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DR. EVIL?
If your life were made into a movie, what genre would it be? It's doubtful that your average scientist would pick horror. But according to Christopher Frayling, a British expert on popular culture and author of Mad, Bad and Dangerous? The Scientist and the Cinema, a survey of 1,000 horror films shown in the U.K. between the 1930s and 1980s, reveals that scientists make regular appearances in scary movies. Of these scientists (and their creations), a whopping 31 per cent portrayed villains, while they played heroes in a mere 11 films.

BIG BUCKS
Investing in films is risky business, so Josh Eliashberg and his co-workers from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia set out to improve the odds. They created a mathematical system that can analyse movie plots to forecast their box-office return. Using a sample of 81 movies, the team applied their system to select 30 profitable movies to back. The result as detailed in the journal Management Science in 2007, was a 5.1 per cent return – significantly better than a random selection or a 'typical' studio portfolio which returned a 24.4 per cent loss, they said. It remains to be seen if their technique catches on with investors.

MINORITY REPORT
Eva Flicker from the University of Vienna, Austria, studied 60 films made between 1929 and 2003, which contained scientists. Her report, published in the journal Bridges in 2005, revealed that only 18 per cent of the scientist characters were women. This ratio seems to be rising, though, with a study of more recent films by Jocelyn Steinke of Western Michigan University finding the proportion of female scientists was 31 per cent. However, the fictitious females fared far better than their male counterparts when it came to morality and mentally unhinged tendencies.

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