New research on the affects of background noise and how we perceive taste.

While louder noise reduced the reported sweetness or saltiness, it increased the measure of crunch.
The research is reported in the journal Food Quality and Preference.
It may go some way to explaining why airline food is notoriously bland – a phenomenon that drives airline catering companies to heavily season their foods.
“Theres a general opinion that aeroplane foods arent fantastic,” said Andy Woods, a researcher from Unilevers laboratories and the University of Manchester.

via BBC News – Background noise affects taste of foods, research shows.

The International Space recently celebrated its 10th year in full operation.

The second decade of a new era in human history — when not everyone lives on our home planet — began Nov. 2, 2010, as the International Space Station crossed the 1.5 billion mile mark of its travels with six residents on board and six visitors en route.

On Oct. 25, the station also set a record for being the longest continuously inhabited spacecraft. On that day, the International Space Station eclipsed the previous record of 3,644 days set by the Russian Mir Space Station. With each new day, NASA and its partners are pushing the envelope of human achievement in space into uncharted territory.

via NASA – 10 Years and Counting.

New research reveals that humans are estimated to consume over 1 billion frogs every year.  According to the study, the U.S. and France are among the biggest importers of frogs, and Indonesia is reported to export an estimated 5,000 tons of frogs each year.

The new research, to be published in a forthcoming edition of the journal Conservation Biology, suggests that the global trade in wild frogs has been underestimated in the past.

“Frogs legs are on the menu at school cafeterias in Europe, market stalls and dinner tables across Asia to high end restaurants throughout the world,” said Corey Bradshaw from Adelaide University in Australia.

[From BBC News]

New research has found that people who drink more than seven cups of coffee a day will be more likely to hallucinate.

People who drank more than seven cups of instant coffee a day were three times more likely to hallucinate than those who took just one, a study found.
A Durham University team questioned 200 students about their caffeine intake, the journal Personality and Individual Differences reported.

[From BBC News]

The NASA Mars Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, where only designed to operate for 3 months on the Martian surface, but after a five year anniversary, they are still collecting data and exploring the planet.

The rovers are now showing some serious signs of wear and tear.
Spirit has to drive backwards everywhere it goes because of a jammed wheel; and Opportunity’s robotic arm has a glitch in a shoulder joint because of a broken electrical wire.
There have been times also when the vehicles’ have been dangerously short on power because of the dust covering on their solar panels.

[From BBC News]

A brother and sister in England spent 40 years trying to find each other — then discovered they lived only 300 yards apart.

Ken Whitty, 64, walked past 62-year-old Yvonne’s house countless times and even saw her in the garden, but did not recognize her. They were reunited only after Whitty wrote to his local paper appealing for help in his search.

[From Fox News]

A strong cup of coffee has a greater effect on men than women, research shows.
In a study on 668 healthy volunteers, an espresso pepped up men after just 10 minutes. Women also became more alert after the beverage, but less so.

[From BBC News]

Police in Finland caught a car thief using blood found in a mosquito.

Finding the car in Seinaejoki, north of Helsinki, police saw that the mosquito had recently sucked blood and decided to send the insect for analysis.

The DNA found from laboratory tests matched a man on the police register.
The suspect denies stealing the car and says he was just hitch-hiking a lift with a man.

[BBC News]

What have people been searching for this year? Google has published its yearly Zeitgeist containing the fastest rising search terms for a number of categories, including; News, Politics, Books and Images.

 
Fastest Rising (Global)

1. sarah palin
2. beijing 2008
3. facebook login
4. tuenti
5. heath ledger
6. obama
7. nasza klasa
8. wer kennt wen
9. euro 2008
10. jonas brothers

[Google Zeitgeist]

“RSS is a family of web feed formats, specified in XML and used for Web syndication. RSS is used by (among other things) news websites, weblogs and podcasting. The abbreviation is variously used to refer to the following standards:

Web feeds provide web content or summaries of web content together with links to the full versions of the content, and other metadata. RSS in particular, delivers this information as an XML file called an RSS feed, webfeed, RSS stream, or RSS channel. In addition to facilitating syndication, web feeds allow a website”s frequent readers to track updates on the site using an aggregator.”
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