Can cat videos really make you 27% more productive? — Did you just waste the past hour watching cute kittens on YouTube? Psychologist Hiroshi Nittono from Hiroshima University wants you to know that was time well spent. In 2012, Dr. Nittono asked students to perform a visual search on numerical matrices before and after viewing pictures of baby animals. …

I feel sorry for the girl named “Talula Does the Hula From Hawaii” — In New Zealand, baby names must be approved by the Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages before they become official. Most parents won’t even notice. Just pick a reasonable name, and it will be approved without hassle. But what the government thinks of as “reasonable” is still a bit of…

Science reveals one thing full-time writers do, but amateurs don’t — In 2014, neuroscientist Katharina Erhard used MRI scanners to measure the brain activity of several dozen writers as they sat down (or rather, lied down) to produce a piece of fiction. Roughly half of participants were full-time writers, while the others wrote in their spare time. Performing this experiment was…

A Nobel judge fears Western literature is doomed — While serving as a judge for the Nobel prize in literature, Horace Engdahl noticed a disturbing decline in quality from Western authors. Americans are the worst culprits. Until recently, “writer” was not a profession. There was so little money to be made that writers needed to support themselves through other…

No, AI is not on the verge of taking over the world — An Amazon seller uses an advanced AI bot to generate cell phone cases. The more clicks an item gets, the more similar images it uses to create new designs. But if a design gets zero attention, it gets deleted. Unfortunately, AI has a tough time trying the difference between amazingly…

His clean toilets and sparkling windows inspired an entire generation of air force cadets — Hundreds of cadets roamed the halls of the US Air Force Academy, leaving an enormous mess for the janitor to clean. For years, William Crawford went about his job, never complaining and not even revealing the truth about his past. The bathrooms sparked, but few people noticed. In fact, most…

Platforms reward authors who brag about their earnings to conceal how they’ve been cutting our pay — In 2020, readers spent 5.5 billion dollars on pleasure reading, setting a record as the most lucrative year in history. But at the same time, author incomes have dropped by a staggering 42% over the past decade. In 2018, three professors from the University of London surveyed 50,000 full-time and…

Are you up to the challenge? — If you can’t bear the thought of being torn from your pillow, you’ll be excited to learn that you can earn $18,500 for remaining in bed for two months straight. NASA, the European Space Agency, and the German Aerospace Center are working together to study the effects of idleness on…

Say goodbye to writer’s block. Forever. — If you already know about how bird poop helps cool the artic or Napoleon’s infamous battle against 3,000 angry bunnies, you’ll have your next piece researched and written in no time. But have you ever tried doing a Google search for “interesting topics to write about?” …