People living with synaesthesia (known as synaesthetes) experience abnormal interactions between the senses. Digit-color synaesthetes, for instance, will experience certain numbers in specific colors (for example, they might experience the number seven as red). A possible reason put forward for this phenomenon is the existence of extra connections between brain areas in synaesthetes, but the new study, published in the journal Psychological Science, suggests otherwise.

The College of Agriculture and Life Sciences' (CALS) Bioenergy Feedstock Project, now in its second year, is the only project of its kind devoted to exploring the many species of field grass that grow in the Northeast and their potential as sources for biofuels.

The project has roughly 80 acres of different warm- and cool-season perennial grass varieties, otherwise known as "feedstocks," growing in 11 counties across New York. "Our ultimate goal is to maximize the economic benefit of bioenergy production as an alternative energy source," said Donald Viands, professor of plant breeding and genetics, who heads the project, speaking against a colorful backdrop of a field of blue, green, lavender and beige hues, where some plants were withering, but some were some thriving.

Many people believe that as soon as you start using a skin cream, you have to continue with it; if you stop lubricating, your skin becomes drier than when you started. And now there is research to confirm for the first time that normal skin can become drier from creams. Izabela Buraczewska presents these findings in the dissertation she is publicly defending at Uppsala University in Sweden on October 24.

Aesthetics or your personal preferences aside, who do you think is in better physical condition,  international ballet dancers or international swimmers?  

A study led by Professor Tim Watson and Dr Andrew Garrett of University of Hertfordshire involved comparing members of the Royal Ballet and English National Ballet School with a squad of British National and International Swimmers, including members of the Olympic squad.

The results will be announced at the University’s Health and Human Sciences Research Institute Showcase but we'll go ahead and tell you here:  ballet dancers.


Sorry, swimmers.

Scientists at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz have, for the first time, succeeded in rendering the spatial distribution of individual atoms in a Bose-Einstein condensate visible. Bose-Einstein condensates are small, ultracold gas clouds which, due to their low temperatures, can no longer be described in terms of traditional physics but must be described using the laws of quantum mechanics.

German President Horst Köhler will award the German Future Prize for 2008 on 3 December in Berlin. Professor Axel Haverich, a heart surgeon and Leibniz prizewinner from Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) Hannover Medical School (MHH), and his two colleagues Dr. Serghei Cebotari and Dr. Michael Harder are one of four teams who have made the final round of the President's award for engineering and innovation, worth 250,000 euros.