Today in 1903, the birthday of Dr. Claire Weekes, who helped the world understand that sometimes the way to stop a spell of anxiety in its tracks… is, in a way, to stop trying to stop it.
Dad jokes may not be good jokes, but they may be good for us: a study from The British Psychological Society shows how telling a very simple, groan-inducing joke is a pretty complex process.
The University of Cambridge did a study about robotic wellbeing coaches. And it turns out that if we want robots to help us help ourselves… they need to be cute.
Today in 2016, researchers released a study that showed how to influence rats to make risky bets in a “rat casino.”
There's a new technique that could help people trying to fend off chronic nightmares - and it involves playing "neutral" piano chords at just the right times.
Back about 120 or so years ago, in Berlin, Germany, you might have encountered a strange sight: a man named Wilhelm Von Osten asking math questions of a horse named Clever Hans. Was the horse actually solving the problems, or was something else at work?
A University of Oregon study on what's called the “perceiver-elicited similarity effect" finds that when you’re nice, that can lead to more niceness around you! Plus: today in 1910, what’s believed to be the first movie stunt took place. And it was quite a stunt.
Plus: if you're weary of remote meetings, a new web tool called Zoom Escaper may help you get a break.
The sunk-cost fallacy - when we keep at something even when it’s really not worth it anymore, just because we’ve already put so much time or effort in - is a part of human nature. But new research shows it's also a part of the nature of - this is the best part - video game playing monkeys. Plus: our first story on world records of 2021. Meet the world's largest spam musubi!
A new study from researchers at Aoyama Gakuin University and Osaka University finds that something interesting happens when we’re trying not to reveal something: our perception of time slows down. Plus: MIT physicists have designed a model for a super-accurate atomic clock that even accounts for quantum physics.
