Small Laboratory Saucepan?

Small Laboratory Saucepan?

Is your laboratory environment something like this? Sosban Fach (meaning ‘Little Saucepan’) is a popular Welsh song which recounts the troubles of a harassed housewife. It is particularly…
Computer viruses, Bio-warfare, and Hank

Computer viruses, Bio-warfare, and Hank

It appears that Hank may have become infected with a virus that originated from his computer.  If so, this would represent the first instance of a computer virus capable of acting on a…
Academic Inbreeding Alert

Academic Inbreeding Alert

“The practice of having Ph.D. graduates employed by the university that trained them, commonly called ‘academic inbreeding’ has long been suspected to be damaging to scholarly practices and…
Some (Chimps) Like It Hot

Some (Chimps) Like It Hot

Perhaps it was the title: ‘Acquired preferences for piquant foods by chimpanzees.’ but whatever the reason, Paul Rozin, Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, found it very…
Shirking - The Upside

Shirking - The Upside

The word 'Shirk' normally carries quite pronounced negative connotations. But are there circumstances when shirking might have beneficial effects? For example in the efficient operation of teams?…
Update : Psychoacoustics Of Mongolian Gerbils

Update : Psychoacoustics Of Mongolian Gerbils

There are new clues in the quest for a fully coherent theory of the perception and neural representation of size-variant human vowels in the Mongolian gerbil. Previous investigations in the US (see:…
Aircraft Nose Art - The Psychology

Aircraft Nose Art - The Psychology

Of all the available publications on 'Aircraft Nose Art', very few have investigated its psychological undercurrents. An exception is ‘Aircraft Nose Art: From World War I to Today’ (1991). Chapter 1…
Wobbly Tables - The Math

Wobbly Tables - The Math

Mathematical theory describing the problem of four-legged wobbly tables stretches back at least as far as 2005, when a paper on the subject of  “The Intuitive Table ‘Theorem’ “, was published in…