Mythbusters Recap: Is Yawning Contagious?
Toy Car Top Speed. You might just wonder what would happen if a toy car were to race a real car in a gravity-only race (no means of acceleration - just letting gravity do its work). If you do, then this myth is for you. In a short test, it looks like there might be something to it. So everyone heads out to a hill and sets up a massive length of plastic track - which is no mean feat in itself - to see what happens. Unfortunately, getting the thing to lay flat is the largest problem. But eventually, the kinks are all worked out, and we can see what happens.
It turns out that in the very short distance (perhaps up to 100 feet), the toy car may just win. But beyond that, once you give the real car a chance to get going, then that toy car just doesn't have that much of a chance - there is just too much weight behind the real car! Busted.
Is Yawning Contagious? The question we all want to know - is yawning contagious - will likely have to wait a while longer. The team built a nice chamber to monitor results, and while the official result is Confirmed, the fact is that the sample is just too small. There is just too much room for random error to be introduced. Is it true? Perhaps. Maybe they'll revisit it.
Toast Buttered Side Down - Or Up? Finally, they also looked at the way toast falls, and here we have some interesting results. It seems that toast, when falling from an average table height, flips once and falls top down (which would generally mean butter-side). But if you go higher, say off the top of a building, and drop the toast, there is no apparent rhyme or reason. Still, how often you eat on the top of a larger building probably contributes to how useful this is to you. Busted.
