I have very vivid dreams, many of them, each and every night, some of which the details I remember after I wake up, though others quickly fade from memory. It turns out that everybody dreams during the REM (rapid eye movement) period of sleep but not everyone recalls those dreams on waking up, so the difference between people who say they dream a lot and those who claim to dream a little or not at all lies only in the recall of them. According to Susan Blackmore in Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction (p. 99), “In a typical night’s sleep the brain cycles through four stages of non-REM sleep; first going down through stages 1-4, then back up to stage 1, and then into a REM period, repeating this pattern four or five times a night.”
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As someone who has family in Sri Lanka and New Zealand, this necessitates periodic long flights. Fortunately for me, I do not suffer as much from jet lag as some others do. I am usually back to normal within a day of arrival at my destination whereas I have friends who take up to a week. My personal hypothesis is that the after-effects of jet lag are caused largely by tiredness due to lack of sleep. As a result, on these long flights, I ignore all the in-flight entertainment and instead spend as much of my time as possible sleeping, only waking up to eat or read. Fortunately I can sleep seated.
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In an earlier post, I linked to a test to see how good we are at recognizing faces. There is also software that takes measurements of parts of the face that are supposedly highly distinctive (such as the shape of the ear) and uses that data to find points of similarity to give estimates of the likelihood of an exact match.
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I came across a paper that looked at the vexing question of why we so often spill coffee when walking with a cup of it, and what might be done to prevent it. Of course, coffee shops give us lids but quite often we use actual mugs that do not come with lids. The research was stimulated when a physicist at a conference watched his colleagues walk gingerly while holding cups of coffee and started wondering about it.
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You can give them a Pythagoras Cup. Sir Martyn Poliakoff, who could have been the model for the look of a stereotypical scientist, explains what it is and how it works.

That Pythagoras, such a kidder!

This article says that what dogs see when they watch TV is different from humans.

This research indicates that dogs have a preference towards watching other canines – but our studies have also discovered that sound often initially attracts dogs towards television and other devices. Favoured sounds include dogs barking and whining, people giving dog-friendly commands and praise, and the noise of toys squeaking.

How dogs watch TV is very different to the way humans do, however. Instead of sitting still, dogs will often approach the screen to get a closer look, and walk repeatedly between their owner and the television. They are essentially fidgety, interactive viewers.
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I disapprove of anti-bacterial soaps but the selection of regular liquid soaps was getting smaller and smaller in stores. So I was encouraged by the decision of the FDA to ban them because not only were their benefits unproven but they may even do more harm than good.
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