Science Culture

A few weeks ago, some kids in New Jersey were removed from their home by Child Protective Services because their parents named them after Nazis. When the story got out, their dad told reporters that he didn’t think there was anything wrong with naming a kid Adolf Hitler Campbell. The media coverage around this story created an interesting new controversy. Is giving your child a bad name really a form of abuse?

The opening chord to “A Hard Day’s Night” has reached an almost mythical status. For years, no one knew what it actually was. People would come close, through trial and error, watching Ed Sullivan performances, and studying advanced music theory, but no attempts ever quite captured the exact chord.

In a recent study from UC Berkeley, scientists revealed significant physical differences in the brain development of children from different socio-economic backgrounds.

The first gamers were not the trendy young teens of today. Bad skin and thick rimmed glasses were practically mandatory for anyone intent on owning an Atari 2600. Perhaps it was the lack of real women in their lives, or maybe the rise of porn videos and lad mags in an increasingly hypersexualized media landscape, that led early programmers to quickly create female video game characters as roughly pixelated, highly sensualized sex objects. Whatever it was, that was only the beginning...

I love nerds. I loved nerds even when it wasn’t cool, so it’s nice to see them coming into their own on network TV. I remember a time when I was hard pressed to find one real nerd on prime time, never mind a quartet of physics-spouting, Klingon Boggle-playing super brains. Let’s face it: Charlie Epps has nothing on the characters of CBS’s The Big Bang Theory, a show full of loveable (albeit incredibly awkward) nerds. The show glorifies those of us who remember old school Ataris, the Flash, and know exactly how we roll in the Shire.

Everyone knows Halo gamers don't sleep. But now a group of scientists in Sweden have published new research linking violent video games to increased heart rate variability and sleep disruptions.

Two studies have come out in the last two weeks that have me seriously re-evaluating my life. The University of Maryland just released a study in which they asked the question, "Are happy or unhappy people more attracted to TV?" The second study, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, informs us that an obsession with celebrity gossip reduces our fear of death. I watch a lot of TV and I have The Hollywood Gossip bookmarked, so now I'm wondering if I'm an unhappy person who thinks she'll live forever.

Some people may not think of artists as being scientifically minded or scientists as caring about the arts, but it's a surprisingly common crossover. Look at Richard Feynman- he won the Nobel Prize for physics and loved painting... and bongo drums. David X. Cohen, who has a BA in physics from Harvard and an MS in computer science from Berkeley, is most well known as the co-creator and executive producer of Futurama, a FOX tv show set 1000 years in the future. Enter Christina Hurtado, PopSci.com's new columnist.