Answering some questions from this week's show...
Greg, the answer to your questions of exactly why and how a song gets stuck in your head is unavailable. There are some researchers looking into the question though, and hopefully they will be able to answer it shortly. The occurrence is formally known as the Stuck Tune Syndrome, and James Kellaris, a professor of social psychology and marketing at the University of Cincinnati, published his theory in October, 2001. According to Kellaris, a song will get "stuck" if it is repetitious, is musically simplistic, or contains an incongruity (like an odd metering). He interviewed 1000 students at 4 universities and learned that songs like 'The Macarena', 'Who Let the Dogs Out', the Chili's ad jingle, and the '1812 Overture' are on the list of frequently stuck songs. Kellaris believes that a stuck song is something like a neural "itch" caused by a certain type of song that needs to be scratched by repeating or practicing the song or part of a song over and over. Unfortunately, there is no cure, and Kellaris isn't looking for one. His research is aimed at giving the advertising and marketing industry more information about our heads for creating new songs that will remind us of products they want us to buy.
Polaroid has created a new film that even though it isn't sensitive enough for use in cameras will revolutionize digital color printing from here on. Normal film contains silver that must be processed using many harsh chemicals and baths in order to get a printed image. The new polaroid film gets rid of the silver and the many steps, and replaces them with an in sheet light-catalyzed acid reaction. The paper describing the method was published in a recent issue of
Science, and a short description can be found at the
Nature Science Update. I searched the Polaroid site, but was unable to find much press regarding this method. I believe that it relates to the Onyx system of digital printing that is described in the Instant Digital Printing "White paper" that can be downloaded from the Polaroid site. Basically, this new method of printing will enable photographers to print high-resolution color prints from digital images, which is something that has been limited by the current printing technologies (resolution is limited by the silver grains themselves). In addition, it could rid photographers of the cumbersome equipment and time needed to print images that have been in use since the early 1800's.
current science news posted by Kirsten at 8/13/2002 01:09:00 PM
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