The Fun Theory
Volkswagon recently posited an interesting idea: Is it possible to convince people to act better by making positive types of behavior more fun? A new initiative known as The Fun Theory, sponsored by Volkswagon Sweden, is testing the hypothesis, and the results seem to support the central premise — people like having fun even if it means doing something they don't normally enjoy.

According to Volkswagon, the initiative "is dedicated to the thought that something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people's behaviour for the better. Be it for yourself, for the environment, or for something entirely different, the only thing that matters is that it's change for the better."

One of the projects involved encouraging more people to recycle glass products, which, unlike recycling plastic bottles and cans, does not come with a monetary reward in Sweden. The Fun Theory folks decided to turn the process into a game, rigging up an arcade-style bottle bank machine. Over a single night, the "fun" bottle bank was used by nearly 50 times as many people as a standard recycling unit nearby.

Here's a video prepared by Swedish advertising agency DDB for another Fun Theory project designed to convince more people to take the stairs instead of the escalator by adding a musical touch to the experience:

The New Spa Car
The act of driving to a spa may soon become redundant, as French automaker Renault recently unveiled its Zoe Z.E. model, an electric car that reduces fuel consumption while also improving the skin and engaging the senses in a spa-like driving experience.

The vehicle was designed with help from cosmetics manufacturer Biotherm, and features a special air conditioning system that keeps the internal atmosphere "cool and hydrated," along with a built-in toxicity sensor that closes the car's vents "before free radicals destroy your healthy complexion," Wired.com's car blog Autopia reports.

The car is also equipped with an electric diffuser that emits Biotherm-designed aromatherapy oils, "exclusive active substances adapted to the needs of the driver: dynamic in the morning, relaxing coming home from work and awakening vigilance while driving at night," according to a joint statement from the two firms.

Motor Report says the Zoe Z.E. will enter production in 2012, and will form the core of the company's new line of electric vehicles for the European market.

A Glimpse at the Center of Our Galaxy
In honor of the 400-year anniversary of Galileo's invention of the telescope, NASA's Great Observatories, which include the Spitzer, Chandra and recently repaired Hubble telescopes, have released startling composite images of the center of our galaxy.

The main image shows a section of space roughly half the size of a full moon at the very core of the Milky Way, Discover Magazine's Bad Astronomy blog reports. The bright spot to the right of the center and veiled by light years of gas and dust is the black hole at our galaxy's heart, a celestial body with 4 million times the mass of our own sun.

The arcs of gas on the left side are nebulae responsible for the birth of new stars, while the bright blue spot farther left is the Arches Cluster, which contains thousands of superstars each of which is enormously larger than the star in our solar system.

Click image for larger view.
Image Credit: NASA

The Mind-Reading Computer
A team of scientists in the United States recently developed and tested a new computer system capable of scanning a person's brain waves and producing pictures of what that person sees or remembers, effectively reading a subject's mind, the U.K.'s Daily Mail reports.

Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley developed the device and equipped it with a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner that records brainwaves from the visual cortex as a subject watches a video. The system then identifies links between colors, shapes and movements on the screen with specific patterns of brain activity, reproducing the mental images for technicians.

"At the moment when you see something and want to describe it you have to use words or draw it and it doesn't work very well," UC-Berkeley neuroscience professor Jack Gallant, who helped conduct the experiment, told the Daily Mail. "This technology might allow you to recover an eyewitness's memory of a crime."

The technology is reminiscent of a mind-reading system developed in March, which tracked brain cells to determine a subject's spatial orientation and even predict where the person would go next.

Robo-Vac Pac-Man
Ever had trouble deciding whether to clean your floor or play an addictive '80s video game? Thanks to the efforts of the do-it-yourselfers behind Roomba Pac-Man, you no longer have to choose.

The game's developers took a set of robotic vacuum cleaners and rigged them to play Pac-Man on a special game board laid out on the floor. Players control the Pac-Man robo-vac while the vacuum ghosts move autonomously, reading specific patterns from the game layout and responding to specialized software that enables them to behave in the appropriate digital ghost manner.

Here's a video of the game underway:

Have a great weekend, folks!