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Here we are at the end of one more exciting and fascinating week. It’s our time to summarise what have happened during the previous 7 days. The focus of today’s editor’s selection would be on psychology, neuropsychological and medical research. So, let’s start our journey!

Psychology: How many senses do we have?

We often talk of having five senses as a universal truth. In reality, there may be more – or fewer – depending on the way you look at the question. Christian Jarrett explains the controversy.

Smokers learn to cut down while they sleep

Any smoker can tell you how hard it is to kick the habit. Nicotine is one of the most addictive drugs that we know of, and smoking is one of the deadliest of habits, killing more than 5 million annually. Smokers are well aware of the risks, and every year more than one third of them make at least one attempt to stop, but only 2-3% manage to do so.

Training can lead to synesthetic experiences: Does learning the ‘color of’ specific letters boost IQ?

A new study has shown for the first time how people can be trained to ‘see’ letters of the alphabet as colors in a way that simulates how those with synesthesia experience their world.

Less Talk, More Therapy

Settled on her table that first day, I explained to her that I’d had many intractable physical problems in the last several years, the most recent being a pain in my knee that no medical professional could make heads or tails of. I couldn’t sit cross-legged on the floor or rise up out of a full squat, and I’d feel a sharp stab whenever I slipped that leg into my jeans. Some yoga practitioners that my husband knew had recommended I see her about this.

Thank you so much for your attention. We are coming with new stories soon!

Chemists have developed a revolutionary new way to manufacture natural chemicals and used it to assemble a scarce anti-inflammatory drug with potential to treat cancer and malaria.

The breakthrough could lead to new and cheaper ways to produce rare drugs in large quantities.

“We took small molecules and clipped them together like Lego,

You might think that a movie about information from 1953 couldn’t possibly be relevant in the age of iPhone apps and the Internet but you’d be wrong. A Communications Primer, directed by that power couple of design Charles and Ray Eames, might refer to some hopelessly quaint technology – computer punch cards, for instance – but the underlying ideas are as current as anything you’re likely to see at a TED talk. You can watch it below.

In fact, the film made for IBM was the result of the first ever multi-media presentations that Charles Eames developed for the University of Georgia and UCLA. Using slides, music, narration and film, Eames broke down some elemental aspects of communications for the audience. Central to the film is an input/output diagram that was laid out by Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, in his 1949 book, The Mathematical Theory of Communication. As the perhaps overly soothing narrator intones, any message is transmitted by a signal through a channel to its receiver. While in the channel, the signal is altered and degraded by noise. The key to effective communication is to reduce “noise

Physicists at ANU have engineered a spiral laser beam and used it to create a whirlpool of hybrid light-matter particles called polaritons.

“Creating circulating currents of polaritons – vortices – and controlling them has been a long-standing challenge,

WHO warned recently that progress towards the elimination of measles has stalled. The number of deaths from measles increased from an estimated 122 000 in 2012 to 145 700 in 2013, according to new data published in the WHO Weekly Epidemiological Report and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The estimated number of measles deaths in 2013 represents a 75% decline in mortality since 2000, significantly below the target of a 95% reduction in deaths between 2000 and 2015.

“Poor progress in increasing measles vaccination coverage has resulted in large outbreaks of this highly contagious disease, throwing the 2015 elimination targets off-track,

The ocean is warming steadily and setting up the conditions for stronger El Niño weather events, a new study has shown.

A team of US, Australian, and Canadian researchers sampled corals from a remote island in Kiribati to build a 60-year record of ocean surface temperature and salinity.

“The trend is unmistakeable, the ocean’s primed for more El Niño events,

Welcome at the end of one more exciting and this time, we could say, historically amazing week. Namely, these days we are witnessing a highly interesting ESA’s mission called Rosetta. For such a reason, this week’s review will be dedicated to that mission and some space science and industry stories. So, let’s go through the top news of this week.

Are we sending aliens the right messages?

By broadcasting formulae of aromatic chemicals, she says, aliens could reconstruct all sorts of whiffs that help to define life on Earth: animal blood and faeces, sweet floral and citrus scents or benzene to show our global dependence on the car. This way intelligent life forms on distant planets who may not see or hear as we do, says Paterson, could explore us through smell, one of the most primitive and ubiquitous senses of all.

Philae lander sends back first ever image from comet

The picture shows the cracked, bumpy surface in monochrome, with one of Philae’s three legs in the bottom left of the frame. It is not yet clear whether the leg in the image is actually touching the surface. What is certain is that Philae is not level, and may be wedged into a pit.

The Adventures of Rosetta and Philae

The giant antenna dishes of the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex are supporting the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft, relaying data that the refrigerator-sized Philae probe has commenced its descent to the unknown surface of Comet 67-P Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

Intergalactic ‘wind’ is stripping galaxies of star-forming gas

Astronomers have provided the first direct evidence that an intergalactic ‘wind’ is stripping galaxies of star-forming gas as they fall into clusters of galaxies. The observations help explain why galaxies found in clusters are known to have relatively little gas and less star formation when compared to non-cluster or ‘field’ galaxies.

These would be all for this week. Thank you so much for your attention. We are coming with new stories soon!

New research has found Mountain Ash forests provide more value to the community and the global climate when protected and not logged.

Research scientists at the ANU, in partnership with information and communication technologists at Fujitsu Laboratories in Japan, have used long-term field data from the Central Highlands in Victoria to calculate the social, economic and environmental values of the forests after wildfire and after logging.

“Quantifying natural resources and the services they provide for human wellbeing is important in evaluating land management decisions,

Most people know that Mark Twain wrote about Jim and Huckleberry Finn navigating down the Mississippi. Less well known is that he occasionally dabbled in the burgeoning genre of science fiction. His 1898 short story “The Great Dark