Last week, six contestants in a cycling race in Norway were poisoned after drinking laundry detergent. Drinking detergent seems like an exceedingly idiotic thing to do. So how come that six people did this? Well ...

(Source: Twitter)

... Omo Aktiv & Sport really looks like a sports drink.

In the beginning of 2006, there were almost one hundred reports of people being poisoned after drinking Fabuloso, a surface cleaner that promises to make dirty floors shine again. Why? Well ...

... Fabuloso really looks like a soft drink.

The reason that manufacturers make their cleaning products look like food is obvious. People like eating better than cleaning, so a cleaning product is more attractive if it looks edible.

Non-foods that look like foods, and non-drinks that look like drinks, are called food-imitating products. They are recognized as a public health risk by the European Union. If a detergent looks like a drink, someone will drink it. The result is a nasty case of poisoning, which, in rare cases, can be deadly. It's a problem.

The issue of food-imitating products was studied in an interesting, if somewhat quirky, study by Basso and colleagues. This study is not new, but I think it's worth mentioning again after the cycling-race incident in Norway. First, Basso and colleagues reviewed real-life cases of poisoning by food-imitating products. Surprisingly, at least to me, poisoning was not limited to children or elderly, groups that you might expect to make these kinds of mistakes more easily. Rather, there were several reports of …

I'm writing this on my way back from London, where I attended a workshop on publication bias that was organized by the NC3Rs (the British National Center for the Replacement, Refinement, and Reduction of Animals in Research). Publication bias arises when not all scientific studies are published, and when the chance of whether a study is published depends on its outcome. More specifically, studies that show a 'positive' result (e.g. a treatment effect, or something that supports a researcher's hypothesis) are published more often than studies that show a 'negative' result (e.g. no treatment effect, or something that doesn't support a researcher's hypothesis). Publication bias distorts scientific evidence. In most cases, it makes treatments (drugs, therapies, etc.) seem more effective than they are, simply because we only see studies that show positive treatment effects.

Publication bias is increasingly recognized as a severe problem that affects all areas of science. It's not new. It's just that until recently little was done about it. It was therefore great to see this workshop bring researchers, funders, publishers, and people from industry together with the aim of discussing concrete ways of reducing publication bias. In this post I would like to tell you about some of the things that were discussed.

There were many excellent speakers, but I will first highlight the opening talk by Emily Sena. Her talk was partly based on a meta-analysis in which she investigated publication bias in animal research on stroke treatment. Her work nicely shows how …

I recently had a little adventure on the Google Play store, where I publish a few apps. I wanted to share the story with you, because it illustrates the danger of having a single company (Google) that dictates an entire platform (Android) and its app store (Google Play Store).

It's about a game app called Infinite Maze. This is a cute little game that Theo Danes and I created as an entry for the 2014 Best Illusion of the Year Contest. A playable optical illusion! We didn't win, but I'm proud to say that we made the finals.

You can read more about the illusion here, but this post is about a trademark infringement that was filed by Namco against a dozen-or-so apps, including Infinite Maze. Namco is the company behind Pac-man. Their exact allegation was:

this app infringes PAC-MAN in the first game screenshot; PAC-MAN is clearly seen as the game title

Besides punctuation, there is something very wrong with this allegation: It is not true. Sure, Infinite Maze is a labyrinth game, and it's clearly inspired by Pac-man. In the past, I have even referred to it as Infinite Maze of Pac-man. But before uploading it to the Google Play store, I removed all mention of the word 'pac-man' in the game so that I wouldn't violate any trademarks. The word 'pac-man' now only occurs in the app description in the context of 'a pac-man-inspired game'. A phrasing that, as far as I know, doesn't constitute trademark infringement …

Tens of thousands of psychology students have spent hundreds of thousands of hours in stuffy little lab cubicles doing visual-search experiments. They have searched for diamonds among squares, red lines among green crosses, smileys among frowneys, and so on. You would think that by now every conceivable visual-search experiment has been done. But no, there's still cool stuff left.

In a study that just appeared in Journal of Vision, Erik van der Burg and his colleagues used a genetic algorithm to breed the best visual-search display. That is, they used evolution through 'natural' selection to create a display in which a target object was super easy to find. The results are a little surprising, which makes this experiment extra cool.

Natural selection applied to visual-search displays. The fittest displays from generation 1 are crossbred to create the displays from generation 2. The target is the horizontal red line segment in the center.

Van der Burg and colleagues started with random displays that consisted of tilted red, green, and blue line segments. There was always one horizontal red line segment: the target. Participants had to find the target and indicate whether or not there was a small gap in it. The (r)evolutionary aspect of their experiment was that each display had a fitness, which simply corresponded to the speed with which participants found the target. Next, they used the three fittest displays to create a second generation of displays, which were random mixtures of their fit parents, with a little …

Let's try a little trick.

1. Take a piece of cardboard and punch a small hole in it, no bigger than say two millimeters. If you're in a bar—this is one of those bar tricks—a beer coaster will do just fine.
2. Cover your right eye with the piece of cardboard so that you can see through the hole. Make sure that no light gets through, except for through the hole.
3. Cover your left eye with your hand. Make sure that no light gets through at all.
4. Now uncover your left eye and watch what happens to the hole: It shrinks!
5. Now recover your left eye with your hand, and watch the hole become bigger again.

This trick allows you to see your own pupillary light response. When you remove your hand from your left eye, the light that suddenly enters the eye causes your pupils to constrict. (Your right pupil as well as your left, because pupils always act together). And this, in turn, causes the little hole to appear smaller. In other words, the apparent size of the hole directly reflects the size of your pupil! (If you're brave you can try to figure out the optics behind this effect. It took me a while.)

All of this was just an elaborate introduction to tell you what you already know: Pupils respond to light. Brightness causes pupils to constrict, and darkness causes pupils to dilate. But what you may not know (unless you read my previous post) is …