May 24, 2011
Science in the sun
Listing of our antics including Glastonbury, the Secret Garden Party, Dirt Banquet and the Dirt Season in the New Scientist Culture Lab festival roundup.
May 17, 2011
Smelly Tweeting
How long can you last without washing? Could you endure 40 days? What if there were a sweet prize at the end – say, a ticket to the Secret Garden Party?
We cordially invite all with a partiality for putridity to join us as we investigate what it means to be dirty and attempt to last 40 nights without a wash.
How could the shunning of soap change the way you live your life, how you feel about yourself, or what others think of you? And does being stinky affect your sex appeal? Napoleon certainly is famed for having written to Josephine, “Will return to Paris tomorrow evening. Don’t wash.”
We are issuing a call to arms for the defense of dirt in collaboration with Dr Leslie Knapp, an immunogeneticist and expert on the role of smell in human behaviour. With the assistance of Dr Knapp, we will recreate the famed t-shirt experiment alongside the competition to investigate the molecular basis of attraction.
Contestants must report daily on Twitter using the hashtag #smellytweet about their experience of being physically filthy, the reactions of those around them to their odiferous state, how being dirty makes them feel, and their reasons to quit the contest should they choose to drop out.
Discover your own personal capacity for dirtiness and let us know by entering our Smelly Tweeter competition which launches on 21 May. Sign up by 18 May here.
Image credit: Bark
This competition is part of our exploration and celebration of all things filthy as part of the Wellcome Trust’s Dirt season.
May 16, 2011
T-shirt Experiment
At the Secret Garden Party this July, we will host a Feast of Stenches with molecular immunologist Dr Leslie Knapp. We will re-create the famed “t-shirt experiments”, which have examined how research subjects will preferentially rate different human smells – in the form of dirty t-shirts – for their attractiveness. A short film on the wonderful American network PBS can be seen here.
Remarkably, research has shown that our preferences for smells are determined by subconscious genetic cues. The same genes that determine how we smell – known as the “MHC cluster” in animals and the “HLA” in humans – also play a key role in programming how our immune systems operate by determining what innate and individual resiliences we all possess.
Lab animals as well as people will preferentially choose mates who possess MHC clusters that are different from their own, which most scientists believe acts as a subconscious mechanism that protects against inbreeding. Dr Knapp’s own research on mandrills has demonstrated that individuals will use smell to “identify potential partners with the appropriate genes,” as she puts it.
In humans, some fascinating studies (such as this one) have found that when women are shown photographs of men and given a selection of smell samples from the same men (though without knowing which smell belonged to which man), their choices frequently matched: the scents they deemed sexy often came from faces they declared handsome.
“We humans usually think that we pick our mates according to how they look – we first think of ‘love at first sight’ – we don’t appreciate the importance of smell,” she says. “But studies of primates and even studies of humans have shown that our ability to smell is very important, even in present day society – how we perceive the smell of someone has an influence on how we react to them, and there is good evidence to suggest that it has important influences on how we choose our mates.”
By Zoe
May 15, 2011
Sunday Times
Louise Wise of the Sunday Times discusses our upcoming Decontamination Chamber at Glastonbury this year in a Culture section feature about how “the British festival, maturing nicely, is hosting a wider and more interesting selection of arts projects than ever before.”
This collaboration, manned by the art-cum-science outfit Guerilla Science, promises a spin on the Wellcome Collection’s current exhibition, Dirt.
Guerilla Science’s Jenny Wong gives a breathless account of what we can expect, a Decontamination Unitriffing off both Dir t and Shangri-La’s charming overall 2011 theme, viral outbreak. The whole installation seems to involve hexagonal chambers, UV lighting, something called a Shame Drain and, as Wong puts it, “screens bombarding you with loads of visual information about viruses and viral outbreaks”.
Describing the cornucopia of art installations and immersive creations to be found at British festivals:
In other words, it can go deeper than stone circles and fairy lights. Of course, how much is remembered once the hangover sets in is a moot point. Then again, nobody wants our festivals to grow up entirely.
Dear heavens no!
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