Flying in the face of the "Morningness" study...

Wow, lots of science news today to blog about. This study shows that students are smarter when they get more sleep. A scientist studied 8th graders in a two week test and proved that, if you get an extra hour's sleep in the morning, you are cognitively sharper.

I'm sure this guy impressed all his friends with this one.

This does fly in the face of the earlier article I blogged about where "morning" people do better than "night" people in school. I say we get these two scientists into a cage match to see who is more right.

Guy has idea, gets lots of press

Another useless science article, a scientist has *designed* a flying saucer that uses ionized plasma to fly.

Quoting the article: "But Roy is confident that the unique nature of his design will allow it to clear the technological hurdles and take to the skies, and he’s not deterred by the risk of failure."

It's a cool idea, and I'm interested in the mechanism of the device, but this article is honestly a perfect example of science fluff.

Faulty science

I hate science news sometimes. Here's an example:

Morningness Is A Predictor Of Better Grades In College

This article states that researchers found that students who are "morning people" get better grades than "evening people".

My problems with this:
1) This test was only taken by kids in psychology courses. This means that "morning psychology students" get better grades in psychology than their evening counterparts. It doesn't cross over to the bartender school across the street.
2) It's common sense: people who stay up later are sleepier during morning classes the next day. Why do they need a test for this? We all know sleepy people have a harder time staying awake during boring collegiate psychology lectures than their wide-awake morning-oriented classmates.

What this college should do is realize that "evening" people should have classes of their own to maximize their most alert hours.

Oh, I also think this quote is the height of hubris: "The finding that college students who are evening types have lower GPAs is a very important finding, sure to make its way into undergraduate psychology texts in the near future..."

Gosh, they are so very important, aren't they?

Movies control your brains!

Scientists shoved people into an MRI machine and took pictures of their brain as they watched movies. I'm pretty sure this won't transfer well to games, in that they tracked the similarity of the viewer's responses to the linear format of films. Games, being notoriously non-linear, (except for some well known Japanese cutscene-fests)probably won't be able to measure up quite as well. However, this research does point at Alfred Hitchcock as a master of getting viewers to suspend their disbelief and follow his movies like lemmings.

I think I'm going to have to get a book on Hitchcock's filming methodology.