Inside Science News Service

July 17, 2008

A collection of brief stories from the world of science

Ferraris Are Red, Suzukis Are Blue

You're standing on a street corner, not doing much of anything, when you spot a bright red Ford Mustang coming your way. You admire its mean, retro look as it rumbles by, and then turn your attention to the light green BMW rolling down the pavement. It exudes power and efficiency as it passes by. So which car was louder? Odds are, even if the cars make exactly the same amount of noise, you'll pick the Mustang. German scientists with the Technische Universitat Munchen conducted experiments in which 16 people were shown four images of a sports car, each a different color. As the people looked at the red, blue, light and dark green images, they listened to sounds of the car accelerating. The researchers played four different decibel levels of acceleration for each color car. The red and dark green cars were perceived as being louder than the blue or light green cars. The conclusion, presented at a recent Acoustic Society of America conference, is that the color of an obje!
ct can influence how a person hears sound associated with the object.

A Roundhouse Kick to Martial Arts Judging

As if to confirm the findings about the influence of color on human perception, especially the color red, two researchers at the University of Durham in the United Kingdom found that Tae Kwon Do referees unconsciously favored a combatant dressed in red over a fighter wearing blue. The researchers showed 42 martial arts referees video clips of two equally skilled black belt competitors fighting. One competitor wore red protective gear (helmet and chest guard), the other wore blue. After the referees scored the fights, the video clips were digitally altered to switch the colors of the protective gear. The clips were show in a different order and the same referees scored them again. In a report on NewScientist.com, the researchers found that the referees gave 13 percent more points to the competitor wearing red, even when the only thing that changed was the color, not the kicks.

Bang! You Win

Sprinters looking for every advantage at the Olympics in Beijing should move as close to the starting gun as possible. Researchers at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, discovered that the louder the bang, the faster the start. The researchers first looked at the reaction times of sprinters in two races at the 2004 Olympics, and found that those closest to the starter had significantly faster reaction times out of the blocks. Then they lined up four trained sprinters and 12 other people and had them perform sprint starts from starting blocks set up to measure horizontal force. The researchers used a recorded gunshot and discovered that the louder the gunshot, the faster the reaction time of the participants. "We suggest that procedures presently used to start the Olympic sprint events give runners closer to the start the advantage of hearing the 'go' signal louder" said Alex Brown, a research student involved in the study, in a report on newswise.com. "Consequ!
ently, they react sooner than their competitors."

iPod, iDeaf

To determine if an entire generation of teenagers with their iPods cranked to Smashing Pumpkins and Slash guitar solos will eventually suffer from severe hearing loss, Italian secondary school students conducted a research project in which they checked the volume settings of mp3 players gathered from a group of teens. "More than 70% of the subjects had volumes set to over 80 d.B. (decibels)," the student researchers reported at an Acoustical Society of American conference in Paris. That's louder than a vacuum cleaner (80 d.B), but less than a jet engine (110 d.B.). The students, with the Liceo Classico G.D. Ramagnosi, in Parma, Italy, noted that, at more than 80 d.B., teenagers who listen for more than 8 hours a day are at risk. While 8 hours is a long time, the volumes of many of the mp3 players were set much higher. "We tried to estimate what a safe listening time would have been for those levels," the students wrote. "The results were astonishing, as almost 40% of th!
e subjects had times below one hour, and the average daily listening time is about two hours."

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