Give one person the same wine in two bottles, one labelled with 5€, the other with 50€, will he notice? Seems like not: the more „expensive“ one will taste better.
Placebo effect? Scientists have looked at people’s brains during this test and found interesting differences: the placebo effect seems to actually work!
(original post at „The Frontal Cortex„)
And one quote to take home and think about:
„We have these general beliefs about the world –for example, that cheaper products are of lower quality – and they translate into specific expectations about specific products,“ said Shiv. „Then, once these expectations are activated, they start to really impact our behavior.“
Wired has a new article about my chemical hero Hervé This, „The Father of Molecular Gastronomy Whips Up a New Formula„.
Molecular gastronomy is more than just the chemistry of cooking, think new flavors, new cocktails, stuff done with liquid nitrogen, encapsulation with agarose or alginate.
Many cool things you, too, can try at home. Will you?
There are a couple of nice plotting apps out there for MacOSX. Ⅰ have been using Plot myself for much of my thesis and related work, but this review has shown a great alternative: DataPlot, which could be mistaken for DataPlot (a free multi-platform software for plotting and data analysis created by NIST. And actually this app seems to be doing very many cool things, including Design of Experiments and related… In any way: this is just a UNIX-app and runs on top of X11, so be prepared for an extraterrestrial experience). Now, the OSX DataPlot is very cool and integrated with most OSX technology, almost guaranteeing nice graphs and mac look and feel. Check it out!
It seems like we are finally reaching the fun stage in nanotechnology. Some Japanese scientists have invented a nano motor that is driven by bacteria! The little creatures are sliding along and are pushing the motor, just like the old hamster wheel.
It is funny, as the bacterium in question is called mycobacterium mobile, which can move at a fast 5 micrometers per second; if you think about its size: it moves about 3–4 times its own size per second. A human would thus be moving at 6 meters per second, or 21.6 km per hour, not bad for a critter 
[via treehugger and physorg]
Citation: Hiratsuka, Yuichi, Miyata, Makoto, Tada, Tetsuya and Uyeda, Taro Q. P. „A microrotary motor powered by bacteria.“ Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. vol. 103. no. 37. 13618–13623
The periodic spiral is a perfect example of infoporn and science visualization. Who would have know that after Mendeleev’s glorious act of inventing the periodic system of the elements, or rather its design and structure — its visualization, someone, some hundred years later would try again. This time, though, it looks functional and pretty: the periodic spiral uses a hexagonal grid in which all elemnts are placed in a spiral starting from the center of that hexagon; the trick that still keeps the chemical grouping together is the generous use of white space: the groups are all aligned radially, blocks are still blocks. So, in a way, there is not much new in this kind of visualization, it is just no longer square but hexagonal. Still, the noble metals are set apart from the less noble ones, but as far as Ⅰ can tell there is no obvious advantage to do so…
On the mentioned site you can also check out a shockwave application that lets you explore some characteristics and data of the elements; there is also a downloadable (and not free) version for Macs and Windows.
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