How Hollywood Studios Harness Your Brainwaves to Win Oscars
One thing you aren’t likely to hear Sunday night from the Oscar-winning producer after accepting the trophy for Best Picture: “I’d like to thank my neuroscience partners who helped us enhance the film’s script, characters, and scenes.” It’s not that far-fetched, though. A sizable number of neuromarketing companies already brain test movie trailers for the…
Just How Likable Is Each Angry Bird Anyway?
We don’t really want to think about how many hours we’ve spent flinging little cartoon birds at little cartoon pigs—it’s too sad to consider all that wasted time. Instead we’re going to focus on which of those little cartoon birds we like best and why. And to help us, we’ve got a chart designed by…
Science explains why humor turns women on
We all know that women like funny guys (how else do you explain Woody Allen’s love life?), but empirical evidence for this phenomenon has been sorely lacking. Fortunately, in a recent study in the journal Psychological Reports, a French scientist took up the challenge of testing whether humor helps men pick up women. In the…
Helmet-Cam Captures What it’s Like to Fall Down a Mountain
When an adventurous skier tumbles backwards down the rocky side of a mountain his helmet-cam is there to record it all. According to his Vimeo account he was very lucky not to be seriously injured. Note: The great slip and fall starts at around the one minute mark. (via Reddit)
2 Planets Share the Same Orbit
Buried in the flood of data from the Kepler telescope is a planetary system unlike any seen before. Two of its apparent planets share the same orbit around their star. If the discovery is confirmed, it would bolster a theory that Earth once shared its orbit with a Mars-sized body that later crashed into it,…
