One amazing fact I bet you didn’t know about bacteria

I’ve just eaten a yoghurt, and as usual I was absentmindedly reading every last scrap of information on the packaging. Then I read something rather odd:

This yoghurt contains the friendly bacteria HOWARU™ Bifido, exclusive to Marks & Spencer. These can benefit your overall wellbeing by maintaining a healthy and balanced digestive system, if enjoyed once a day or more. HOWARU™ is a trademark of Danisco.

The mind boggles. I’ve always been somewhat skeptical of ‘friendly bacteria’ (if they’re so friendly, why do they never smile back?) but this one actually is…

Yoghurt: HOWARU™
Me: ‘Um, I’m fine thanks. I’m going to eat you now, sorry.’

But perhaps more importantly, I never knew you could trademark a type of bacteria, friendly or otherwise, and sell it to a shop to stick in food. Did anyone else know this? Am I simply incredibly ignorant in the ways of unicellular microorganisms?

Finally I just have to say, for the sake of public service, that the yoghurt was quite disappointing. Sharp, tangy and creamy, in a not entirely pleasant way. And although there are gloriously large chunks of cherry, they’re a bit dull and tasteless.

For the sake of 49p I just hope the fancy trademarked bacteria now sitting in my belly are busy educating the frankly less impressive local bacteria in how to be more polite.

How to write a great press release

Three unis, three press releases, one subject. Oh, the power of good writing: two of the universities produced really fascinating, grabby stories – each with a slightly different emphasis – and one was b-o-r-i-n-g.

Here are the three headlines and first paragraphs of each story, and I’ll let you decide for yourself which is the poorer story:

‘Super-fridge’ to help improve lives in developing countries (Imperial College London)
An all-in-one cooker, energy generator and fridge could soon be improving quality of life in developing countries, thanks to an international project launched this week.

Powered by sound – revolutionary stove could help reduce poverty (Nottingham)
It’s a cooker, a fridge and a generator in one – and it could have a huge impact on the lives of people in the world’s poorest communities.

University to develop three-in-one biomass appliance for the third world (Manchester)
The University of Manchester will play a major role in a £2m project that aims to deliver a wood-powered all-in-one generator, cooker and fridge into third world communities in five years.

It’s pretty obvious that Manchester is the dullard here. So what do the above examples teach us about good press release writing?

• Join-up the dots for us. What is a biomass appliance? Don’t know, don’t care. Stoves and fridges, however – now you’re cookin’.
• Make it news-worthy. Why should we care about this fridge-stove thing? Because it could reduce poverty and improve lives. Just being for the third world is not specific enough.
• Make it exciting. Don’t exaggerate, but if it’s genuinely super or revolutionary then say so.
• We don’t care who you are. Nottingham and Imperial concentrate on what has been developed, Manchester emphasise that they had a hand in the development.
• The first words count most. Nottingham and Imperial go straight in, while Manchester takes 18 words to get to the point of the story.

Anyone got any other tips for writing killer press releases?

Does language decide what you think?

Native Russian-speakers see the colour blue differently from native English-speakers, reports New Scientist.

Russian has no single word to describe the colour we (English speakers) understand as ‘blue’ – instead they make a distinction between light blue, pronounced “goluboy”, and dark blue, pronounced “siniy”. As a result, Russians are 10% faster at distinguishing light and dark blue colours.

“So Ruskies can get dressed quicker in the morning, so what” you might be thinking. Well, in addition to being a natty fact you can casually drop in to your next dinner party conversation to trump that old Eskimo /words for snow myth (more on that another day), this is good news for fans of the Sapir–Whorf school of linguistic thought.

Put simply, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis claims that language is not merely a passive mirror for our world, it actually influences the way in which we think about life.

Perhaps the best (and most sinister) example of S-W thinking is ‘Newspeak’, the fictional language of George Orwell’s 1984. Newspeak is a language with no way of expressing supposedly undesirable concepts such as ‘freedom’ – the belief being that if you can’t say it, you can’t think it.

Newspeak is obviously Sapir–Whorf-ing to the max, totally totalitarian-style, so don’t go assuming that SW is automatically A Bad Thing.

In any case, Noam “language is innate” Chomsky and Steven “thought is independent of language” Pinker have tag-team-trashed the Sapir–Whorf thinking pretty hard in recent years, so it’s not much to worry about any more.

Well, until these fascinating Russians and their blues of course – who’s up for another Sapir–Whorf revival?

Artificial snot enhances electronic nose

I get a daily news bulletin each day, and sometimes the headlines really throw me. The other week it was:

‘White dwarf and ultra-cool dwarf keep their distance’

But then the next one offered a clue to what it might be:

‘Radioactive brown dwarfs are a new type of pulsar’ (Both stories were from the Royal Astronomical Society).

Today’s strange headline was less a case of misinterpretation and more a case of plain straight-up oddity:

‘Artificial Snot Enhances Electronic Nose’

And you know what – it’s actually pretty interesting. Electronic noses can be used for quality control in the food industry, but they’re really limited to about 50 smell sensors (compared to your nose, which has about 100 million sensors).

However, by coating the electronic sensors in artificial snot – that is to say, a mix of polymers which act like snot – the nose is suddenly a lot more sensitive, and can now distinguish the smell of milk from banana, which it couldn’t before.

The reason why nasal mucus is so useful is that it ‘dissolves’ scents in the nose. Your snotty nose separates different odour molecules, allowing each type to be sensed by your nose at different times. Your brain then uses this speed/time information to better realise which smell you’ve just smelt, and then it’s up to you to decide if you want a banana milkshake or not.

Aint science cool! It’s almost as cool as an ultra-cool dwarf.

Who’s top dog? Read your emails

How emails are addressed say a lot about office politics, according to Norwegian scientists.

Karianne Skovholt studied over 700 work emails over a five-month period, and became very interested in why colleagues ‘cc-ed’ their workmates into emails.

She found that there were three main reasons for cc-ing:

1) To inform and document
2) To invite participation and seek support in conflicts

And, most interestingly,

3) To create visibility and positioning

You might have suspected it, but now you know it’s true: the humble cc field is a way of asserting rank and developing a complex work hierarchy.

“Employees can use an email’s cc function to position themselves in the organisational hierarchy under cover of simply wanting to provide information,” explained Skovholt. Not only this, but by copying in superiors, workers subtly exert pressure on the person the email is primarily addressed to.

Something to think about next time you send an email around the office…

Are your workmates liars, cheats and thieves?

Do you suspect that Andy from Sales fudges his expenses? Are your sandwiches only safe in the fridge when Pete from IT is on holiday? Does Trish from Accounts go strangely quiet when you demand to know who’s taken your stapler for, like, the fifth time this month, people!

Paranoid workers of the world – your suspicions are probably correct. Scientists from the University of Central Lancashire have found that a whopping 33% of your colleagues are indeed tricksters, although deceit is much easier in email than over the phone or face to face.

The most common forms of deception are ‘distortion of information’ (“The sandwich fell in my mouth”) withholding information (“I will not confirm or deny that I scoffed your sandwich”) providing deliberately ambiguous information (“From whence the sandwich came, thus we all too enjoy the bliss”) or changing the subject in order to deceive. (Look! Madonna on a horse!”)

In 15% of all communications, respondents admitted to actually lying. (“No I did not eat your delicious ham and cheese sandwich. And may I suggest that you use pickle instead of mayonnaise tomorrow.”)

So don’t trust email, or at least verify important information you’re worried about with face to face talking so you can hunt for clues. If Pete’s avoiding eye contact, touching his nose and –most importantly – has crumbs around his mouth, then you can be pretty damn sure he ate your sandwich. Thieving bastard.

Incidentally, Ms Wincy Shek, one of the scientists who conducted the research, commented: “Managers may be wise to encourage team-building and bonding activities in order to develop psychological closeness between themselves and their subordinates and also within all employees.” Not calling them ‘subordinates’ could be a good start…