Innovation Hub

Willpower isn’t the only thing dictating what you eat. Neuroscientist Rachel Herz says the color, shape, and presentation of food has a major impact on our diet.

Then, there’s not as much evidence-based decision-making in medicine as you might expect. We take a look at why.

Finally, we talk with physics professor Robbert Dijkgraaf about why funding basic scientific research can yield powerful results down the road.

We know that our brain plays tricks on us, but did you know the size of your plate can dictate how much you eat? Or that a bowl filled with jelly beans in a variety of colors will induce you to eat more than a series of bowls with the jelly beans separated out by color? Rachel Herz, a neuroscientist at Brown University and the author of Why You Eat What You Eat: The Science Behind Our Relationship with Food, describes the psychology that influences our eating habits.

Nearly half of medical procedures may not be based on sound science. That’s according to Eric Patashnik, director of Brown University’s public policy program. And he says it’s not necessarily your doctor’s fault. How did we get to this point? We put that question to Patashnik, who is co-author of the new book, “Unhealthy Politics: The Battle over Evidence-Based Medicine.”

Back in the 1990s, the Digital Libraries Initiative from the National Science Project supported a small project out of Stanford University. It sounded obscure, and a lot of people thought it wasn’t exciting, and would have little real-world application. But on that team were two graduate students – Larry Page and Sergey Brin – the founders of Google.

The modest grant ended up paying off very well, according to Robbert Dijkgraaf, a physics professor and the director of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. He recently wrote a companion essay to Abraham Flexner’s 1939 piece, “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge,” explaining why Flexner’s ideas are even more relevant today.

We talk with Dijkgraaf about why governments should fund more basic research that doesn’t necessarily have immediate results, like the project at Stanford – and how it can actually reap huge rewards in the long run.

Behind movies like “Sunset Boulevard” and “Singin’ In The Rain,” there’s a real story about how Hollywood adapted to a groundbreaking innovation: sound.*

IMAX, 3D glasses, VHS, technicolor… technology has continually reshaped Hollywood. But perhaps the biggest, most important change happened early in the industry’s history: the transition from silent films to talkies. Marc Wanamaker, a longtime Hollywood historian and consultant on films like “La La Land,” walks us through what happened, and how it forever transformed the silver screen.

David Rose has spent much of his career designing products that try to make the ordinary devices we use every day more magical: an umbrella that can tell you whether you actually need an umbrella that day, a pill bottle that alerts someone if you haven’t opened it in a while. We ask him how our products are learning more and more about us… and why that’s both good and bad.

How have the Amish thrived in a world without technology? They’ve hacked and innovated, says Elizabethtown College professor Donald Kraybill. Entrepreneurs can still succeed within the confines of their culture. It just takes a little imagination.

Turns out, the Russian Revolution can teach us a lot about the power of Twitter. Niall Ferguson walks us through the history of networks.

Olympic athletes aren’t born with a tolerance for pain. They’ve just learned how to suffer.

A tree a day keeps the doctor away. Florence Williams explains why going outside can make you feel better.

It’s easy to look at our social networks and think that they’re completely unprecedented. After all, it wasn’t like Abraham Lincoln could see how many likes he was getting on Facebook. But according to Niall Ferguson, that’s a narrow view of history. Ferguson, author of the new book, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook, explores how networks have altered the course of human events, and tells us what we can learn about our own social networks by examining the networks of the past.