Science bites…

The New Scientist is a good read for those with an interest in all things scientific, but who don't necessarily have a PhD. If you have a short time to spare and would like a laugh, try their Feedback pages.

Sock singularity! I knew it…

ONE of our winning questions to Stephen Hawking was "Why, when two socks pass the washday event horizon, do they so often become singularities?" (11 September). Peter Hicks's proposal prompted reader Geoff Levick to recall investigating this very serious matter in the 1970s.

He reports discovering that the board of New Zealand's largest sock manufacturer and the board of the country's only washing-machine manufacturer had two directors in common. He deduced that collaboration between the two companies had resulted in a device for the washing machine that extracted socks on a random basis, shredded them, and expelled them in the wash water.

Some time spent upside down in the machine bowl with a torch in an unsuccessful search for the device only led him to conclude that it was very cleverly hidden.

See what?

This is great! I first saw these experiments on TV, and it is surprising how easy it is to fool the eyes. Obviously 'slight-of-hand' magicians and pick-pockets have been doing this for ages, but it is interesting to find out that our eyes are actually quite poor and it is our brain that sees (and not sees) things. Try them out, but don't cheat…

Daniel Simons of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Christopher Chabris of Harvard earned the Ig Nobel prize in psychology for their "Gorillas in our midst: sustained inattention blindness for dynamic events" (Perception, vol 28, p 1059). In a study that has already gained some notoriety, they asked students to count how many times a group of people threw a basketball in a video. Over a third failed to notice a woman in a gorilla suit walking through the scene. See http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/djs_lab/demos.html and for the full Ig Nobels go to www.improb.com