Infra-noise leads to ghost reports

And then there is sound we can't hear — infrasonic. In 1998, a group of scientists working in a laboratory began to feel as if they were in a haunted house: They thought they saw blurry gray figures and were full of dread, a science journal reported. They finally traced the effect to an extractor fan, whose infrasonic noise happened to be "at just the right frequency to make eyeballs vibrate and so perhaps to generate visual illusions."

-- from a review in today's NYT by Katherine Bouton of
Discord: the Study of Noise, by Mike Goldsmith

Today's most horrifying image of scientific research

The new research involved numerous experiments in mice aimed at teasing out what happens to both brain and behavior when ketamine takes effect. In one such test, mice were forced to swim in a water-filled tube that they cannot escape. Previous research has shown that mice given antidepressants swim longer before giving up: a sign that the drugs are working.

-- From a Time article
on new uses for the drug ketamine

Isn't that a wonderful image for the use of anti-depressants in modern society: Although you are existentially trapped, you "swim longer before giving up." Lovely.