Would you choose £50,000 over the chance of £1m? You have the choice of instantly receiving £50,000 or flipping a coin for a 50/50 chance of £1m. The vast majority decide on taking the £50k, according to a survey of thousands of people by YouGov. Women voted 82% in favour of the guaranteed cash. The poll has sparked a debate about why Brits appear more risk-averse than people in the US.

This weekend, the Perseid meteor shower will light up the moonless sky, the product of dust breaking off from the same Swift-Tuttle comet that sends its greetings to Earth every August. The richest display of meteors will appear between August 11 and 13. But as you settle down to watch those fragments burn up into nothingness as they hit the Earth's atmosphere, something else will also be watching: NASA's all-sky meteor camera network. Every night, 17 video cameras scattered across the United States scan the skies for meteors. Each one sits in a sturdy white cylindrical tube for protection, sealed off by a clear dome lens that gives a clear view in all directions.

If you're feeling sick and you want to know what's wrong with you, there's an app for that. But the diagnosis won't be as accurate as the one you'd get from a doctor -- not by a long shot. In a head-to-head comparison, real human physicians outperformed a collection of 23 symptom-checker apps and websites by a margin of more than 2 to 1, according to a report published Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine. Even when the contestants got three chances to figure out what ailed a hypothetical patient, the diagnostic software lagged far behind actual doctors. Indeed, the apps and websites suggested the right diagnosis only slightly more than half of the time, the report says.

But if, as they say in this electoral season, you're looking to "grow your base," exercising emotional intelligence -- expressing empathy, checking your emotions in a bid to avoid conflict, and investing in personal relationships -- is a strategy that beats narcissism over the long term. A new exploration of how we make friends and influence people rigorously measured the emergence of popularity in small groups -- first-year college students organized into 15 study groups of about 20 in Poland. In the first week of their assignment to a group and then again three months later, 170 of the freshmen named the person or people they most liked in their group. Upon recruitment into the study, each participant completed standard inventories assessing their narcissistic personality traits and gauging their emotional intelligence. The findings: When a group of strangers is thrown together, individuals who score high on narcissism enjoy an early surge of admiration, recognition and friendship among their peers.

Not every scientific study can be about weighty topics, like gravity waves or gene editing. Sometimes you can gain a true scientific insight by discovering that mammals of vastly different sizes require roughly the same amount of time to empty their bladders, or by noticing that people who speak 10 disparate languages all came up with a version of the word "Huh." These awards are bestowed every fall by the editors of the Annals of Improbable Research. There are 10 winners in a range of categories, which typically include fields like physics, neuroscience and mathematics (but which also may include entomology, safety engineering, fluid dynamics or acoustics). The prize-winning scholarship may sound silly, but that doesn't mean it's trivial.

Why is it that some people crave several cups of coffee a day while others stop at only one or two? A growing body of evidence suggests that the amount of coffee we consume is determined by our genetic makeup rather than the amount of sleep we got the night before. Coffee is one of the most popular beverages worldwide, second only to tea and water, researchers say. And drinking hefty amounts of coffee has been associated with several health benefits. Recent reports have linked coffee consumption with improvements in short-term memory, as well as a reduced risk of developing multiple sclerosis, melanoma, Type 2 diabetes and liver cancer.