Whether you prefer pumpkin, apple, or chocolate, you probably agree that pie is already amazing. But it can be made even better by carefully engineering the eating experience. Enjoying food is much more than just taste; sound, smell, sight and texture all play integral roles in how much we enjoy a given food. Popular Science talked with Charles Spence, a professor of experimental psychology at Somerville College in England, who studies the psychology and sensory experience of eating.
In the wake of massive #BlackLivesMatter demonstrations, the ugly implications of racism in the United States have come to the foreground. Prejudice, whether conscious or unconscious, exists on a much wider scale than most of us would like to admit. In fact, you can glimpse into your own brain and measure its unconscious attitudes toward various objects and ideas by taking an implicit association test, or IAT. (The results might surprise you.)
After a class on out-of-body experiences, a psychology graduate student at the University of Ottawa came forward to researchers to say that she could have these voluntarily, usually before sleep. "She appeared surprised that not everyone could experience this," wrote the scientists in a study describing the case, published in February in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.
Earth circa 1993 was a radically different place. In roughly two decades, technology has completely reorganised our lives, our workplaces, and our interpersonal interactions. We have more means and methods of communicating, of interacting, of collaborating and sharing information than we could have envisioned twenty years ago. It's easy to feel like there is no problem - especially where communication is concerned - that technology can't solve. At least until you run headlong into one that it can't.
Building a next-generation jet engine isn't easy, but from the cool confines of a blacked out holographic chamber in Brooklyn, it can at least be easier. Here, GE and its partners at BBDO New York have assembled ThrottleUp, an immersive 3-D holographic experience that lets users build one of GE's new energy efficient GEnx jet engines using a gesture controlled holographic interface.
According to a new study by sex researchers at the Indiana University, women having orgasms during exercise is a real phenomenon. As far as the researchers know, this is the first study that deals directly with exercise-induced orgasms (EIO), known colloquially as "coregasms" because they tend to occur during core-strengthening workouts, like sit-ups and crunches.