We all know that noise can prevent you from falling asleep, but it seems that noise could actually make you fall asleep. See DNews video for the explanation - why?

Simon Anholt worked a long time as an independent policy advisor. He has helped politicians and policy makers to improve economic, political and cultural relationships with other countries Now he works on interesting project - so-called Good Country Index. This index attempts to quantify how good the countries are in a sense that how useful they are to the world. See Simon's Anholt's talk recorded for TED.

You might also be interested to study Good Country Index on your own.

In the begging of 2016 largest US lottery Powerball decreased the odds of winning the jackpot to around 1 in 300 million. What is interesting in this development is that it was done to attract more players and thus increase the profitability of the lottery. Intuition would suggest that any rational individual should quit playing the lottery, but what will real people do?

The main catch in these lotteries is that the jackpot is carried over to the next game until it is won by somebody. Thus smaller odds of winning the jackpot imply that the jackpot will have more time to "grow". Namely there will be more consecutive games with jackpot left intact, thus the jackpots will become larger. The data shows that the larger the jackpot the more people will buy lottery tickets. Thus in the long run this strategy should attract more people to play the lottery. Consequently, in the long run, the profitability of the lottery should increase.

Watch Extra Credits video or read Wired for more information.

We invite you to listen to Hannah Fry interview given to Numberphile channel, in which she talks a bit about using math to predict crime.

Homo economicus (lat. economic man) is a very convenient concept, which is used to simplify many economical problems. Yet this concept may not always work. One of the simplest examples were the idea of homo economicus fails is so-called Minority game.

Imagine that each workday evening you may either go home or visit a bar. At home you will always be able to spend some quality time, but at the bar you might be able to have more fun. Yet the bar has only a limited space for visitors. For the sake of simplicity let us assume that it may conveniently fit in just about half of your coworkers. Each of your coworkers faces the same dilemma as you - go home or visit the bar? Thus you have to make the same choice as minority of you coworkers.