ScienceDaily: Living Well News

While the range of colors your eyes may perceive extends beyond the words language provides, languages around the globe are remarkably similar in how they partition the space of colors into a vocabulary. Yet differences exist. In a study examining 130 diverse languages around the world, researchers developed an algorithm to infer the communicative needs that different linguistic communities place on colors.

Among the traditional five human senses, touch is perhaps the least studied. Yet, it is solicited everywhere, all the time, and even more so in recent years with the widespread daily use of electronic devices that emit vibrations. Indeed, any moving object transmits oscillatory signals that propagate through solid substrates. Our body detects them by means of mechanoreceptors located below the skin and transmits the information to the brain similarly to auditory, olfactory or visual stimuli. By studying how mice and humans perceive tactile vibrations, researchers discovered that the brain does not reliably perceive the frequency of a vibration when its amplitude varies. An illusory phenomenon is thereby created, which highlights how far our perception of the world around us can deviate from its physical reality.

Researchers have released a new online tool to help schools, hospitals and residents understand and reduce the impact of traffic-related air pollution.

Has the scent of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies ever taken you back to afternoons at your grandmother's house? Has an old song ever brought back memories of a first date? The ability to remember relationships between unrelated items (an odor and a location, a song and an event) is known as associative memory.