Though they relate to different senses and experiences, colour and taste are so entwined as to overlap in meaning – making yellow synonymous with lemons, brown with chocolate and orange with, well oranges. The strength of the relationship is revealed when you imagine a topsy-turvy world in which beer is green, tomatoes brown and rice blue…

We associate colours and tastes to such an extent that we mix them, speaking of lemon yellow, lime green, tangerine, plum red, chocolate brown and so on. In fact, many of the characteristics we ascribe to a certain tone, such as fresh green or deep burgundy, are at least in part drawn from the foodstuff they remind us of. Naturally there are also variants, such as white chocolate, green tomatoes and brown rice, but while we have grown used to these it feels odd to stray too far from the combination of tones and flavours that have become engrained in our brains, as well as our eyes and taste buds. Read the rest of this entry »

After last year’s highly informative seminar in Málaga, during which friends and colleagues not only exchanged information but also had lots of fun, we had high expectations of the WABAS 2014 meet-up in Granada.

We hadn’t been to this historic gem of a city for many years, and you know, it was even nicer than I remembered. The grand historic buildings and monuments looked as good as ever, the streets even livelier and the number of restaurants, cafés and bars seems to have mushroomed apace with Granada’s reputation as a university city. It is now the biggest Erasmus university in Europe, drawing thousands of especially language students to its lecture halls and exchange programmes. Read the rest of this entry »

Cat Gaa and Hayley Salvo met in Spain, having left the United States to embark upon new lives in the country. They found they had a great deal in common, amongst others just how complicated and challenging it was to tackle the paperwork, bureaucracy and the official documentation before they could relax into the laidback Spanish way of life. To help others avoid the same pitfalls, they decided to work together and compare an e-book guide to moving to Spain. Read the rest of this entry »

Do Sphinx-like monuments and water irrigation systems point to the existence of an ancient civilisation on Mars? Among a great many other conspiracies, NASA is being accused of ‘covering up’ what it really knows about the red planet, reports Michel Cruz.

In July 1976 NASA’s Viking 1 spacecraft was put into orbit around Mars, on a seemingly standard mission to look for suitable landing sites for the impending Viking 2 mission. As its cameras scanned the red planet’s surface, however, they suddenly came across a feature so incredible that it would not only spark off a sensation, but also a legion of fanciful hypotheses about life on Mars. The images beamed back to earth by Viking Orbiter 1 were of a land form that so strongly resembled a human face, complete with eyes cast in shadows, a narrow nose and frowning mouth, that to many it had the unmistakable appearance of an Egyptian Pharaoh. And so the mysterious ‘Face on Mars’ was born, capturing the attention of millions across the world and completely overshadowing what had started as a scientific probe into the mysteries of our nearest planetary neighbour. Read the rest of this entry »

July 20^th 1969, the day ‘the eagle landed’ and Neil A. Armstrong took his famous “one small step for a man and one giant leap for mankind”, was humanity’s proudest moment—or was it? So incomprehensible was the news that we had landed a manned craft on the moon, that it temporarily brought together a world steeped in political conflict. The moon landing was born out of the space race—in itself yet another manifestation of the cold war—and it was certainly a major coup for the USA, but the sheer accomplishment of it had a profound effect on people the world over. For a brief moment, the world came to a standstill as images were beamed from the moon in a testimonial to what humans are capable of. Read the rest of this entry »