Humor

Want to be more creative? No problem, just take a ball and squeeze it (but only in your left hand, otherwise the consequences are as yet unknown).Dr. Abraham Goldstein (pictured) along with colleagues at the Brain Research Center of Bar-Ilan University, Israel, published their finding in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin&Review. Following the notion of the “… relative importance of the right hemisphere (RH) in creative thinking” [see proviso below] the team asked 40 right-handed experimental participants to squeeze a ball for 45 seconds whilst engaged in a creative task*. (Note that due…

So the only food that we knew could survive the apocalypse has been driven out of business by its own employees, who also teamed up with single mothers, minorities and atheists to overwhelmingly re-elect a guy determined to jump off a fiscal cliff right just before the end of the world was long projected - December of 2012. Well played, Mayans. As Twinkies go, so goes America.  Without junk food and $6 billion Navy destroyers, we are doomed. Really, America was the only variable the Mayans had to be worried about come December 21st, 2012, when they emerge from their LHC-created black…

For Marcel Proust, one of the after-effects of eating asparagus, was that it  “…transforms my chamber-pot into a flask of perfume.’’ This unusual phenomenon is well known by a (disputed) percentage of asparagus-eaters who are lucky (or unlucky) enough to be able to nasaly detect the vegetable’s odorous metabolites in their (or others’) urine. And it has been the subject of fairly intense scientific scrutiny for more than a century. The first formal study came from Wilhelm Marceli Nencki, who, in 1891, published his paper -  ‘Ueber das vorkommen von methylmercaptan in menschlichen…

“ ‘Chills’ (frisson manifested as goose bumps or shivers) have been used in an increasing number of studies as indicators of emotions in response to music …” But in a new research project, investigators from Hanover University of Music and Drama (hmtmh) in Germany focused their attention not just on chills which are exclusively musically-induced, but also on those initiated by aural, visual, tactile, and taste stimulation.  A comprehensive set of experiments were devised to investigate. Before the cross-modal inquiries could begin however, it was necessary to define (as closely as…

What does “Well” mean? Or, more specifically, what does ‘Well’ mean when it’s used as the first word in response to so-called ‘Wh-questions’ (which, what, who, whom, whose, where, whence, whither, when, why, whynot, wherefore, whatever etc. etc.)? Professor Gene H. Lerner and Professor Emanuel A. Schegloff offer an explanation in the April 2009 issue of the journal Research on Language&Social Interaction. “We show that these well-prefaces operate as general alerts that indicate nonstraightforwardness in responding …” A set of ten real-world transcriptions of conversations (featuring ‘…

In 1987, unthinking, primitive pre-GMO breeders exploited an abandoned shelter cat in Montana, with no one to defend it, for their own nefarious ends when it was discovered that this feline pawn gave birth to a curly-haired kitten. The kitten was then raped by a Persian male and gave birth to a mixture of curly-haired and normal-haired kittens, resulting in a horrible mutation that was now dominant over nature: its presence on even one of the two copies of the gene involved was suddenly sufficient to cause cats to have curly hair. (1) And so the slippery slope into Frankenkitten began but…

It's that time of year again - All Hallows Eve - and that means an upsurge in witch sightings which inevitably leads to impromptu witch trials. As much as we appreciate that the residents of Salem do not passively sit back and wait for our just and benevolent God to find Mercy on the souls of witches, we think some guidelines are in order for the corporeal world so we want to clarify some things about the Court of Oyer and Terminer. Beware wily seductresses and their demonic incantations! Already in this year of Our Lord 1692, ye good citizens were able to uncover over 100 cases of witchcraft…

Some believe in the power of telepathy. Some believe in the power of fMRI. And putting the two together led a team of experimenters from the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, and the Swami Vivekananda Yoga Anusandhana Samsthana, Vivekananda Yoga Research Foundation, Bangalore, India to perform : “Probably the first fMRI study to analyse the neuroanatomical correlates of telepathy.” They asked Mr. Gerard Senehi (his brain pictured at right) “… well known for his abilities to perform various paranormal tasks such as telekinesis, mind reading and telepathy” to try to…

If you had just bought a lottery ticket, would you be willing to swap it? If you’re like most people, the answer would be an emphatic ‘No’. But why? Given that a properly-run lottery is an entirely random affair, mathematical theory dictates that your chances of winning won’t change whether you swap or not. Academia has tackled this question before, but recently, Jane L. Risen, now Associate Professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and Thomas D. Gilovich, Professor and Department Chair of Psychology at Cornell University, New York, decided to take…

A recent edition of  ‘M/C – A Journal of Media and Culture’ features one of the very few, perhaps the only, fully blind, peer-reviewed academic papers on sugar pigs. Author Toni Risson, at the University of Queensland, Australia, first defines sugar-pigginess. “Sugar pigs are traditional confections shaped like sugar mice with little legs and no tail.” And then goes on to refine the implications of sugar pig consumption – starting at the beginning : “As an imagined border between the private world inside the body and the public world outside, the mouth is an unstable limit of selfhood…