioning of Positive Affective States: Rats Can Learn to Associate an Odour with Being Tickled,” Vincent Bombail, Nathalie Jerôme, Ho Lam, Sacha Muszlak, Simone L. Meddle, Alistair B. Lawrence, and […]
A quick video visit with the winner of the 2001 Ig Nobel Prize for biology:
Smells have effects on hair follicles and sounds have effects on the taste of cheese, sometimes, suggest two recent—but not necessarily related studies. The sound-and-hair study is described in LiveScience (thanks to Francesca Bewer for bringing this to our attention): Like your nose, your hair can detect odors. In a new study, researchers found that […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]