body language

Robot swarms could someday hover, spin, and attack in response to a simple gesture or graceful pirouette from a human operator. And yes, Boeing has filed a patent on that future vision.

"The method may involve defining a plurality of body movements of an operator that correspond to a plurality of operating commands for the unmanned object," Boeing notes in its patent filing. "Body movements of the operator may be sensed to generate the operating commands."

From the US PopSci team

Remember the stereotype about the snotty rich kid? Well, now science may even support this old cliché. Generally, people gauge each other's wealth in material terms——the kind of car you drive, your house, or the clothes you wear. But, according to psychologists Michael W. Kraus and Dacher Keltner at the University of California, Berkley, body language also indicates where you stand in the economic pecking order.

Sorry fellas, but shes probably just being nice to you.

Many women know that men sometimes mistake friendliness—say, smiling and eye contact—for sexual interest. Psychological research has long backed up their experience. A new study appearing in the April issue of the journal Psychological Science is no exception. It found that college-age heterosexual men who viewed images of women misidentified their body language and facial expressions as sexually suggestive 12 percent of the time. Women made the same mistake only 8.7 percent of the time.

These findings are nothing new, but when the researchers ran the second part of the experiment a curious pattern emerged.