The Hello and welcome to the naked scientists with me Ginny Smith and also with

Chris Smith.

This week how fears and phobias can pass from a parent to a child in a smell, why first impressions

really do count, and also. The physics of being a lead guitarist.

We'll find out what they are.

Plus, we hear how one of the brightest lights in the universe, based in Oxford, is helping

scientists to build better jet engines, fight off antibiotic resistant bacteria, and read the biochemical makeup of long dead dinosaurs.

The Naked Scientists Podcast is powered by UKfast.co. UK Fast dot CoDock UK. Helen of Troy apparently had a face that launched a thousand ships and scientists say that we form an impression by looking at

the face of what someone is like in less than a tenth of a second but what features

to be base these opinions on by studying thousands of faces and people's reactions to them,

scientists at York University have now produced a computer program that can tell us how another

person will respond when they see us, which apparently could come in very handy, I'm told, in job interviews

or even on dating websites.

Tom Hartley led the research.

When people look at a face, they start to form an impression about the person that they're looking at.

So they first of all be able to judge things like age and sex, maybe more objective features,

but also they form an impression about more subjective qualities so things like

whether somebody's approachable or confident healthy aggressive people can

guess who's going to win the election based on what their face looks like. Another example would be court cases

so there's been some work to show that the result of a court case can be

determined by the face of the person that they're looking at.

So how did you try to approach this?

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