For Marcel Proust, one of the after-effects of eating asparagus, was that it  “…transforms my chamber-pot into a flask of perfume.’’

“ ‘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.

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 …”

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.”

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.

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.”