What's it worth? There's nothing a psychologist likes better than to wind up an economist, and in the 70s psychology succeeded big time with the endowment effect. Economics expects us to give an object a value, and that value should determine how we would price it to buy it or sell it. But experiments have shown that we value something we own a lot more than the same object if we don't own it. Economists, and us sciencey types who want people to be more rational, tend to highlight the endowment effect as one of the 'errors' people suffer from in making rational decisions. But I'd suggest, as is often the case in science, it's more complicated than that. Here are two suggestions as to why the endowment effect can be just as rational as an other approach. I'm going to take a variant of the original experimental demonstration of the endowment effect to show this. In our experiment, some participants are given a mug, then later asked how much they...

There has been a significant amount of noise on Twitter and elsewhere about 'The Dress', the phenomenon of a photograph of a dress which it is claimed that some people see as black and blue, and others as white and gold. My suspicion is that this is a hoax - a very nice piece of PR. The reason I am suspicious is that I've seen pictures on different sites where I see it as each of the colours (and the pictures are different at the RGB level)*. But if it were genuine, it would simply be demonstrating how false the image of the world we think we see through our eyes really is. This was one of the points I wanted to demonstrate when writing The Universe Inside You . In its predecessor, Inflight Science , I included a series of science experiments that the reader could do on a plane. It was a bit harder to do something similar with TUIY, where I wanted to show things from optical illusions, with a reveal of what was happening, to demonstrations of a Crookes radiometer and...

One of the saddest things about the way chemistry teaching has progressed is the way experiments have been made safer and safer. In our after school chemistry club I once did an experiment using hydrogen cyanide as an ingredient - somehow I can't see it being employed today. And the modern idea of a chemical volcano is the impressively bubbly but totally un-volcano like result of combining sodium bicarbonate and vinegar. But back in the day we could produce much more impressive volcanoes that threw out sparks and sent ash flowing, as you will discover in my latest Royal Society of Chemistry podcast. To find out more about ammonium dichromate, take a listen by clicking play on the bar at the top of the page - or if that doesn't work for you, pop over to its page on the RSC site . And in case you'd like to see it action (though the real thing is better):  

Now look, I am all in favour of this science thing. I spend my time telling people how good it is, and writing about its wonders. So you would think that in return it could at least behave itself. But no. It has to go and show itself up for the spoiled brat of an intellectual field that it is. It's all a matter of carnations. Go red, you horrors! In my role of occasional domestic lab assistant I was asked to prepare a classic 'carnations with food dye to demonstrate osmosis' jobby. No worries. I did it all by the book. Fresh flowers? Check. Newly cut diagonally under water to prevent air bubbles? Check. Warm but not hot water? Check. Ten to twenty drops of food colouring? Check. And three days the later the little horrors have not taken on a hint of colour. My suspicion is that they are now treating flowers to make them last longer out of water without wilting with something that prevents or at least reduces their ability to take in water. But that's not the ...

When I wrote The Universe Inside You I wanted to include a series of experiments to try out as I had done in Inflight Science . The difference was that many of these experiments were going to involve using your body as a lab, with quite a few using the brain. It seemed the best thing to do would be to put together a website with those experiments that aren't so easy to do on the kitchen worktop, as opposed to (say) dropping antacid tablets in vinegar or extracting DNA (both in the book). And while I was at it, I could provide a more detailed 'further reading' section with links to other books, as a good few people had suggested that Inflight Science should have had suggestions for finding out more. The outcome was www.universeinsideyou.com - I originally intended this purely as an adjunct to the book, but I've showed it to a sample of people who assure me it is quite interesting in its own right, so on their recommendation it's worth taking a look even if you...

A simulation of a Higgs discovery. Allegedly. The recent kerfuffle about faster-than-light neutrinos has stirred an old concern in my mind. One of the essentials of good science is being able to replicate the results. Any particular experimental setup can always mislead those using it because they get something wrong that they don't realize. This is why the neutrino guys have asked other experimenters to try to confirm what they have found. A classic lesson in the dangers of relying on a single experimental setup is the one that emerges from the work of Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons. They were the people behind the cold fusion debacle in 1989. This was, as far as I can tell, a serious experiment by good scientists. They got some amazing results from their single experimental setup then did something stupid. Instead of attempting to publish in a journal and get peer review, they went straight to the press. There are two reasons this was stupid. It was partly because it...

I was listening to Radio 4's All in the Mind yesterday. It's not a programme I often catch, but I was on a long drive back from talking at Spalding Grammar School , a situation where I tend to give myself up to whatever Radio 4 has to offer. (I even listen to the plays.) Something really strange happened on this programme, which illustrated either the dangers of doing science journalism badly, or the ethical dilemmas facing experimental psychologists. The story was illustrating how feedback influences sporting performance. Dr Tim Rees of Exeter University was putting forward the idea that positive feedback after failure, emphasing what can be changed rather than what can't improves performance. Although this is vaguely self-evident, it's quite interesting - but the BBC presenter decided to illustrate the theory with an 'experiment.' The idea was that she was to throw darts at a dartboard blindfolded. She would then be given feedback and they would see how i...

Moral dilemmas are very fashionable in science. A number of the softer -ologies have over recent years produced some cunning thought experiments to test how we react, and why we react, to moral challenges. One of the most famous of these is the trolley dilemma. (I believe this refers to what we'd call a tram in Europe, rather than the sort of things desserts used to be served on.) Test subjects are presented with a hypothetical choice. A runaway trolley is about to smash into five people and kill them. Would the subject press a button which switched the trolley onto another track where it would kill just one person? Pretty well unanimously they answer 'Yes,' even though they are going to be responsible for that individual's death. Then the subjects are presented with an alternative. They are to imagine themselves on a bridge over the trolley track. A runaway trolley is about to shoot under the bridge and kill five people. The only way to stop it is to push a very he...