Back when you were doing it solitary-style, your mama told you that your little habit would make you go blind. But did you listen? No.

Hey, it could happen -- at least when it comes to intercourse. Last year, physicians in Denmark reported the case of a 66-year-old man who literally went blind in one eye every time he had an orgasm, Discover Magazine's Discoblog recently noted. It turned he was having intercourse two or three times every week – not bad for 66 – and every time he did, he’d lose sight in one eye for a couple of minutes which, as you might imagine, could wreck the afterglow.

In 2008, a doctor in Texas reported the similar symptoms in a 48-year-old woman. Thirty minutes after sex, she’d get a headache and go blind in one eye.

Sure, we like to talk about having blindingly good sex, but these people actually had it. It’s probably not a good thing, though. “Transient monocular vision loss” might not be a sign of eye-ball-socket blowing lovemaking skill. It could result from a vascular disturbance like amaurosis fugax. With the right trigger -- climax, say -- a piece of fatty plaque from the carotid artery breaks off, travels to an eye’s retinal artery, and dams up the eye’s blood supply. That could be a sign of atherosclerosis and heart disease.

Treatment with a vasodilator to ease blood flow helped the Danish man, but others, like the 25-year-old female Hungarian scuba diver who experienced the same symptoms after dives, can have severe artery blockages, high cholesterol, and “sticky platelet syndrome.” Usually such cases are treated with some combination of blood thinners, statins, and possibly surgery.

Now, never doubt your mother again.

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Christi Foist doesn’t drink a lot of wine, but when she does, it’s not pretty.

“I find that if I have one to two glasses of wine, my sinuses will get stuffed up,” says the 32-year-old web editor, who lives in the San Francisco area. “And if I don’t drink enough water, I’ll get the headache. I think it must be the sulfites or something else.”

Turns out, Foist is allergic to wine, along with an estimated 500 million other people -- about 8 percent of the world's population -- who can’t sip vino without suffering symptoms of a bad cold.

Sulfites have long been known to cause sniffles, sneezes, headaches, skin rashes and/or breathing difficulties in about 1 percent of that group, but, until now, the trigger for the other 7 percent has been chalked up only to “something else.”

But thanks to new research out of the University of Southern Denmark, scientists now believe they’ve identified a potential culprit: glycoproteins.

Those are the sugar-coated proteins that develop during the grape fermentation process. They’re also the molecules that trigger allergic reactions to substances like dust mites, ragweed and latex.

“We have hypothesized that there could be a link between protein glycosylation and allergenic response, but more clinical data are necessary to prove it,” says Dr. Giuseppe Palmisano, a molecular biologist at the University of Southern Denmark and lead author of a new study recently published in the American Chemical Society’s Journal of Proteome Research.

“When we started the experiments, we wanted to identify the glycoproteins present in wine to understand more about oenological problems like haze formation and aroma changes, but the results led us to think about another possible implication of these glycoproteins.”

In a nutshell, Palmisano and his colleagues analyzed a bottle of Italian chardonnay and discovered 28 different glycoproteins. Upon further analysis, they realized that some of the grape glycoproteins were strikingly similar to other known allergens.

What does this mean for people who sneeze and sniffle every time they sip?

Well, Palmisano said researchers are working to map out a complete “molecular picture” of wine components, the better to understand which tiny particles deserve focus.

“If these molecules are proven to be responsible for allergy in wine, then the winemakers will have a target to remove them,” he explained.

In other words, hypoallergenic wine may be coming to a glass near you.

No more stuffy noses. No more skin rashes. No more headaches.

Unless, of course, you drink too much.

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Make your post-Thanksgiving food coma work for you: New research suggests that eating a big turkey dinner may keep you from spending impulsively on holiday sales.

The study, published in the December issue of the Journal of Marketing, builds on the turkey-tryptophan trope that we all hear this time of year -- it's practically guaranteed that somebody at your Thanksgiving gathering will say,"Did you guys know that turkey makes you sleepy?" That's only kind of true -- an amino acid called tryptophan is found in turkey, and it does work as a natural sedative, but we really don't eat enough of it, even at Thanksgiving, to be affected. Our after-dinner lethargy is more likely caused by overindulging on delicious carbs and cocktails.

But the body uses tryptophan to produce serotonin, and serotonin is known to inhibit impulsive behavior, which made researchers from the University of Utah curious: How might Thanksgiving dinner affect Black Friday binge buying?

To find out, they recruited 170 volunteers and instructed them to fill out an online survey on Thanksgiving evening in 2007. They rated how likely they were to buy popular items at a deep discount -- such as a Dell laptop marked down to $499. Those who had consumed a traditional Thanksgiving dinner were less likely to splurge on any of the marked-down items, say Arul Mishra and Himanshu Mishra, the University of Utah marketing professors that co-authored the study. (Fun fact: They're also husband and wife.)

Of course, as Himanshu Mishra points out, "The influences are not going to be there after 12 hours. If someone is going out shopping tomorrow morning, probably the person will not see that effect." So here's how to make these new findings work for your wallet: Either skip the shopping on Friday and do your holiday shopping online Thursday night, or load up on leftovers before heading out to the stores on Friday.

Would you give this a try? Or is impulse shopping on Black Friday half the fun?

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Forget the cheese straws or veggies and dip this Thanksgiving. New research suggests that if you really want your Thanksgiving dinner crowd to be nice to each other, you may just want to show them pictures of the turkey before you’ve popped it in the oven.

According to a new study, meat doesn’t just give us strength or the occasional bit of indigestion, it actually makes us less aggressive.

Curious as to whether images of meat would trigger our inner caveman aggression (the drive that facilitated the ability of our ancestors to hunt and survive), researchers at McGill University in Montreal divided 82 male undergrads into three groups in order to participate in what they were told was a “multitasking” experiment.

Each group was asked to sort through various pictures – either pictures of raw meat, guns or geometric shapes – while they evaluated another participant reciting a script. Whenever the person reading “forgot” their lines (researchers asked the reader to do this six times), students would administer a dummy “tone blast” that ranged from “barely noticeable” to “very painful.”

As it turned out, people were less likely to zap their associates when they saw pictures of raw meat.

“The meat group was significantly less aggressive,” says psychology researcher Frank Kachanoff. “The tone blasts they chose were less painful than participants in the geometric shape group.” The findings were presented at a recent symposium.

Kachanoff says he believes there’s a logical reason why pictures of raw meat triggered less aggression.

“I only showed pictures of meat ready to cook, not pictures of an animal,” he says. “The main aggression of killing the animal would have already been done. In my next experiment, I’d like to see if images of live animals would prime aggression.” The results would likely be the same if the participants were looking at cooked meat, Kachanoff says.

Daniel Printz, a 42-year-old estate planning lawyer (and meat eater) from San Diego says looking at raw meat certainly doesn’t make him feel aggressive.

For thousands of years, we saw raw meat every day and we saw it as a sign of accomplishment in that we’d brought something down during the hunt,” Printz says. “But nowadays, it simply involves a butcher shop. I don’t feel that looking at meat in any form makes me aggressive. If it’s raw meat, I feel a little bit uneasy. It’s disquieting.”

Cooked meat, on the other hand, tends to make him “happy.”

Ah, but what about those agitating geometric shapes?

Even though Kachanoff thought of the shapes were a neutral image,“it’s always possible that the people in the geometric shape group didn’t like geometric shapes.” The people shown the guns had the same reaction as the geometric group.

So, if you want to avoid family arguments before the big dinner, skip the triangle-fold napkins and let your guests watch the cooking bird via a turkey cam.

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Facebook takes the blame for many modern problems: shortening attention spans, boosting the use of annoying text-speak and, of course, eroding our quaint notions of privacy. But a just-published case study appearing in The Lancet introduces a brand-new issue laid at the feet of the social networking giant -- asthma attacks.

The report tells the tale of heartbreak in the age of Facebook: An 18-year-old man is dumped and "unfriended" by his girlfriend, who starts "friending" several new young men sooner than he can handle, writes Dr. Gennaro D'Amato, of the High Specialty Hospital A Cardarelli in Naples, Italy. The patient, who isn't named in the report, is clearly a savvy Facebook stalker: When he could no longer access his ex's profile, he created a new nickname for himself on the social networking site and added her once again. What he saw took his breath away. Literally. Every time he looked at her profile -- paging through her pictures, scrolling through her status updates -- he had an asthma attack.

He was no stranger to asthma, but until then his symptoms had been under control with the help of medication. Here in the U.S., an estimated 17 million adults and 7.1 million kids under 18 have asthma, according to the Centers for Disease Control, and anxiety or psychological stress is a common cause of non-allergic asthma, experts say.

"Somehow, when the mind is under pressure or stress, some people are prone toward asthma attacks; these are people who really are susceptible to stress,"says Dr. Neil L. Kao, an allergist in Greenville, S.C. Kao didn't treat this particular young man, but he sees many patients whose asthma is caused by stress-outs about school, sports or social situations, which is what might be happening to this young man.

"To me, for that man, social stress triggers an asthma attack," Kao says. "I’ve never heard of Facebook causing it, but I could see that happening." Because while Kao's own Facebook page has been hijacked by his Farmville-addicted wife, for many people, Facebook is an extension of their real-life social network, with real-life social implications. And D'Amato said in an e-mail that while this is the first recorded case of Facebook-induced asthma, there easily could be more cases.

The 18-year-old patient was able to manage his symptoms only after he resolved to keep off of Facebook, after consulting with his doctor and a psychiatrist. And that's just about all you can do, if your asthma attacks are triggered by stress -- try to limit the amount of stress you encounter. "We advise every patient with asthma to know their triggers and to be prepared for the unexpected exacerbations. That's life, so be ready. When their asthma is active, rule one is always stay calm and think," Kao says.

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If you feel a little snobbier when behind the wheel of a BMW, or a little more outdoorsy when you slip on a North Face fleece, or a little hipper when using your new MacBook Air -- you're not alone, as they say. It's widely known that a product's brand image has a profound impact on our own self-image, but a new study finds that we may actually change our personality to match the "personality" of a brand.

"For example, if I want to convey an image of being adventurous, I might buy a Harley-Davidson motorcycle or wear casual clothes from outdoor adventure companies such as REI," says Deborah Roedder John, a marketing professor at the University of Minnesota and one of the authors of the study published in the December issue of the Journal of Consumer Research. (You can find the report here, but a subscription is required.)

John continues, "But our prior research didn't delve into the question of whether consumers actually 'took on' the personalities of these brands they selected to boost their self-images: If you buy a Harley motorcycle, will you really see yourself as more adventurous?"

For one part of the study, the University of Minnesota researchers recruited about 100 volunteers -- all women, all between the ages of 18 to 34 -- at a mall, asking each of them to carry around for an hour the shopping bag of their choice: a bag from Victoria's Secret, Old Navy or Limited Too. Every participant chose the pink Victoria's Secret bag. When they came back from an hour of shopping, Victoria's Secret shopping bag in tow, they were asked to take a survey rating how they felt about themselves. The researchers found that the "personality" of Victoria's Secret -- sexy, glamorous, feminine -- actually did make some of their volunteers feel sexier, more glamorous and more feminine. (No word on whether carrying around a bag from Victoria's Secret made some feel a little like a 15-year-old.)

The same researchers did a similar experiment instructing participants to write with a pen with an MIT logo on it, with similar results -- some of the participants really did feel smarter when using their MIT pen. (The researchers conducted four separate studies, involving more than 200 participants in all, John says.)

The trick is this: If you're the kind of person who thinks a particular brand will make you more feminine, or more glamorous, then it will. That's called "entity theory," and it means you're the kind of person who seeks out products to make you feel a certain way about yourself. But if you're not the kind of person who feels that way about the brands you buy, well -- then you won't feel much of anything after using a particular brand. That one's called "incremental theory." You might think you're staunchly one way or the other, but these researchers primed their participants to identify with one of those theories by having them read an article promoting it.

The study results shed light on how those "entity theorists" and "incremental theorists" experience brands differently. An entity theorist is -- well, let's just let the experts explain it, as John and her colleague Ji Kyung Park write in the report:

Individuals who endorse entity theory view their personal qualities as something they cannot improve through their own direct efforts; instead, they seek out opportunities (such as brand experiences) to signal their positive qualities to the self or others. Conversely, individuals who endorse incremental theory view their personal qualities as something they can enhance through their own efforts at self‐improvement, reducing the value of signaling opportunities through brands.

"For consumers, our study could help them understand how brands really affect them -- just carrying a shopping bag with the Victoria's Secret name makes you feel more glamorous, feminine, and good-looking (at least for a good deal of people we call 'entity theorists')," John says. "So, you don't really need to buy and use the brand--just have some association with it. Maybe this is a money-saving tip for anyone strapped for money during these recessionary times?"

What do you think? How does the stuff you buy influence the way you feel about yourself -- or does it at all?

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Randy Dotinga writes: Talk about sensitive skin.

A new study found that women with the most sensitive fingertips are much more likely to have had recent orgasms during vaginal intercourse. The common thread seems to be the ability to feel the tiniest sensations, regardless of whether they occur above or below the waist.

The research does raise plenty of questions, and not just "How do I manage to figure out if that girl I just met has sensitive fingertips?" At the moment, researchers aren't sure whether fingertips in men provide insight into the orgasms that they experience. And there’s a big mystery about why the study only found a link between fingertip sensitivity and one specific type of female orgasm -- vaginal intercourse with a man.

Still, the findings do provide insight into how "many factors can both help or hurt optimal sexual functioning," says study lead author Stuart Brody of the University of the West of Scotland.

The study researchers tested the fingertip sensitivity of 70 French-Canadian college students, aged 18-30, and asked them questions about their orgasms within the last month and over their entire lives. The study findings appear in a recent issue of The Journal of Sexual Medicine.

Women with the highest levels of sensitivity reported having many more orgasms in the last month from vaginal intercourse than the other women. But more fingertip sensitivity didn't appear to boost the likelihood of orgasms from other kinds of sexual activity, like cunnilingus, anal sex and masturbation.

Is there anything women can do to improve the physical sensitivity of their bodies? Yes, as it turns out, says Brody.

"There's one simple thing that requires a little bit of work: pay attention," he says. "Sensation is not only a function of the quality of the stimulus and (the body's) receptors. It is also a function of processing by the nervous system, notably the brain. If you pay full attention to a stimulus, it is more prominent in awareness than if you are distracted or ignoring the stimulus."

Research suggests better vaginal orgasms come when women focus on sensations specifically in that part of the body. So think vagina, Brody says.

"Not the clitoris, not what your hair is like, not whether he thinks you're fat or what the kids are doing," he says. "Focus on sensations on a long-term basis, for the rest of your life. Pay attention: it's a good thing."

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Why did the cookie go to the hospital?

Because he felt crummy.

What did one snowman say to the other snowman?

Smells like carrots.

Why does Snoop Dogg carry an umbrella?

Fo' drizzle.

Terrible jokes? Or a sign of a brain disorder? Actually, sometimes it's hard to tell.

Witzelsucht (the Germans just have the best words for everything, don't they?) is a brain dysfunction that causes all sorts of compulsive silliness: bad jokes, corny puns, wacky behavior. It's also sometimes called the "joking disease," and as Taiwanese researchers phrased it in a 2005 report, it's a "tendency to tell inappropriate and poor jokes." We've covered all sorts of strange disorders of the mind in earlier Body Odd posts: one disorder makes you believe your loved ones are strangers, another convinces you that your hand has taken on a life of its own. Now, we give you a brain disorder that actually causes a poor sense of humor.

It's a symptom of an injury to the right frontal lobe, which could be caused by brain trauma or a stroke, tumor, infection or a degenerative disease. "Patients who have disease of the left frontal lobe often are sad, anxious and depressed," explains Dr. Kenneth Heilman, a neurologist at the University of Florida College of Medicine in Gainesville, Fla. "In contrast ... patients with right-hemisphere disease often (appear) indifferent or euphoric and have inappropriate jocularity."

Heilman says he sees several cases of Witzelsucht each year. "One of the most dramatic cases (that I've seen) appeared to be attracted to my reflex hammer," Heilman says. "After I checked his deep tendon reflexes and put my hammer down, he picked up the hammer and started to check my reflexes, while giggling."

A 2005 case study describes a 57-year-old woman who suddenly morphed into a more gregarious version of herself. "She had become the life of the party and would laugh, joke, and sing all the time. The patient had decreased self-care and hygiene and wore the same clothes every day," according to the report. Her doctors believed dementia that damaged the front temporal lobes of her brain was to blame for her change in personality.

The Taiwanese case study mentioned earlier describes a 56-year-old man's symptoms, and introduces an interesting conundrum found in some Witzelsucht sufferers. Although they're constantly making others laugh, some patients don't seem to get the joke themselves. "On some occasions, he showed no smiles or laughter to the jokes ... which made everyone laugh loudly, while on other occasions, he was not able to appreciate jokes from the others," according to the report.

When it's possible, doctors attempt to treat the underlying disease or injury that's causing the Witzelsucht symptoms. Some physicians may prescribe mood stabilizers such as antipsychotic medications, but often they'll attempt to use behavioral strategies to rein in the giggles. But as Heilman explains, the jokiness "can be annoying to family and caregivers, (but) it is usually not a terrible problem."

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We do it while we eat, while we work, even while we pray. In fact, new research has found we let our minds wander almost half the time we do anything.

The problem? It’s making us unhappy.

“In every situation that we measured, people were considerably less happy when they were mind-wandering," says Matt Killingsworth, a doctoral candidate in psychology at Harvard University whose findings were just published in the journal Science. "And this was enormously true when mind wandering was unpleasant."

The study -- part of a larger research project about the causes of human happiness -- collected real-time data from 2,250 volunteers via an iPhone app. Researchers asked how happy the subjects were, what they were doing (talking? working? exercising? watching TV?), what they were thinking about while doing it, and if they were thinking of something else, whether that something else was pleasant, unpleasant or neutral.

Turns out, no matter what we’re up to -- commuting to work, making dinner, talking to friends, even meditating -- our minds are usually somewhere else.

“We found that about 47 percent of the time, people were mind wandering,” says Killingsworth. “It was ubiquitous. It pervades people’s experience. It was greater than 30 percent in all but one activity.”

You guessed it: Making love tends to hold our attention. Sadly, though, most of us don’t have that kind of focus throughout the day. And this apparently gets us down.

In fact, Killingsworth and his colleagues found that not even daydreaming about something fun -- like an upcoming vacation -- makes us as happy as we are when we’re task-focused. Space out about something neutral -- like grocery shopping -- and we’re unhappier yet. Start fussing about bills or deadlines or a relationship gone awry and our happiness drops 24 points lower.

Jennifer Heigl, a 33-year-old wine blogger and writer from Portland, Ore., says she rarely lives in the moment.

“My mind is constantly wandering -- thinking about what’s coming next, thinking about what I just did, thinking about deadlines,” she says. “Usually it wanders because I’m bored, not because I’m stressed. But it also tends to wander when I have a deadline because it’s hard to focus. The internet doesn’t help.”

Website helps you track your happiness

As a writer, though, Heigl says she can see both good and bad aspects to it.

“I’ve been called on it a couple of times,” she says. “But in a creative sense, that’s how our minds develop stories and songs. The more your mind wanders, the more creative you end up being.

Killingsworth acknowledges mind wandering can have an upside. But he feels humans should try to harness this ability for good, rather than for …

Wait, what were we talking about?

“It’s probably not a coincidence that we have this capacity,” he says. “I think it allows us to do a lot of useful things and is incredibly important for learning and planning and imagining. But at the same time, it has a downside for happiness. We seem to use it in ways that reduce rather than increase our happiness.”

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It usually starts after you go for a swim. Or get too much water in your ear in the shower. At first it’s just a tickle, but after a while your ear starts to itch – really itch -- as if you’ve got a mosquito bite inside of it. Or worse yet, a mosquito.

Welcome to the wonderful world of swimmer’s ear.

“Nine out of ten time times, it’ll be fine,” says Julie Levitch, a 41-year-old marketing professional from Scottsdale, Ariz., who’s had the condition about 20 or 25 times during her life. “But about 10 percent of the time, the itch will turn into full-blown swimmer’s ear which is incredibly painful. If you tug on your earlobe, it’s excruciating. If you hold a phone to your ear, it hurts.”

Officially known as otitis externa, swimmer’s ear is a low-grade infection of the outer ear canal that causes itchiness, pain, ear pluggage and drainage,” says Dr. Vincent Chan, an ear, nose and throat specialist at Swedish-Ballard Hospital in Seattle.

The problem is fairly common, says Chan, but it’s not the only thing that makes people’s ears itch. Allergies to various foods such as apples, bananas or dairy can also trigger the itch that cannot be scratched.

“Essentially it’s referred pain from the back of the nose and throat,” he says. “There’s a lot of cross-wiring between the throat, nose and ear. A lot of things that irritate the throat, irritate the ear.”

People with itchy ears due to allergic reactions can usually find relief with over-the-counter antihistamines like Benadryl, Zyrtec or Claritin.

As for swimmer’s ear, if it’s a full-blown infection – i.e., you’ve got pain and drainage and hearing loss -- Chan advises a visit to your doctor, who may need to prescribe antibiotics. If the ear is simply itchy, though, skip the Q-tips – which can push the infection further into the ear -- and treat it with a few drops of mineral oil or an easily home-made concoction of equal parts white vinegar and rubbing alcohol.

“Just put a few drops in each ear with an eye dropper and that dries the ear out,” says Chan. “Do it after you swim if you regularly get water in your ears.”

Some people may fear that an itchy ear is the result of a wayward insect.

“That very rarely happens,” Chan says. “But if it does, you’ll feel the bug moving around in there. They’re pretty active but they can’t cause serious damage. People are always concerned about them laying eggs and then having them go into your brain.”

Thank the infamous Night Gallery episode, “The Caterpillar” for this nightmare. In the show, an earwig eats its way through a man’s brain and eventually comes out the other side (but not before laying dozens of eggs).

That can absolutely not happen, Chan insists.

“They can’t lay eggs or go into the brain - the ear drum blocks the way,” he says. If you think you have a creepy crawly thing in your ear, go right for a few drops of mineral oil.

“That will drown the bug,” he says.

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Bill Briggs writes:What’s scarier than bats in the belfry?

Easy: tarantulas in an MRI tube.

To observe the brain’s panic-response network in full freak, British researchers asked 20 volunteers to lie inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine. One by one, the scientists then had each person view a screen that showed a tarantula crawling closer ... and ... closer to the subject’s feet.

As the spider advanced, MRI scans allowed researchers to see flashes of activity switch from the volunteer’s prefrontal cortex – a region associated with anxiety – to a spot in the midbrain known to involve intense fear. But the neural terror waned when the tarantula retreated, “regardless of the spider’s absolute proximity,” wrote the study’s authors. In other words, as long as the spider was moving away, no matter how close it still was, the volunteers relaxed.

Titled “Neural Activity associated with monitoring the oscillating threat value of a Tarantula,” the study was published today by the National Academy of Sciences. They could simply have dubbed their paper: “Watching the Willies.” What the researchers glimpsed, they say, was the brain’s danger-tracking system at work.

Before you brand the scientists as sadists, you should know two things.

First: the findings may make it easier to diagnose and treat patients who suffer from clinical phobias, said Dr. Dean Mobbs, one of the authors.

“We first show that multiple (brain) systems are involved in fear and that a goal of future research should be to try and understand which parts of the system break down,” said Mobbs, who works at the MRC-Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at the University of Cambridge Medical School. “If we can understand this, then we can better engage people with phobias and other types of fear. To cure we must first understand.”

Second: the volunteers were actually watching pre-recorded images of the spiders walking to and fro. The MRI tubes never contained real critters.

But why tarantulas? Why not rats or bats or scorpions?

“The UK has one of the highest amounts of spider phobics in the world. This is despite the fact that we have no deadly spiders in the UK,” Mobbs said.

He then admitted: “I mainly used spiders because I have a slight fear of them.”

What scares you the most? Tell us about it in the comments.

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Seen a half-grown handlebar or two this week? Perhaps a fledgling Fu Manchu? Mustache season is here again. And it's for a good cause!

It's called Movember -- a mashup of "mustache" and "November," get it? Legend has it, the idea was born over beers in Melbourne, Australia, in 2003, as a group of guys discussed all the attention breast cancer awareness groups have managed to grab for their cause, especially in recent years. The world goes pink in support of women's health in October; why shouldn't men's health enjoy the same attention?

Related: Famous mustaches slideshow

Seven years later, Movember has become a global trend, spreading to the U.S., the UK, Canada, New Zealand, Ireland, Spain, the Netherlands, Finland and South Africa. Last year, 255,755 people participated in Movember, raising $42 million toward men's health issues, including prostate cancer research, according to the Movember Foundation's website.

But for you fellows whose facial hair won't cooperate, there are other ways to show support. You can donate directly to the Prostate Cancer Foundation and Livestrong, Lance Armstrong's charity for people affected by cancer, on the group's website. Other options for the facial hair-free are cataloged on a recent blog post from BellaSugar, which points out the proliferation of mustachio'd accessories, including handlebar headbands, rings and necklaces.

Do you participate in Movember? (Or, are you participating without realizing you were doing any such thing?)

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Linda Carroll writes: The electricity generated by a 9-volt battery might be all there is between you and the mathematical brilliance of a Newton or an Einstein.

OK, we can’t guarantee you’ll be that smart, but, amazingly, British scientists have now shown that low voltage current applied to the right part of the scalp can spark changes that boost the brain’s math abilities. What's more, that mild jolt can lock in your improved mathematical prowess for as long as six months, according to new research published in this month’s issue of Current Biology.

The findings come too late for those of us who already suffered through middle school algebra, but maybe future generations will benefit.

The researchers, led by Roi Cohen Kadosh from the University of Oxford, suspected that a little electricity directed at the right parietal lobe – a brain region at the top of the head and known to play a role in numerical calculations – might juice up a person’s math ability.

To test that theory, Kadosh and his colleagues rounded up some volunteers and equipped some with transcranial direct current stimulation devices that were positioned on the scalp over the right parietal lobe. Another group of volunteers served as a control group and got no stimulation.

All the volunteers were then taught some abstract math, which involved no numbers. They were introduced to a set of symbols, shown some rules about the symbols and then tested.

As it turns out, electrical stimulation helped people learn the math a lot better -- and faster.

And there was some more good news: the gain comes with no pain. The sensation sparked by the device is merely a mild tingling, says Dr. Ian Cook, an expert unaffiliated with the new study and associate director of the Laboratory for Brain, Behavior and Pharmacology at UCLA. The feeling is something akin to what you’d feel if you put your tongue on a 9-volt battery (not that we recommend you do that).

Math isn’t the only brain function that can be boosted with a little electricity, says Dr. Roy Hamilton, co-director of the Laboratory for Cognition and Neural Stimulation at the University of Pennsylvania. Set the device over a different part of the brain and you get enhanced language abilities, he explains.

So, will kids one day head off for school with a battery like device strapped to their heads that they’ll move from one spot to another as they go from class to class?

“I think that’s still in the range of science fiction,” says Cook. “But it’s certainly in the range of possibility.”

In the meantime, though you might be tempted to run a similar experiment on your own – with a battery and a wet sponge – experts caution against it. “This is in the ‘Kids, don’t try this at home,’ category,” says Cook. “There is the potential to injure the brain.”

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Jeff Garvin had never heard of Purple Glove Syndrome until his wife, Sue, woke up with her right hand painfully swollen and violently discolored from the wrist down.

The Fort Myers, Fla., woman had suffered a massive stroke in 2008 at age 52 and was hospitalized. Then, as if that weren’t bad enough, she got a botched injection of intravenous phenytoin, a seizure drug linked to cases of the oddly named disorder that has caused lingering pain, amputations -- and death.

“With the Purple Glove Syndrome, she can’t do all the things with her hands she used to do,” Jeff Garvin said. “Her biggest complaint from the stroke is a speech impediment -- and the pain in her hand."

Today, an advisory committee of the Food and Drug Administration recommended that IV phenytoin, marketed as Dilantin, should be labeled with warnings that the drug can cause Purple Glove Syndrome. The group voted not to recommend pulling the drug from the market.

PGS is a rare condition first noted in the 1980s, when patients who received IV Dilantin were developing painful, swollen hands that turned a deep shade of violet. Some 43 cases of PGS have been documented, according to the FDA. However, it's very likely the disorder is under-reported.

No one’s sure exactly how often PGS occurs. Studies have suggested that severe cases of PGS may occur in up to 6 percent of patients who receive IV phenytoin, with less-serious incidents in perhaps 25 percent of patients.

The condition is often caused when the toxic drug doesn’t go directly into a vein, but instead seeps into the underlying tissue of the hand. Often, the damage is permanent.

Another drug, fosphenytoin, marketed under the brand name Cerebyx, appears to control seizures as well as phenytoin. It carries some risk of PGS, but the panel was divided on whether there's adequate information to conclude that it also causes the disorder. Both drugs have similar risks of other side effects.

The FDA will now consider the recommendations of the joint meeting of the Peripheral and Central Nervous System Drugs Advisory Committee.

In Jeff Garvin’s opinion, the agency should take it very seriously.

“I think they need to look at it really closely,” he said. “There are other ways to do it that don’t pose the risks. Certainly for somebody in my wife’s situation, I learned there were alternatives that had less toxic side effects with better results.”

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Not only can Botox protect your face from the cruel march of time, it may also keep you out of the slammer.

When a Canadian woman named Paddi Anne Moore was pulled over by a police officer last spring and asked to blow into a breathalyzer, she huffed and she puffed, but she just couldn’t blow, according to a report in the Vancouver Sun.

The officer gave her four chances, and, finally, charged Moore, 51, with refusing to give a breath sample.

Moore admits, sure, she was drinking that night, but she says she simply couldn’t comply with the trooper because she’d recently received Botox injections and the wrinkle-freezer kept her from puckering her lips.

Last week, a Vancouver judge tossed out the charge when Moore provided a letter from a doctor in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, who had performed the Botox shots.

The doctor wrote it’s not uncommon for Botox patients to be unable "to wrap their lips around a straw or wide circumference such as a breathalyzer blow apparatus" for up to six months.

The police officer disputes Moore’s story, maintaining, “she made no attempt to blow.”

Before we digress into a he said/she said that’s starting to sound like the Clinton impeachment hearings, let’s ask a real expert: Is there any truth to this so-called “Botox defense” (or “defence” for you Canadians out there)?

“It’s definitely realistic that a person couldn’t blow into a breathalyzer because they couldn’t purse their lips after Botox,” says Dr. Anthony Youn, a plastic surgeon from Troy, Mich. who runs the blog Celebrity Cosmetic Surgery, although he adds it would have to be a rather uncommon type of injection.

“Some people will inject Botox into the muscles around the mouth to get rid of smoker’s lines, those fine vertical lines that extend around the mouth,” he says. But result probably won’t look very natural. “If a person is unable to pucker their lips, it looks strange. You may have a mouth that doesn’t move naturally, like a wax figure type of mouth.”

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Youn says if the woman really did have Botox injections, her defense is conceivable. And if she didn’t have the shots, he says he’s still impressed.

“You’ve got to hand it to her,” he says. “I’ve tried excuses to get out of speeding tickets myself.”

Of course, the last laugh may be on Moore. According to Youn, Botox shots in the muscles around the mouth can sometimes cause other side effects.

“Typically, we inject Botox in the upper face – the forehead, the crow’s feet, the frown lines,” he says. “My concern in injecting somebody around the mouth is that they might come back and say my mouth isn’t working right. And if those muscles aren’t moving right, you could get a droop or a drool.”

And then people might really accuse her of drinking too much.

Ever had a Botox mishap? Tell us about it in the comments.

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We write about some gross things, but we never thought we'd feel the need to ask our readers this: How often do you guys shower? Because it seems being unwashed is officially a thing -- more people than you might think are skipping daily showers and deodorant, The New York Times reported this weekend.

Defying a culture of clean that has prevailed at least since the 1940s, a contingent of renegades deliberately forgoes daily bathing and other gold standards of personal hygiene, like frequent shampooing and deodorant use.

To the converted, there are many reasons to cleanse less and smell more like yourself. “We don’t need to wash the way we did when we were farmers,” said Katherine Ashenburg, 65, the author of “The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History.” Since the advent of cars and labor-saving machines, she continued, “we have never needed to wash less, and we have never done it more.”

The article notes some that dry shampoo sales "more than doubled" from 2007 to 2009 -- a dirty little beauty secret that we've written about before -- and that this month's issue of Parenting magazine reassures busy moms that it's OK to skip a shower every once in a while. But what was most striking to us about the story was the photos -- everyone pictured is hip, young and very attractive. Maybe these guys are onto something. Or, maybe The Onion had it right back in September when they asked, "Why Should This Man Shower Now When He's Just Going To Get All Sweaty Again?

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Talk about a bad case of indigestion.

One Rhode Island hospital has spent more than $2 million in the past eight years removing foreign objects -- including knives, batteries and bedsprings -- from the bodies of patients who swallowed them on purpose.

That’s according to Dr. Steven F. Moss, a gastroenterologist who counted 305 cases of intentional consumption of odd objects at Rhode Island Hospital in Providence between 2001 and 2009. Moss decided to study the issue after noticing a peculiar trend.

“We have patients swallowing things almost every week or two,” said Moss, whose findings are published in the latest issue of the journal Clinical Gasroenterology and Hepatology. “We’re a pretty busy clinical service and the last thing we need is to spend a lot of time taking these things out.”

It’s not clear why so many patients showed up after swallowing objects that included teaspoons, toothbrushes and razor blades, Moss said. He doesn’t think there’s anything strange about the local region that would contribute to it, and, besides, a hospital in Los Angeles reported similar findings in 2008.

What is clear is that nearly 80 percent of the 33 people in the study who consumed foreign objects suffered from psychiatric disorders. Most were either prisoners or patients in a local psychiatric hospital. And even many of those who came from home settings were suffering from severe mental illness, Moss said. One mentally ill patient was responsible for 67 separate swallowing incidents.

Most of the patients were aware enough to know what they were doing and some were manipulative, Moss said. For prisoners, a trip to the hospital can be a chance to escape. Mentally ill patients sometimes swallow objects to ensure a change of scenery.

The tough part, Moss said, is getting the objects out. He and other doctors had to use complicated endoscopy tools, including snares, nets and rat-toothed forceps to do the job. Fortunately, only two cases required surgery and there were no deaths or serious injuries.

Still, the problem continues to confound Moss and others.

“We haven’t really come up with a good way to prevent people from doing it,” he said.

Many of the patients seem to be compelled to swallow things and will often awaken from anesthesia only to try to ingest nearby medical supplies. One patient managed to swallow something even while being watched by two guards in an acute care hospital.

The obvious answer of getting rid of objects too small to swallow doesn’t always work, Moss said. Eventually, you have to give a person a toothbrush. And many of the patients become psychologically stable enough to be discharged.

“Once he’s out,” Moss said, “he’ll do whatever he wants."

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