Dec 30
Rob Jenkins and a team of scientists at the University of York’s Department of Psychology have demonstrated that people can recognize a suspects’ face reflected in a victims’s cornea 80 percent of the time:
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Nov 05
You know how your mom used to yell that playing video games would turn your brain into mush? Turns out she was exactly wrong. A new study shows that playing Super Mario 64 for half an hour a day over the course of two months causes a "significant" increase in brain size.
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Oct 28
Everyone knows what it feels like to be absolutely terrified. And while it might not be your favorite flavor of fun, you can’t deny it’s a rush. That’s because your brain takes fear as a cue to start dishing out its own kind of halloween candy in the form of delicious neurotransmitters.
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Oct 21
Are folks in California actually laid back? Are New Yorkers really rude? Wonder no longer, because now a team of researchers has mapped personality clusters across the US and presented them in this fascinating set of maps.
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Sep 17
You can call them Rorschach tests, or you can call them inkblots. But what happens when you merge the idea of abstract symmetry with photography? You get the incredible entrants in this week’s Shooting Challenge.
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Sep 12
None of us want to admit it, but chances are we’re all fanboys of something. Whether it’s a particular brand of software, gadget, or anything else, we often rally behind companies and ideologies without even realizing it. Here’s why we become fanboys and how to prevent it from happening to you.
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Jun 27
The media is full of geek stereotypes, everywhere from Big Bang Theory to episodes of CSI and NCIS
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Jun 26
Be careful next time you reach for a spoon: your choice of cutlery could significantly affect the way your food tastes.
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Apr 08
One late evening in the early summer of 1981, lying sleepless in my student bedsit at the top of a house in Manchester, I became aware of a pattern of bright flashing lights on the wall. All I could see through the curtainless window on the opposite side of the room was a strip of rather cloudy night sky. The vivid flashing was coming from within, or perhaps behind, a bank of cloud. As I continued to watch, an object materialized from within the cloud, advancing until it stood in plain view in the night sky. More »
Feb 15
Lab rats have it bad enough having to jump through hoops and perform in order to be studied, but now life just got worse for the furry rodents. Scientists at Japan’s Waseda University have created a robotic rat designed to terrorize their organic lab rats, inducing stress and depression so their reactions can be studied.
Scientists need to depress rats in order to do things like test drugs for depression. I guess it’s hard to make a rat depressed, but with a robot rat harassing them constantly, they will be sad sacks in no time. The robot can be programmed to chase or attack a rat, or can become its only source of food.
Talk about psychological torture. These rats will be really bummed out and soon they will fear robots just like us.
[via Gizmodo via IEEE Spectrum via Geekosystem]
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