This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has three segments. Here are bits of each of them: The Kármán sutra — … The paper is almost Victorian in its voluminous discussion of possible regulatory mechanisms, but nearly complete avoidance of mentioning fornication. The highest moment of titillation comes in the following passage: “The […]
It’s (more or less) a given that dogs can reliably identify individual humans by their smell. But what about the other way around? To find out, Dr Deborah Wells and Professor Peter Hepper of the Canine Behaviour Centre, School of Psychology, at Queen’s University Belfast, UK, conducted a set of experiments. A 1m square blue […]
If you watch a movie which shows actors engaging in acts of sniffing, are you likely to sniff along with them? The Olfactory Research Group, of the Department of Neurobiology, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel have investigated the possibilities, and name such behaviour ‘Mirror Sniffing’. [That’s in the sense of a mirrored or copied […]
In Ig Nobel Prize-winning invention is now being used, insistently, to help protect nuclear power plants. The 1993 Ig Nobel Prize for chemistry was awarded to James Campbell and Gaines Campbell of Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, dedicated deliverers of fragrance, for inventing scent strips [also known as “scratch ‘n sniff” strips], the odious method by which perfume […]
This is possibly not the only study that focuses on a non-criminal student sample. It is one of the few that relies on both the Iowa Gambling Task and Sniffin’ Sticks: “The Relationship Between Psychopathy and Olfactory Tasks Sensitive to Orbitofrontal Cortex Function in a Non-criminal Student Sample,” Travis M. Bettison, Mehmet K. Mahmut, Richard J. Stevenson, Chemosensory Perception, […]