You can see the color white and you can hear white noise but you can also smell a white odor, says new research. 

When we see white, we are seeing a mixture of light waves of different wavelengths. The hum we call white noise is a combination of assorted sound frequencies but in both cases a stimulus must meet two conditions: The mix that produces them must span the range of our perception and each component must be present at the exact same intensity.

Both of these conditions can be met with odors, so as to produce a white smell - it just involves technical difficulties, like getting the intensities of all the scents to be identical. 

Psychologists from the University of Leicester have carried out eye tests to examine reading styles in young and old people and say there isn't just an eyesight issue - the way we read words changes as we grow older.

They digitally manipulated text, combined with precise measures of readers' eye movements, and say this provided new insight into how young and older adults use different visual cues during reading. Their experiments used precise measures of readers' eye movements to assess how well they read lines of text that had been digitally manipulated to enhance the salience of different visual information - sometimes the text was blurred and other times the features of the individual letters were sharply defined.

The best way to get precise information regarding the inner structure of atoms and molecules is to excite them by means of resonant laser light but this laser light can lead to measurable modifications within the atom's electron shell, above a certain intensity. The act of getting the information changes the study.

Scientists of the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) say they have now shown experimentally how to prevent such "light shifts" and that this confirms the advantages of "hyper" Ramsey excitation that had already been predicted theoretically.

A study today highlighted a new therapeutic technique to repair and rebuild muscle for sufferers of degenerative muscle disorders. The therapy brings together two existing techniques for muscle repair, cell transplantation and tissue engineering - mesoangioblast stem cells delivered via a hydrogel cell-carrier matrix.

Some people take risks with investments while others on safety with their money and in other business activities. Researchers have looked at the attitudes towards risk in a group of 56 subjects and found that in people who preferred safety, certain regions of the brain show a higher level of activation when they are confronted with quite unforeseeable situations.  

The top quark is the heaviest of the six known hadron constituents, discovered at the Fermilab Tevatron collider in 1995.  Because of its quite large mass -over forty times more than the second-heaviest bottom quark- and because of a few additional interesting properties, the top quark has stimulated in the past two decades a large amount of theoretical work, well matched to the Tevatron investigations.

In fact, one of the explicit goals of the CDF and DZERO experiments for Run II of the Tevatron, which lasted from 2002 to 2010, was to study extensively the top quark both as a standard model object, subjected as it is to electroweak interactions which can be studied and compared to predictions, and as a portal to new physics of various kinds.

This semester I’ve been running a graduate level seminar at the City University of New York, on the difference between philosophy of science and science studies. The latter is a broad and somewhat vaguely defined term that includes (certain kinds of) sociology of science, postmodern criticism of science, and feminist epistemology. It’s the stuff of the (in)famous science wars of the 1990s (think Sokal affair, or perhaps this most recent disgraceful episode).

And now the news from Alpha Centauri…(Oh, I’ve waited for so long to utter those words! News. From Alpha Centauri. Wow!)

Marketing people follow predictable patterns; in order to sell something it either needs to scare people or make them feel good.  "This ain't your father's" X is a timeless perceptual classic, meaning it is not old-fashioned and conservative and boring like parents.

Clostridium acetobutylicum became popular when the chemist Chaim Weizmann first used the bacterium to ferment the solvent acetone and the alcohols butanol and ethanol, collectively known as “ABE” products, from starch - he wanted to create synthetic rubber and during World War I the process was used by the British to ferment acetone for the production of cordite, the explosive propellant that replaced gunpowder in bullets and artillery shells.