We’ve all heard of infectious laughs. But how about infectious eyebrows?

That’s what 12 women from Switzerland were left with after a freelance artist with a pot of tainted ink applied permanent makeup to the women’s brows, resulting in a serious mycobacterial infection.

This particular kind of nasty infection is becoming increasingly common as a complication of cosmetic procedures, according to the case study, reported in the Oxford Journal, Clinical Infectious Diseases.

 They’re also nothing to sneeze at, says Dr. Joel Schlessinger, a dermatologist and board certified cosmetic surgeon from Omaha, Neb., who didn’t treat the Swiss women (whose median age was 56, by the way).  

 “A mycobacterial infection is way more severe than a staph infection, and staph infections can be fatal in some cases,” he says. “Mycobacterial infections are just not as treatable. Once it takes hold, there’s very little that can be done to fix it other than a very long course of antibiotics or excision of the affected area.”

 Of the 12 women infected, 10 had to undergo surgery. Some had to have a “partial paroditectomy” (meaning they had to have the lymph nodes in their neck taken out because the infection was lodged there).  Others had to have their infected eyebrows surgically removed.

But that wasn’t all. All 12 of the women had to take a harsh triple-whammy of antibiotics (clarithromycin, cipoflaxacin and rifabutin) for weeks -- or months -- on end (some had to take the concoction for nearly a year).

Schlessinger says infections like this are often the result of “fly- by-night” medi-spas and salons that don’t adhere to safe, sterile practices.

“We see a lot of people enter this field with little or no training and less strict ideas of how they maintain their instruments,” he says. “They may share instruments between people without cleaning them or throw them in a very minimally sterilizing instrument bath for only a few minutes. Typically, sterility is the first thing to go in these operations.”

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Well, we suppose this is one way to lower the curve in a tough calculus class. A new study shows that women scored lower in math when men gave them quick-but-creepy once overs, reports LiveScience. A psychologist at the University of Nebraska instructed research assistants to given women an unsettling up-and-down assessment, and then stare at their breasts for a few uncomfortable seconds. From the LiveScience story:

The research assistants then gave the real volunteers a five-question interview, ostensibly as part of the teamwork exercise. In some cases, the assistant started the interview by gazing from the volunteer's head to waist and back again, and then stared at the volunteer's chest for a few seconds between some questions.

...

Studies have shown that when you remind people of a stereotype about their group — "Girls are bad at math" — their performance at that task actually does drop because of their anxiety over the stereotype. This phenomenon, called stereotype threat, likely played a role in the lowered math scores, Gervais said. The women who got the objectifying look were aware of it on some level, as they reported that their partner was more preoccupied with their looks than the women who weren't ogled.

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On the fourth hour of this morning's TODAY, Kathie Lee and Hoda discuss "eyeballing," a disturbing new drinking game that keeps popping up in YouTube videos and on Facebook. 

It seems kids today are pouring vodka into their eyes, believing that it will get them drunk faster. (It won't, says the expert interviewed in the segment.) Some think this may just be an Internet hoax, but others aren't so sure. (After all, vodka eyeballing even has a Wikipedia page now, and we all know everything on Wikipedia is always true. Right?)

You can watch the clip below.

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Well, this is awkward. A Dutch psychologist may have uncovered exactly what it is that makes those disruptions in conversation so horribly uncomfortable: They elicit deep-seated, primal fears of social acceptance and belonging.

"You could compare the dynamics of an interaction with dancing: Partners smoothly follow each others steps and know when to take over, in such a way that, in the end, one flowing dance appears," says Namkje Koudenburg, of the psychology department at the University of Groningen.

"In our research we found that this conversational flow is very pleasant; it informs us that things are all right: We belong to the group and agree with one another,” she continues. “As such, conversational flow serves social needs. That is, the need to belong, the need for self-esteem and the need for social validation."

The study consisted of two experiments, involving 162 total undergraduate students overall. In one experiment, participants watched one of two versions of a six-minute video clip, in which a group of three female students were talking about relationships. The participants were to imagine themselves being one of the three female students in the video, a woman named Linda. The three talked for four minutes, and then "Linda" said that teachers who have sex with students should be fired immediately. (Awkward.)

In one version of the video, the other members of the group smoothly steered the conversation to a topic that wasn't directly related to what Linda had said, and the conversation continued for two more minutes, never returning to the subject she had broached. But in the "disrupted flow" version of the video, Linda's words were followed with four seconds of silence, and then the conversation continued in a similar way to the first video. In a questionnaire, those who imagined themselves as Linda in the awkward-silence scenario reported feeling more rejection and more negative emotions, and fewer feelings of belonging or self-esteem, than those who watched the conversation that kept going without skipping a beat.

People who experienced the awkward silence reported feeling “distressed, afraid, hurt, and rejected,” according to the paper published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

"Even when people are not consciously aware that there is a silence, they immediately sense that there is something wrong," Koudenburg says. "Experiencing conversational flow is probably more than just detecting a silence. There may also be other ways in which a conversation is not as smooth as you would want it to be.”

Koudenburg doesn’t recommend rushing to fill the awkward silences when they occur.  Instead, she suggests trying to identify what brought it about – a disagreement? A controversial statement? – and remembering that everyone experiencing the disruption in conversation is feeling just as uncomfortable as you are.  

Because those awkward moments happen to everybody – there’s actually a Tumblr devoted to chronicling them. And if Natalie Portman weren’t a beautiful, famous, Oscar-nominated movie star, her dorky laugh at the Golden Globes last week might’ve shushed the crowd into an awkward silence. 

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By Linda Carroll

Lowering your thermostat may reduce not only your spending, but also your weight, a new study suggests.

Researchers suspect that rising indoor temperatures in British and American homes may have contributed to the obesity epidemic. The theory is that we burn fewer calories when our bodies don’t have to work as hard to stay warm, according to a report published in Obesity Reviews.

“Research into the environmental drivers behind obesity, rather than the genetic ones, has tended to focus on diet and exercise – which are undoubtedly the major contributors,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Fiona Johnson, of the UK Health Behavior Research Centre at University College, London. “However, it is possible that other environmental factors, such as winter indoor temperatures, may also have a contributing role.”

Johnson and her colleagues scrutinized data on indoor temperatures in both the United Kingdom and the United States. They found that both British and American households have bumped up their thermostats several degrees over the last few decades.

For example, bedrooms in the U.S. were heated to an average of 66.7 degrees in the late 1980s, versus 68.4 degrees in 2005. The differences were more striking in British bedrooms, where the average temperature climbed from 59.4 degrees in 1978 to 65.3 degrees in 1996. 

Studies have shown that slightly chillier temperatures can lead to increased energy expenditures, Johnson noted. And that’s true even when people bundle up.

“Increased time spent indoors, widespread access to central heating and air conditioning, and increased expectations of thermal comfort all contribute to restricting the range of temperatures we experience in daily life and reduce the time our bodies spend under mild thermal stress – meaning we’re burning less energy,” Johnson said.

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It seems stammering is having a moment: Early this morning, "The King's Speech" received 12 Academy Award nominations, more than any other film this year. One of those nods went to Colin Firth, who many expect to win for his portrayal of King George VI, the English king with a debilitating stammer. Now the speech impediment is all the Internet can talk about.

But one type of stammer that's not being widely discussed is sudden onset stuttering. For most, stuttering begins in childhood, while children are developing language skills – but in rare cases, it can come come on suddenly, mangling the speech of adults who'd never struggled with the problem before.

The cause of sudden onset stuttering is either neurogenic (meaning the brain has trouble sending signals to nerves, muscles or areas of the brain that control speaking) or psychogenic (caused by emotional problems). A sudden stutter can be caused by a number of things: brain trauma, epilepsy, drug abuse (particularly heroin), chronic depression or even attempted suicide using barbiturates, according to the National Institutes of Health.

In sudden cases sparked by underlying psychological issues, "often times, you can find that it's not so sudden; there might be a history of stuttering that had been outgrown," says Dr. Tommie L. Robinson, former president of American Speech-Language-Hearing Association and director of the speech and hearing program at Children’s Nation Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

According to one 1998 case report, a 30-year-old woman hit her head in a car crash, and the trauma to her brain appeared to cause a temporary stutter.  And in a 1982 case, a 28-year-old man developed a stutter after a suicide attempt; his doctors believe his sudden speech impediment was the result of psychological distress.

The movie hints that the king’s trouble with speech may have been psychogenic, as it may have been the result of the extreme pressure he felt from his father. (When he begins to have trouble getting out the words, his father demands, “Get it out, boy!” Not exactly helpful.) Experts once believed all cases of stuttering were psychogenic, but that particular cause is actually known to be very rare. In fact, last year scientists isolated three genes that cause stuttering.

Oh, and in case you were wondering: stuttering and stammering are synonymous, Robinson says. "'Stammering' is more of a British thing," he explains.

Some quick facts on stuttering from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders:

• Stuttering affects people of all ages, but it most often begins in children ages 2 to 5, as they develop language skills.
• About 5 percent of all children stutter at some point in their life.
• Boys are twice as likely to stutter as girls – and as they grow up, the number of boys who continue to stutter is three to four times larger than the number of girls.
• Most children grow out of their stutter. Only about 1 percent of adults stutter.

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Those eyes! Just look at those big brown eyes. A kinkajou would never hurt you. Right? Well ... 

Animalia

Mynah the kinkajou sits in a fleece sleep sack.

A new case study published in the Emerging Infectious Diseases Journal describes the unusual case of a kinkajou (an adorable raccoon-like creature) named Mynah and her owner, a 37-year-old zoologist in Indianapolis named Joel Vanderbush. The little creature infected her owner with a disease called blastomycosis through a bite, which is a really rare way to get a really rare disease, says Julie Harris, an epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control.

In August 2009, Mynah became very sick, and started showing signs of a respiratory illness. “She was literally dying on the floor of her enclosure,” Vanderbush recalls. “I wanted to give her a little comfort in her last moments of life, so I picked her up.” When he did, Mynah turned her head and bit Vanderbush on the middle finger of his right hand – just a soft, sad little bite that barely broke his skin. She died shortly afterward.

Usually, an animal bite is no big deal to Vanderbush, who’s been a zoologist for 16 years, and now owns Animalia, a nonprofit organization that seeks to educate people about conservation and care of animals, both domestic and exotic. He owns 70 animals (29 species, including rats, ferrets, reptiles, birds, a coatimundi, a genet and another kinkajou besides Mynah).

“You work with animals, you tend to get bit or gored or stabbed,” Vanderbush says. “This was the most pathetic little bite of my career.” He applied Neosporin and didn’t think much of it, but about a month later, his middle finger had swollen to three to four times its normal width. He was given medication and sent home -- but three days after that, worsening pain sent him back to the doctor. “It went systemic – it locked up all my joints. For two of those days, I really couldn’t move … literally, I couldn’t get up out of the bed,” Vanderbush recalls. Test after test came back negative, until about a month later, when results of a test for fungal infection determined that Vanderbush had blastomycosis.

Blastomycosis is an infection that normally develops in people after they've breathed in a fungus found in wood and soil called Blastomyces dermatitidis; in the U.S., it can be found in the South and the Midwest. Usually, it develops into pneumonia, but in Vanderbush's case, it caused a skin infection, making this case rarer still. And while there are a few cases of people becoming infected with blastomycosis after a dog bite or a cat scratch, this is the certainly first known case of an infection after a kinkajou bite. The working theory is that the kinkajou may have picked up the fungal infection from the branches that were placed inside her enclosure (even though Vanderbush cleaned those branches with bleach every day).

Harris says the takeaway message of this case study is to be extra careful with animal bites -- especially if the animal dies after it bites you. A doctor visit for you and a necropsy for the deceased animal is in order, she says. (We might argue a second takeaway message is that the poor kinkajou never meant to hurt anybody and remains innocent. May the little critter rest in peace.)

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Did you really need another reason not to give your girlfriend a hickey? Here's one: A New Zealand woman was partially paralyzed after receiving a "lovebite" from her partner, reports a New Zealand news site. When the 44-year-old visited the emergency room at Middlemore Hospital in Auckland, she was unable to move her left arm. Her only other injury: the hickey on the right side of her neck. 

An unfortunate chain of events followed: The hickey was covering an artery, and all the sucking it takes to create a hickey caused some bruising inside the blood vessel, resulting in a clot. That clot went into the woman's heart, triggering a minor stroke -- hence her frozen arm. 

Doctors treated her with an anticoagulant, and her clot almost completely disappeared within a week. 

Hickeys: as dangerous as they are gross, according to science.

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Chris Pizzello / AP file

Scottish researchers may have poked a hole in the "Jersey Shore" motto "gym, tan, laundry." (Here, Snooki -- sorry, we mean Nicole Polizzi -- arrives at the 2010 Grammy Awards.)

Forget tanning. Loading up on fruits and veggies actually gives your skin a healthier, more attractive glow, a new Scottish study says. (Sorry, Snooki.)

"Attractiveness is very closely related to healthy appearance; they’re almost the same thing," explains Ian Stephen, who's currently an assistant professor of psychology at the Malaysia campus of the University of Nottingham, although he did the research for the study at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Stephen is the lead author of the study, published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior. 

Carrots really can turn your skin a yellowish, orangeish color; it's not just some blogger dude's gimmick. It's due to carotenoids, a naturally-occuring pigment found in many fruits and vegetables (not just carrots).

In an experiment, participants (all white, all undergrads) used a specially-designed computer program that allowed them to manipulate the skin tone of 51 photographed faces (also all white, all undergrads). They were instructed to make the faces look healthier, either by increasing the appearance of melanin (sun tan) or carotenoids (veggie tan). Most study participants slightly increased the melanin, but they really pumped up the carotenoids: the amount of increased carotenoid color they chose is equal to an extra five servings of fruits or vegetables a day, Stephen said.

A veggie tan beats a suntan. Who knew? 

At South Africa's University of Pretoria, a group of black, South African students used the same program to manipulate the skin tone of photographs of other black, South African students' faces, in another experiment included in the report. Like their white, Scottish counterparts, these students also chose the skin tone that "simulates not the fashion, and not the suntan, but the carotenoids," Stephen says.

But he still wouldn't recommend an all-carrot diet; while carotenoids are helpful to the immune system, too much can result in a skin tone that appears more jaundiced than golden. (Not a great look.)

What do you think of this study? Have we finally uncovered the secret to John Boehner's orange-y hue?

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Wearing the same pair of jeans day after day without ever bothering to wash them isn't as gross as it sounds.

University of Alberta student Josh Le wore a pair of skin-tight, "raw" jeans almost every day for 15 months, the Toronto Star reports. For Le, this started as a fashion experiment, but ended up a science experiment when he and his professor, Rachel McQueen, tested the dingy denim and found that germs levels weren't a worry.

The bacteria were the normal skin kind, nothing terribly icky or dangerous like E. coli. The highest counts of bacteria -- about 10,000 units per square centimeter -- were found in the crotch area.

“I was blown away. I thought there would be a lot more bacteria than was present,” Le told the Toronto Star. “It sort of shows that it is OK to not wash jeans.”

About halfway through the experiment, the jeans got too stinky to stomach, so Le threw them in the freezer and that seemed to help.

But why would a college kid wear dirty jeans over and over? (Also, where is his mother?) Apparently, it's a thing. "Raw" jeans are made of stiff, dark denim meant to be worn in until they are plastered to your figure. Le's jeans, by the way, wouldn't be confused with Lee jeans. They are $150 Nudie brand hipster jeans.

Do you live in your favorite jeans? How long do you go without washing them? Do tell.

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Courtesy of Mary Cappello / "Swallow"

An X-ray reveals swallowed safety pins, a case Dr. Chevalier Jackson described as one of his most difficult.

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Poor Mr. A! He’s a 50-year-old married man, who, since the age of 19, has been plagued with a litany of unpleasant ailments every time he ejaculates.

On cue, after any orgasm, the beleaguered man would experience fever, weakness, exhaustion, loss of initiative, headache, disordered speech, irritability, forgetfulness and frightening dreams, not to mention swollen lips and throat.

The symptoms were so severe that he and his wife planned intercourse for Fridays so he’d have two days to recover before returning to work on Monday. He also suffered from premature ejaculation, so the problem was no picnic for Mrs. A, either. It’s a miracle they had two children.

We know all this because Mr. A’s condition is detailed in a just-published paper in the Journal of Sexual Medicine in which Dutch doctors describe what they call Post Orgasmic Illness Syndrome, or POIS.

POIS was first identified by the same team of doctors in 2002. Initially it was thought the cause might be psychological, possibly related to a syndrome called “dhat” that is sometimes reported among men in India and Sri Lanka that leaves them fearful of ejaculating.

Then, doctors in the United Kingdom noted similar symptoms in two men, including one whose problem improved dramatically by taking non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs just before and for two days after ejaculating. That seemed to indicate the problem was caused by some sort of immune system reaction.

The Dutch doctors figured POIS might lie in a man’s reaction to his own semen. They conducted skin prick testing, a common way to test for allergies, on 33 of the 45 men they’ve identified with potential POIS so far. When the men were exposed to their own semen this way, 29 of them had classic allergic reactions. Mr. A was one.

They tried treating him the way allergists sometimes treat food allergies, with “hyposensitization,” a technique that uses the allergen itself to treat the condition.

The doctors began a long series of treatments, first diluting the semen 40,000 times, inoculating him with it, and then, over a period of 31 months, gradually working up to a dilution of 1-to-20.

Amazingly, it worked. Mr. A eventually was able to ejaculate without debilitating illness. His symptoms did not disappear entirely, but they were much milder and lasted only a short time. Lead author Marcel Waldinger, of the Department of Psychiatry and Neurosexology at Haga Hospital in The Hague, said the results “contradict the idea that the complaints have a psychological cause.”

That’s good to know, but why, we may ask, is Mr. A allergic to his own semen at all? Women have been known to have allergic reactions to men’s emissions, but that’s entirely different.

Scientists aren’t sure, but they believe that a gap in the seminal plumbing somehow allows the semen to contact immune cells called T-lymphocytes which, in turn, sets off immune system alarm bells. With repeated exposure, the reaction becomes intense.

Whatever the cause, Mr. A is relieved that his problem has eased. Doctors report he is now “quite contented” at both home and work.

As a side benefit, the premature ejaculation stopped, too, so we can only surmise that Mrs. A is content as well.

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Wills Eye Institute

Patients with cat eye syndrome have a congenital defect that can make the pupils resemble a keyhole.

By Stacy Lipson

When Kathleen Neely was a kid, her eyes were a bit different from other people. While the left was blue, the right was green, and it was smaller -- oh, and it looked like it could belong to a cat.

Neely was born with cat eye syndrome, a condition marked in some patients by a congenital defect of the iris called a coloboma, which causes the pupil of that eye to look keyhole-shaped, much like a cat eye.

Statistics from the National Center for Biotechnology Information estimate that cat eye syndrome affects one in every 50,000 to 150,000 live births. It's a chromosomal disorder, meaning it can be passed from mother to child if the mother is a carrier of the disorder.

Dr. Alex Levin, chief of the Wills Eyes Institute at the Pediatric Ophthalmology and Ocular Genetics Service in Philadelphia, says that cat eye syndrome occurs when patients have an extra piece of chromosome 22, creating two extra copies of that particular piece. Having an extra piece of chromosome 22 can cause serious health issues with organs such as the heart and kidney, Levin says. And vision itself might be impaired, if the coloboma affects the optic nerve and retina.

As a child, Neely was teased for her unusual eyes; she remembers her peers called her names like "Cyclops." When she was 30, her right eye was replaced when it started to deteriorate. Today, she has a prosthetic eye.

"I'm in good health," says Neely, now 39 and living in Boulder, Colo. "I consider myself very fortunate."

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Scott Boehm / Getty Images file

Chicago bears fans tailgate prior to the game between the New England Patriots against the Chicago Bears at Soldier Field on Dec. 12 in Chicago, Illinois.

We hear there are a couple of very important football games coming up this weekend.

But here's a counterintuitive finding: When fans leave those games, whether they're stumbling out of Chicago's Soldier Field or Pittsburgh's Heinz Field -- most of them will be surprisingly sober, a new study suggests.

Researchers from the University of Minnesota gave breath tests to sports fans as they left professional football and baseball games, and found that nearly 8 percent were legally drunk, meaning their blood alcohol content, or BAC, was at 0.08 or higher. Overall, about 40 percent had a positive BAC (that's including those who were legally drunk) and nearly 60 percent were not even a little drunk, with zero BAC. 

As the study's lead author has heard from quite a few people -- that actually doesn't sound all that bad, right? "I guess my reaction to that is ... that’s a lot of intoxicated individuals, especially when you think of the vast numbers of people who attend these events, says Darin Erickson, the study's lead author and an assistant professor of epidemiology and community health at the University of Minnesota. "Some of these modern arenas easily hold 50,000-plus, and you spin it out across an entire season, an entire sport -- it sounds like a small number, but I don't think that means this isn't an important public health issue." 

It's the first study to attempt to measure BAC levels after professional sports games in the U.S.; a similar 1992 Canadian study showed similar results. The survey included 362 people ages 21 to 64, who took breath tests after three football games and 13 baseball games. (It's a small sample size because it was tough to stop people outside stadiums who were on their way home, Erickson says.) About half of those surveyed said they drank at the game. 

The study also found that younger sports fans are the drunkest -- those 21 to 35 were more than nine times more likely to have BAC levels above 0.08. 

Erickson was tight-lipped on which football and baseball stadiums his research surveyed, only saying that it was one NFL stadium and one MLB stadium. (Although we can probably rule out Qwest Field, as Seahawks fans who order a "large" beer are actually getting one that's the same size as a "small," despite paying $1.25 more for the bigger size, a popular YouTube video suggests.)

"I think the implication, then, is that this many people are getting this intoxicated at these events -- what is this leading to?" Erickson says of the report, which was published online today in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research. "We’re all aware of drinking and driving, but that’s only one of the outcomes," adding that alcohol often plays a factor in accidental injuries or violent assaults. 

Erickson may focus future research on tailgaters, who were fourteen times more likely to be legally drunk after exiting the game, compared to those that hadn't tailgated, the study shows. One in four tailgaters had five or more drinks at their pre-game parties.

What do you think about the report? How does it compare to the last professional sports game you attended? And is it really possible to enjoy a baseball game without a beer or two? 

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Mondays are the worst. January is also the worst. And according to some, today is the worst day in the worst month of 2011. Welcome to Blue Monday. 

As CBS New York and other news outlets are reporting it, a British psychologist has developed an equation showing that the third Monday in January is the most depressing day of the year. (That very important and not at all made-up equation takes into account weather, debt, time since Christmas, time since screwing up on our New Year's resolutions, low motivational levels and the feeling of a need to take action, according to a press release issued by the UK's Mental Health Foundation in 2009. Science!) This morning, Blue Monday was a top trending topic on Twitter, just below Martin Luther King, Jr., Day and above the Golden Globes. 

But! A quick bit of Internet sleuthing shows today may not be as dreary as it initially appeared. First, according to the "Bad Science" column in the UK newspaper The Guardian, the whole "blue Monday" idea is attributed to psychologist Cliff Arnall of Cardiff University; in 2005, his name was attached to a press release describing the Blue Monday equation. But the newspaper later printed a correction requested by the school, saying that Arnall was actually just a former part-time tutor at the university. And even according to Arnall's own equation, we have a week to go until the real Blue Monday arrives.

Bottom line: Sometimes things you read on the Internet aren't true. Now that's a real downer.

Feeling bluer than usual today? Could it be because you're working on this national holiday? Do tell. 

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Joan Raymond writes: Have you ever taken off your glasses only to discover that besides being blind as bat, you can’t hear too well either? You’re not alone. There’s even a small cadre of Facebook folks who gather under the group, "I can't hear you, I don't have my glasses on."

According to Lawrence Rosenblum, professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside, the phenomena – though not highly researched – is plausible. “What we understand about the perceptual brain is that our senses integrate, and though we don’t think we use sight in hearing, we lip-read all the time,” and also get clues from teeth and tongue movement, says Rosenblum, author of "See What I'm Saying: The Extraordinary Powers of Our Five Senses." So if you can't see with your glasses off, you can't "hear" very well, either.

A phenomenon called The McGurk Effect shows how we all integrate so-called visual speech into speech that we hear. According to Rosenblum, researchers found that when a word or syllable is dubbed on a video showing a person’s face making a different sound, people will usually say the sound they “hear” is what the person on the video is saying, not the sound dubbed over it. Sometimes, people will come up with an entirely new sound, a combination of both the audio and video.

Rosenblum’s own research shows just how tightly sight and hearing are intertwined. In a study published in the journal Attention, Perception and Psychophysics, participants watched people mouth 80 words. The participants all had good hearing and no formal lip-reading training. When they were asked to repeat the word they thought was being said, participants were more likely to repeat the word in the same accent as the person who was mouthing the word. “We all mimic each other,” says Rosenblum, “but what’s so interesting is we do that even if we can only see, not hear, what a person is saying.”

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Cari Nierenberg writes: Students who are the biggest worrywarts before taking a test might calm their nerves -- and improve their results -- by writing about their fears for 10 minutes before the exam, a new study suggests.

Researchers looked at students who seemed to choke under pressure and didn't perform as well as expected in stress-filled situations, in the study published in the Jan. 14 issue of the journal Science.

They asked a group of 20 college students to do a series of math problems, telling them that the highest scorers on the test would be rewarded with money. To really turn up the heat, students were also told they would be videotaped during the exam and both their teachers and peers would be watching.

One group of students was asked to sit quietly for 10 minutes before the test; the rest spent the time writing down their thoughts and feelings about the upcoming exam. Those who put pen to paper outperformed the others, enjoying a 5 percent boost on their test scores.

"Writing down these negative thoughts helps students to see them on paper and rethink their negativity. Then those thoughts are less likely to pop in your head during the test and distract you," says Sian Beilock, the study’s senior author and an associate professor of psychology at the University of Chicago. "It's almost as if you've emptied your mind so you have the cognitive horsepower to perform at your best."

Beilock and her colleague Gerardo Ramirez repeated similar tests with more than 50 ninth-graders taking a final exam in biology.

Freshman with the most pretest jitters who wrote about their worries before the final earned a B+ on the exam, while students who wrote about something else got a B-. 

"The benefits are the most robust for students who are habitually anxious about taking tests," points out Beilock, author of "Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting it Right When You Have to."

The scientists suspected that expressive writing could help anxious students because other research has found that writing regularly in a journal was an effective mood-booster for depressed patients.

And the benefits may extend beyond the classroom.

"Taking the time to jot down your thoughts before you enter a do-or-die situation," whether it's a job interview, public speaking or an athletic event, "may do a lot to help you excel or shine in that setting," says Beilock.

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If you're a lady who just got dumped -- cheer up. It'll win you some points with your next boyfriend, suggests a recent study published in the journal Evolutionary Psychology. 

Learning that a woman kicked her last guy to the curb seemed to make men nervous, the study suggests. But women preferred it when the guy was the one to break up his previous relationship. 

The study's lead author, Christine Stanik, speculates that "a man’s willingness to end an ongoing relationship in hopes of finding someone better might be interpreted by women as a sign of status." Stanik received her Ph.D. in 2009 from the University of Michigan, where she conducted the research, and she's currently a post-doctoral researcher at Penn State University

In the study, participants logged on to a fictional online dating site, browsed through fake profiles and ranked how much they'd like to date the (fake) person. After slogging through bunch of trivial information (such as favorite ice cream and favorite color), they reached the kicker: "My last relationship ended because ..." Each of the profiles showed one of three answers: either the person was the dumper, got dumped themselves or chose not to respond to the question. The report drew its research from 198 participants, 102 women and 96 men, whose average age was about 19. Most of the participants -- 75 percent -- were white, and all were heterosexual.

"The sex difference is that women found a man more attractive after learning he had dumped his last partner; however, men found a woman less attractive after finding out the same information," Stanik says. (And sneakiness doesn't help matters: Refusing to answer the question lost points, too.)

"A man taking a dominant role in his romantic relationships may also be seen as more consistent with traditional gender roles," she continues. "A dominant woman may be less acceptable for this reason, or men may just view her as picky or demanding."

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Twentieth Century Fox

Who knows when "mouth-breather" became an insult synonymous with "dork" or "dweeb," like a character from "Napoleon Dynamite." But listen to the heavy breathers that are likely surrounding you: It's January, when more of us are prone to the sniffles, which means more of us have stuffy noses, which means -- we've entered the month of the mouth-breather.

But the term isn't just a barb that tracksuited TV villain Sue Sylvester loves to hurl like a slushie at the "Glee" kids; experts say that breathing while slack-jawed can actually lead to some surprisingly unpleasant health problems. If you're fighting a cold right now, you know your inability to suck any air through your congested nostrils can cause dry mouth, dragon breath and lack of sleep, for starters. You'll be fine when you kick the crud; the big problems start when you've become a chronic mouth-breather -- children and adults with allergies, for example.

As Dr. Yosh Jefferson, a New Jersey functional orthodontist, explains, "Mouth-breathing also irritates the tonsils and adenoids, so you have a double whammy where the sinuses are congested, which causes further blockage of the upper airway." Now you really can't breathe out of that nose. What's more, when you take in oxygen through your nose, it passes over the mucous membrane and into the sinuses, which produces nitric oxide, which your body needs for all the smooth muscles, like your heart and your blood vessels. So when you're not breathing through your nose, your blood actually isn't getting all the oxygen it needs to function properly. 

Jefferson believes breathing though the mouth is often an overlooked root cause of many health and behavioral problems, particularly in school-age kids. ("Just think of the child," he says. "How do you think they’re doing in school? These kids are tired, they’re irritable, they can’t concentrate in school. And a lot of these kids (may be) diagnosed with ADD and hyperactivity.")

But here's the absolute weirdest thing that mouth-breathing can cause: It can actually change the shape of kids' faces, according to a report Jefferson published last year in the journal General Dentistry. "Severe mouth breathers develop what they call long face syndrome -- long, narrow faces, very unattractive facial features. Also if their tonsils are swollen, they sometimes position their jaw in weird ways in order to get more oxygen into their bodies. It can happen in adults as well ... but it’s more prominent in children," Jefferson says. "People think they grew to this face because of genetics –- it’s not, it’s because they're mouth-breathers." It's reversible in children if it's caught early -- an orthodontist might use a device to expand the jaw, which will widen the mouth and open the sinuses, helping the child breathe through the nose again. (This can be done in adults, too, but it's more difficult.)

"It's best to treat them early," Jefferson says. "It drives me crazy that there are so many kids who are mouth breathers and no one is doing anything about it."

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We've long known that coughing and sneezing spreads cold and flu germs. Now, researchers are finding that so do singing, whistling and laughing, reported Reuters.

And if you're felled by the flu, especially don't bellow along to the music of Les Miz. (We're looking at you, Susan Boyle.) "I suspect that singing (especially trained operatic singing) will produce an even stronger, more penetrating plume [of infection]," Julian Tang, a virologist and consultant with Singapore's National University Hospital told Reuters. 

The Singapore researchers are using a ginormous mirror and high-speed camera to watch the splatter and figure out exactly how far those flu bugs fly through the air. (Hopefully, they also have a spectacular amount of Windex.)

Once researchers learn the answer, they can better recommend how far apart to place hospital beds or quarantine patients with an airborne infection - and you'll know how far to stand from your coughing, singing, whistling flu-infected loved ones.

They'll also be looking at how effective coughing into a loosely clenched fist, a tissue or face mask actually is, Reuters reported. No word on the effect of Josh Groban on influenza.

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Courtesy of Ronan McCloskey

Brendan Holland and Dr. Marta Korbonits view the skeleton of Charles Byrne, known as "The Irish Giant." Holland, who is 6 feet 9 inches tall, is genetically related to Byrne. The 7-foot-7-inch 18th century street performer is the subject of the upcoming documentary to be shown on BBC2.

Cari Nierenberg writes: Brendan Holland recently got some huge news about his family medical tree.

Holland, who's in his late 50s and lives in Dungannon, Ireland, found out through his participation in a research study that he "was genetically related to the Irish Giant."

The Irish Giant, whose real name was Charles Byrne, came to London in 1782 from Northern Ireland to make a living off his towering height as a street show performer. Today, Byrne's 7-foot-7-inch skeleton is a medical marvel on display at The Royal College of Surgeons in London.

At 6 feet 9 inches, Holland had always been baffled by his extremely tall stature since both his parents and siblings were of average height.

When he was about 13, he started growing rapidly, about 2 inches a year, he recalled. “I was constantly tired, had tremendous headaches, and was developing tunnel vision."

Holland's doctor discovered he had a tumor on his pituitary gland that was causing his body to pump out too much growth hormone. After the tumor, a pituitary adenoma, was found and treated when he was 20, he stopped growing. 

Eventually, Holland learned he lives in an area of Northern Ireland that scientists consider a hot spot for pituitary adenomas.

In a study published in today's New England Journal of Medicine, scientists in the United Kingdom looked at four modern-day Northern Ireland families, including Holland’s, and noticed the same genetic mutation in these families as they found in the 18th-century Irish Giant.

Using DNA extracted from Charles Byrne's teeth, the researchers speculate that they could trace the roots of the Irish study participants and the Irish Giant's inherited gene mutation for gigantism to a common ancestor who lived an estimated 1425 to 1650 years earlier -- or 57 to 66 generations ago.

The findings have a additional meaning to Holland because he has two sons. "I know that my children or my grandchildren could be screened for this rogue gene and if they are sufferers (of familial isolated pituitary adenoma), they can be given early treatment.”

Dr. Marta Korbonits, a professor of endocrinology and metabolism at Barts and the London School of Medicine, who led the research team's efforts, hopes this new evidence can lead to a better understanding of pituitary adenomas. 

"These people are not weirdos or freaks, but just ordinary ill people, as anybody else who inherits an increased chance to get a disease from their parents, as many of us do with other diseases, such as heart disease or diabetes," explains Korbonits.

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