HERE are three interesting-sounding scientific papers. Martin Gardiner was perusing the programme for the Acoustical Society of America conference, due to take place in June, when he came across by Joan Sinnott and Kelly Mosteller in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (vol 122, p 2947). According to the abstract, gerbils are rather good at vowel identification. For example, Mongolian gerbils can tell the difference between 鈥渦鈥� and 鈥渋鈥�, and even between 鈥渁鈥� and 鈥渁e鈥�. Not many people know this.
Also of interest is a paper discovered by our colleague Jeff Hecht. is by R. Deguen, T. Alboussi猫re and D. Brito. It appears in Physics of The Earth and Planetary Interiors (vol 164, p 1) and doubtless repays close study.
Advertisement
Lastly, Lucy Robinson was intrigued when a colleague drew her attention to a paper by Patrick Rabbit and colleagues entitled in Psychology and Aging (vol 17, p 468). 鈥淧robably pretty dramatic, we thought,鈥� is Robinson鈥檚 comment.
WHAT has the got against Chinese people? A correspondent, who insists their name really is Grimble Gromble, was checking out Homo sapiens on the catalogue鈥檚 website. It reports that the worldwide distribution of H. sapiens is: 鈥淪outhern Asia, South America, Oceania, North America, Middle America, Europe & Northern Asia (excluding China), Caribbean, Australia, Africa.鈥�
鈥淭his week鈥檚 鈥渕ost ingenious misquote鈥� award goes to a camping shop in Beverley, East Yorkshire, UK, where Chris Finn saw a sign announcing: 鈥淣ow is the Winter of our Discount Tents鈥�
DOGS are humans鈥� best friends, their owners often believe. But how far does canine loyalty go? Emanuela Prato-Previde and colleagues at the University of Milan鈥檚 Institute of Psychology throw some light on this question in the journal .
They took 54 dogs and tested them on their ability to choose between a large and a small quantity of food when their owner showed no encouragement towards either. No problem: the dogs knew what was best for them, and picked the fuller bowl.
Then some owner encouragement was added. When offered two equally small bowls, the dogs were strongly biased towards the one their owner picked up and enthused over. Not so surprising, perhaps. However, when a big bowl and a small bowl went head-to-head and the owner enthused over the skimpy portion, some of the dogs eschewed the big feed and went for the smaller snack instead.
Does this prove that loyal Fido really is our best friend, or just that Fido is extremely stupid? Prato-Previde suggests that millennia of domestication and human-dog co-evolution have produced dogs bred for unthinking obedience. So yes, they may well be our best friends, but only because we made them that way.
THE Braun electric toothbrush that Geoff Burn bought from Sainsbury鈥檚 supermarket had some strange advice on the packaging. It said: 鈥淲arning! This product is fitted with a security device which is NOT MICROWAVABLE.鈥�
Burn wonders if there is an eccentric group of Sainsbury customers who buy electric toothbrushes in order to microwave the security devices that come with them and who must at all costs be put off doing so. Or perhaps they simply like microwaving the toothbrushes, and the warning is there to ensure they detach the security devices before indulging in their hobby.
To make the matter more puzzling, there was no security device with the toothbrush that Burn bought. Since he had not seen any such device being removed or deactivated at the check-out, and nor had any alarms gone off when he left the shop, he could only assume that the non-microwavable security device had been removed before the toothbrush reached the point of sale, leaving the warning somewhat redundant.
Then again, perhaps the whole thing is Sainsbury鈥檚 idea of an obscure practical joke.
THE first lines of text on the website of the state that 鈥淧roof-Reading-Service.net provides professional proofreading services exclusively for professors, lecturers, post-doc鈥檚 and research students and businesses.鈥�
Ian Short suggests this may not be the best way to introduce such a service, and wonders what the would have to say about it.
FINALLY, according to 鈥淨uelling evolutionary controversy鈥�, a paper in the University of British Columbia journal Synergy, 鈥淐ontroversy about the role of interbreeding among and between species has led to conflicting views about hybridisation among botanists and zoologists.鈥� Jeff Thompson wants to know if botanists and zoologists are now recognised as distinct species, and if so, is such hybridisation possible?