Mozart may enhance a man's performance in board games - while AC/DC may hinder their chances, according to new research. Photo / File
Mozart may enhance a man's performance in board games - while AC/DC may hinder their chances, according to new research. Photo / File
Mozart may enhance a man's performance in board games - while AC/DC may hinder their chances, according to new research.
The scientists behind the study, from Imperial College London and the Royal College of Music, say classical music may be the best option for men when concentrating on a task.
Music was found to have no effect on women's performance, though they generally performed better than men at the game involved in the study.
In the research, the team asked 352 visitors at the Imperial Festival - an annual celebration of the science that takes place at Imperial - to play the game Operation.
This game involves removing various body parts from a pretend patient - Cavity Sam - whose nose flashes and buzzes if your tweezers touch the metal sides of the body.
Researchers gave the volunteers headphones that played one of three tracks - Andante from Sonata for Two Pianos by Mozart, Thunderstruck by AC/DC, or the sound of an operating theatre.
The team then timed how long it took the participants to remove three body parts, as well as tracking their mistakes.
The results revealed that men who listened to AC/DC were slower and made more mistakes, compared with men who listened to Mozart or the sound of an operating theatre.
Thunderstruck triggered about 36 mistakes on average, while the sonata and operating theatre noises caused 28.
We walk with "virtual legs"
Scientists say we walk using 'virtual legs'. Photo / 123RF
When we walk, we move like an inverted swinging pendulum, with our body essentially pivoting above the point where the foot meets the ground.
As we take a step, the centre of pressure slides across the length of the foot, from heel to toe, with the true pivot point for the inverted pendulum occurring midfoot and effectively several centimetres below the ground.
In a new study, scientists say it's this that essentially extends the length of our "virtual legs" below the ground, making them longer than our true physical legs.
"Humans land on their heel and push off on their toes," explains University of Arizona researcher James Webber, the paper's lead author.
"You land at one point, and then you push off from another point eight (20cm) to 10 inches away from where you started.
"If you connect those points to make a pivot point, it happens underneath the ground, basically, and you end up with a new kind of limb length that you can understand.
Mechanically, it's like we have a much longer leg than you would expect."
Webber and his colleagues were able to describe the process after monitoring study participants on a treadmill in their lab.
Winds of rubies and sapphires strike the sky of giant planet
This is an artist's impression of planet HAT-P-7b.
Photo / University of Warwick/Mark Garlick
Signs of powerful changing winds have been detected on a recently identified exoplanet 16 times larger than Earth, more than 1000 light years away - the first time that weather systems have been found on a gas giant outside our solar system.
Scientists from the University of Warwick have discovered that the gas giant HAT-P-7b is affected by large scale changes in the strong winds moving across the planet, likely leading to catastrophic storms.
The discovery was made by monitoring the light being reflected from the atmosphere of HAT-P-7b, and identifying changes in this light, showing that the brightest point of the planet shifts its position.
This shift is caused by an equatorial jet with dramatically variable wind-speeds - at their fastest, pushing vast amounts of cloud across the planet.
The clouds themselves would be visually stunning - likely made of up corundum, the mineral which forms rubies and sapphires.
The planet could never be inhabitable, because of its likely violent weather systems, and unaccommodating temperatures.
Switching to daylight saving time may lead to harsher legal sentences
Shortened sleep associated with the change to daylight saving time might also affect the severity of sentences doled out by judges, scientists say. Photo / 123RF
Judges in the United States tend to give defendants longer sentences the day after switching to daylight saving time compared with other days of the year, according to research published in the journal Psychological Science.
Previous research has shown that people tend to sacrifice, on average, about 40 minutes of sleep when they "spring forward" to daylight saving time, and even this small amount of lost sleep can have negative consequences, including an increase in workplace injuries, slacking off at work, and car accidents.
The results of this new research suggest that shortened sleep associated with the change to daylight saving time might also affect the severity of sentences doled out by judges.
"We find that the sentences given to those convicted of crimes may be partially polluted by the sleep of those giving the punishments," said lead author Kyoungmin Cho, University of Washington.
"Sleep is a factor that should not play a role in their sentences, but does."
