Did you miss? Crisps, reading & pain

Highlights from OU science in the news this week:

Break out the bubbly: as reported in The Guardian Charles Spence from Oxford's Department of Experimental Psychology has won an Ig Noble prize.

The Ig Nobles, you may remember, are a fun alternative to the oh-so serious Noble prizes. They reward science that makes you first laugh, then think.

Charles was awarded the prize for Nutrition for his work measuring the effect the sound a food makes on how fresh we think it is. In his study volunteers ate crisps and had the crunching sound relayed to them via headphones and were then asked to rate their freshness.

The Guardian's James Randerson writes: 'By making the crunch sounds louder, or by boosting the high frequencies, Spence made people rate the crisps 15% fresher.' You should be able to hear the experiment for yourself in Alok Jha's upcoming science podcast.

Elsewhere Oxford researchers have found that a gene believed to be associated with dyslexia is connected with reading ability in the general population.

The work was led by Silvia Paracchini and colleagues from Oxford's Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics (WTCHG).

She told BBC Online: 'On average, people carrying this common genetic variant tended to perform poorly on tests of reading ability. However, it's important to note that this is only true for reading ability and not for IQ, so it doesn't appear to be connected to cognitive impairment.'

Can numbers be sexy?

Marcus du Sautoy of Oxford's Mathemtical Institute certainly thinks so. In the first of a regular column for the The Times he writes about prime number hunting.

Marcus reports 'In 1859, the German mathematician Bernhard Riemann came up with a hypothesis about the logic underlying prime numbers that academics have failed to prove for nearly 150 years, despite a $1 million incentive.'

But Marcus's kids have set their sights on an alternative challenge: finding a prime with 100 million digits, which could win them a $150,000 reward.

Apparently they shouldn't start spending yet: it's estimated the search would take a desktop computer three years with the current software, and there is only a 1-in-200,000 chance that they'll strike lucky.

And finally...

It was the story that ran and ran: an Oxford experiment reported in The Telegraph, Mail on Sunday, Daily Express and others has shown that faith can relieve pain.

The Telegraph's Alastair Jameison wrote: 'Academics at The Oxford Centre For Science Of The Mind gave electric shocks to 12 Roman Catholics and 12 atheists as they studied a painting of the Virgin Mary.'

'They found Catholics seemed able to block out much of the pain. Using brain-scanning techniques, they also discovered that the Catholics were able to activate part of the brain associated with conditioning the experience of pain.'

So is godliness the only answer? Maybe not. As an Oxford psychologist admitted, the same effect may be reproduced in non-believers if an image of sufficient emotional power was used: such as an image of a person's mother or father.

Image: Crisps by Geoff Lane via Wikiemdia Commons. 

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