Empirical evidence for unique hues?

Red, green, blue, yellow, and white have been distinguished from other hues as unique. We present results from two experiments that undermine existing behavioral evidence to separate the unique hues from other colors. In Experiment 1 we used hue scaling, which has often been used to support the existence of unique hues, but has never been attempted with a set of non-unique primaries. Subjects were assigned to one of two experimental conditions. In the "unique" condition, they rated the proportions of red, yellow, blue, and green that they perceived in each of a series of test stimuli. In the "intermediate" condition, they rated the proportions of teal, purple, orange, and lime. We found, surprisingly, that results from the two conditions were largely equivalent. In Experiment 2, we investigated the effect of instruction on subjects' settings of unique hues. We found that altering the color terms given in the instructions to include intermediate hues led to significant shifts in the hue that subjects identified as unique. The results of both experiments question subjects' abilities to identify certain hues as unique

Making light work of heavy metal contamination::The potential for coupling bioremediation with bioenergy production

Intense anthropogenic activity continues to expose the natural environment to heavy metal contamination. Whilst a number of physical and chemical solutions for remediation exist, the use of higher plants and algae for clean‐up of contaminated landscapes, termed “phytoremediation” and “phycoremediation”, respectively, offer an attractive and sustainable alternative. However, these remediation processes will always lead to a high‐moisture, heavy metal‐contaminated biomass, which must be further processed to partition, or render inert, the metal contaminants. Conversion of this metal‐rich biomass into second‐generation biofuels offers a useful route to subsidise the economics of remediation activities. Here we briefly review the various methods for bioremediation of heavy metals, and discuss the potential to produce bioenergy from these biomass sources. Ultimately, coupling the bioremediation activity to bioenergy production gives far‐reaching social and economic benefits; however, established processes such as direct combustion and anaerobic digestion risk releasing heavy metals back into the environment. Alternatively, thermochemical conversions such as pyrolysis or hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL) offer significant advantages in terms of the segregation of metals into a relatively inert and compact solid phase while producing a biocrude oil for bioenergy production. In addition, preliminary work suggests that the HTL process can also be used to partition essential macronutrients, such as N, P and K, into an aqueous medium, allowing additional nutrient recycling

Biological origins of color categorization

The biological basis of the commonality in color lexicons across languages has been hotly debated for decades. Prior evidence that infants categorize color could provide support for the hypothesis that color categorization systems are not purely constructed by communication and culture. Here, we investigate the relationship between infants’ categorization of color and the commonality across color lexicons, and the potential biological origin of infant color categories. We systematically mapped infants’ categorical recognition memory for hue onto a stimulus array used previously to document the color lexicons of 110 nonindustrialized languages. Following familiarization to a given hue, infants’ response to a novel hue indicated that their recognition memory parses the hue continuum into red, yellow, green, blue, and purple categories. Infants’ categorical distinctions aligned with common distinctions in color lexicons and are organized around hues that are commonly central to lexical categories across languages. The boundaries between infants’ categorical distinctions also aligned, relative to the adaptation point, with the cardinal axes that describe the early stages of color representation in retinogeniculate pathways, indicating that infant color categorization may be partly organized by biological mechanisms of color vision. The findings suggest that color categorization in language and thought is partially biologically constrained and have implications for broader debate on how biology, culture, and communication interact in human cognition

Color comparisons and interpersonal variation

An important challenge to color objectivists, who hold that statements concerning color are made true or false by objective (non-subject-involving) facts, is the argument from interpersonal variation in where normal observers locate the unique hues. Recently, an attractive objectivist response to the argument has been proposed that draws on the semantics of gradable adjectives and which does not require defending the idea that there is a single correct location for each of the unique hues (Gómez-Torrente, 2016). In Hansen (2015), I argued that the recent objectivist response doesn’t apply to comparative occurrences of color adjectives, so a revised, comparative, version of the argument from interpersonal variation remains a powerful objection to certain types of objectivism. In this paper, I address several unsatisfactory objectivist replies to the comparative version of the argument from interpersonal variation, and offer what I think is a more plausible objectivist reply to the comparative argument from interpersonal variation

Batch and continuous removal of heavy metals from industrial effluents using microbial consortia

Bio-removal of heavy metals, using microbial biomass, increasingly attracting scientific attention due to their significant role in purification of different types of wastewaters making it reusable. Heavy metals were reported to have a significant hazardous effect on human health, and while the conventional methods of removal were found to be insufficient; microbial biosorption was found to be the most suitable alternative. In this work, an immobilized microbial consortium was generated using Statistical Design of Experiment (DOE) as a robust method to screen the efficiency of the microbial isolates in heavy metal removal process. This is the first report of applying Statistical DOE to screen the efficacy of microbial isolates to remove heavy metals instead of screening normal variables. A mixture of bacterial biomass and fungal spores was used both in batch and continuous modes to remove Chromium and Iron ions from industrial effluents. Bakery yeast was applied as a positive control, and all the obtained biosorbent isolates showed more significant efficiency in heavy metal removal. In batch mode, the immobilized biomass was enclosed in a hanged tea bag-like cellulose membrane to facilitate the separation of the biosorbent from the treated solutions, which is one of the main challenges in applying microbial biosorption at large scale. The continuous flow removal was performed using fixed bed mini-bioreactor, and the process was optimized in terms of pH (6) and flow rates (1 ml/min) using Response Surface Methodology. The most potential biosorbent microbes were identified and characterized. The generated microbial consortia and process succeeded in the total removal of Chromium ions and more than half of Iron ions both from standard solutions and industrial effluents

A neural signature of the unique hues

Since at least the 17th century there has been the idea that there are four simple and perceptually pure “unique” hues: red, yellow, green, and blue, and that all other hues are perceived as mixtures of these four hues. However, sustained scientific investigation has not yet provided solid evidence for a neural representation that separates the unique hues from other colors. We measured event-related potentials elicited from unique hues and the ‘intermediate’ hues in between them. We find a neural signature of the unique hues 230 ms after stimulus onset at a post-perceptual stage of visual processing. Specifically, the posterior P2 component over the parieto-occipital lobe peaked significantly earlier for the unique than for the intermediate hues (Z = -2.9, p = .004). Having identified a neural marker for unique hues, fundamental questions about the contribution of neural hardwiring, language and environment to the unique hues can now be addressed

Colour categories are reflected in sensory stages of colour perception when stimulus issues are resolved

Debate exists about the time course of the effect of colour categories on visual processing. We investigated the effect of colour categories for two groups who differed in whether they categorised a blue-green boundary colour as the same- or different-category to a reliably-named blue colour and a reliably-named green colour. Colour differences were equated in just-noticeable differences to be equally discriminable. We analysed event-related potentials for these colours elicited on a passive visual oddball task and investigated the time course of categorical effects on colour processing. Support for category effects was found 100 ms after stimulus onset, and over frontal sites around 250 ms, suggesting that colour naming affects both early sensory and later stages of chromatic processing

Testing the Strength and Robustness of the Attraction Effect in Consumer Decision Making

We report the results of an original experiment that was designed to test the strength and robustness of the attraction effect. Rather than the usual simple tests for this effect, we consider a conceptually simple consumer purchasing task where alternatives are however difficult to evaluate. For the attraction effect to be observed, the consumer must go through two steps: the first is to find out that two or more options are comparable, which leads him to exclude the dominated alternatives. The second is to favor the dominant option over those that are not comparable. Our experiment allows us to determine whether and how many individuals stop before each of those two steps. The results confirm the existence of an attraction effect in our setting, but the effect is not strong. Indeed, only a minority of subjects perform the second step. The effect is not robust to introducing larger differences in prices among options and to widening the range of options to choose from. We conclude by showing that our subjects would benefit from relying more on performing asymmetric dominance editing rather than on their skills in the purchasing task