Butter smeared on bridge hinders suicide attempts
Chinese officials have smeared butter along a 1,000-foot-long steel bridge in Guangzhou to stop people from jumping off it. Officials had tried everything else, said a government spokesman, including “special fences and notices asking people not to commit suicide here.” Despite that plea, eight people jumped to their deaths in a single month. But since the butter made the bridge’s girders and railings so slippery that no one can climb on them, there have been no jumpers.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Studying human cognition with Guitar Hero
New York University is giving a freshman class a chance to study Guitar Hero, the videogame. Professor Gary Marcus says his course, “Guitar Heroes (and Heroines): Music, Video Games, and the Nature of Human Cognition,” will use the wildly popular game to explore such thorny psychological questions as, “Why are human beings so easily sucked in by videogames?” Glen Jackson, father of an incoming NYU freshman, was irate. “I just wrote a big check here,” said Jackson. “I’m not paying for him to study videogames.”