It has been said that (in some cases) court judges are more lenient on those accused of crimes if the date of the court hearing falls on the defendant’s birthday. But can things also work in the reverse direction? What if, for example, the judge’s favorite football team have just lost a match? Would they dish […]
The Ebbinghaus illusion (a.k.a. Titchener circles) is a robust optical illusion discovered more than 100 years ago. Two identically-sized* circles are presented, one is surrounded by large circles, the other by small circles. The one surrounded by small circles looks bigger. In 2012, a research group from Purdue University, the Max Planck Institute and the […]
Q. What is this man doing? A. He is strenuously tackling a ‘Scrummaging Machine’ developed at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Q. Why is he doing that? A. In order to assist with an experimental study into the effect of variations in the alignment of the feet on scrum kinetics during machine scrummaging. Q. […]
If you thought that ‘Score Celebration Injuries’ (SCIs) were restricted to soccer players – think again. A 2017 report in The Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness, 57(3 ): 267-71, reviews the medical literature on the subject, reporting that of the 62 SCIs that they found, only 22 involved professional soccer players. “A total […]