By Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience

In science, it's not enough to think something is so. Researchers must show that what  we believe to be true is in fact true, proven through statistically significant and reproducible results. Questioning assumptions is, after all, what science is about.

Nonetheless, some studies really take the cake in the "duh" department, discovering  things that were already obvious. Here are findings from this year that should come as little surprise.

1. Unsafe sex is more likely after drinking

Drinking too much alcohol can impair decision-making. And a study out this year drove this point home: Canadian researchers, reporting results that will be published in January in the journal Addiction, said they ran 12 studies looking at the link between blood alcohol and the likelihood of agreeing to use a condom during sexual intercourse. The more alcohol in a person's system (yes, the drunker they were), the more likely they were to throw caution to the wind and ditch safe sex. Specifically, for every 0.1-milligram-per-milliliter increase in study participants' blood alcohol levels, there was a 5 percent increased likelihood of having unprotected sex.

2. Men appear confident by suppressing fear, pain and empathy

When mixed martial arts fighters need to show off masculine strength and confidence, they suppress fear, empathy, pain and shame.

Yeah, not too shocking: that tamping down those emotions might make someone seem more formidable. But the research, published in December in the journal Social Psychology Quarterly, was aimed at understanding how men manage their emotions and expectations of manhood.

"Managing emotional manhood, whether it occurs in a locker room or board room, at home or the Oval Office, likely plays a key role in maintaining unequal social arrangements," study author Christian Vaccaro of Indiana University of Pennsylvania said in a statement.

3. Smoking pot and driving isn't safe

Who knew, getting behind the wheel while high could be trouble? According to a study published in October in the journal Epidemiologic Reviews, marijuana use increases the risk of car crashes. People who took to the road within three hours of smoking pot, as well as those who tested positive for the drug, were more than twice as likely as other drivers to be involved in a car crash. And that risk increased for those who smoked more frequently and those showing a higher level of the drug in their urine.

4. Pigs love mud

Turns out pigs aren't just putting on a show when they haul butt around their muddy quarters, diving into the muck. They actually like it. While mud baths keep pigs cool, a review of research reported in 2011 found wallowing may also be a swine sign of well-being. While the review found the strongest reason noted in the past studies for wallowing was to keep cool, the pigs kept it up through winter months.

5. Fashion magazines glorify youth

Surprise, surprise: Fashion mags portray women over 40 sparingly, if at all. Young celebrities and models dominate the pages of these publications, even ones targeted at older age groups. For example, researchers reported in April in the Journal of Aging Studies, that 22 percent of the reader base of Essence is older than 50, but only 9 percent of the women in its pages were even older than 40. Vogue featured only one woman over 40 on its covers in 2010: Halle Berry (then 43).

6. People with generous partners have happy marriages

In the realm of unsurprising marriage advice, researchers found this year that generous marriages are happy marriages. Couples with spouses who offer back rubs and other seemingly selfless acts are happier with their relationships than people who report low amounts of generosity in their marriages, according to researchers with the National Marriage Project.

Half of women and nearly half (46 percent) of men who reported above-average generosity in their marriages described themselves as "very happy" with their relationships. In comparison, only 14 percent of people with low levels of generosity in their marriages said the same.

7. Parents don't think their kids are doing drugs

Smoking pot and drinking? Not my daughter! Parents are in denial about their own children's bad habits, according to poll data released in September by the University of Michigan's C.S. Mott Children's Hospital. That study found that while most parents believe at least 60 percent of 10th-graders drink alcohol, only 10 percent thought their own teen did. 

8. People aren't doing anything in particular on the Internet

Anyone who has ever gone down an Internet black hole, only to emerge hours (and dozens of Wikipedia articles) later, will be less than shocked at the revelation that online is the place to go for mindless entertainment. According to a Pew Research report released in December, 53 percent of people ages 18 to 29 get online at least once on any given day just to pass the time. Using the Internet to goof off isn't limited just to the young, either: Fifty-eight percent of all adults said they sometimes get on the Internet for no reason other than casual entertainment.

9. Restricting driver's licenses decreases teen fatalities

Graduated licenses, which allow teens more freedom behind the wheel as they gain driving experience, save lives. Researchers at the Institute for Research and Evaluation (PIRE) reported in November that fatal automobile crash rates among 16- and 17-year-olds fell 8 percent to 14 percent in states that enacted graduated-licensing laws. Restrictions such as limits on the number of passengers a teen can ferry around and rules against night driving decreased fatal crashes by 13 percent and 9 percent, respectively. Practice (and a little more maturity) makes perfect, it seems.

10. Most shoppers ignore nutrition labels

Calories, cholesterol, sugar … yawn. A study published in October found that grocery shoppers pay little attention to the information on nutrition labels. Even shoppers who say they "almost always" read nutrition information aren't likely to take in much information in a real-world shopping environment, the research found. Using an eye-tracking device on study volunteers, researchers found that only about 1 percent looked at information about total fat, trans fat, sugar and serving size on nearly all labels, even though between 20 percent and 31 percent of people said they looked at each of those categories when they shopped. Anything low on the label is particularly unlikely to get attention. The study found that the average consumer doesn't make it past the fifth line.

11. Presidents outlive their contemporaries

U.S. presidents tend to live as long or longer than their contemporaries, according to research published Dec. 7 in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Sure, being chief executive is stressful (and eight have died in office, four by assassination), but it turns out the top job in the country comes with perks: great medical care, for example. Presidents also tend to be well-off and well-educated, according to lead researcher S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of public health at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Unsurprisingly, money and knowledge tend to buy health and longevity.

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Not much good can happen when you send a bare foot smashing into someone's jaw. But during a summer beach brawl, a kick to the face caused one man to get part of his opponent's tooth stuck in his right foot.

Published in the Journal of Foot and Ankle Surgery, this case is the first to report a tooth "traumatically implanted in the foot." 

The case describes a 29-year-old Croatian man who came to the hospital emergency room complaining of swelling and severe pain in his right foot. At first, he claimed he had stepped on a piece of glass while walking on the beach.

The man had a wound on the sole of is right foot in the gap of skin between his third and fourth toe. When doctors x-rayed the foot, they didn't find a shard of glass but saw "an opaque object" that resembled a human tooth.

So, they questioned the patient again and this time he came clean.

He admitted that two weeks earlier he had been involved in a fight with another guy on the beach. He had been wearing flip-flops but they flew off during the scuffle as he kicked his opponent in the jaw with his right foot.

That strike to the jaw broke off one of his opponent's teeth, which then embedded itself beneath the man's right foot.

Ten days after the brawl when pus from the wound started to ooze out, the man went to see his doctor about his injury. But he didn't fess up to the fight, and his doctor cleaned the wound and prescribed an antibiotic to reduce the risk of infection.

When the pain did not let up, he headed to the emergency room and that's when the tooth was discovered. The doctors decided to surgically remove it because the skin had developed an abscess.

"We consider all foreign body puncture wounds to be 'dirty,' " says Zenon Pogorelić, MD, the case study lead author and a pediatric surgeon at the University Hospital Split in Split, Croatia. Dr. Pogorelić removed the tooth from the patient's foot, and says that because human saliva contains nearly 200 different species of micro-organisms, this can also increase a person's risk for infection.

From the looks of it, the surgeon's suspect the tooth was an incisor from the front part of his opponent's mouth.

Stepping on toothpicks, sewing needles, glass, metal, and insect stingers are the most common objects to cause deep cuts to the sole of the foot. Finding a human tooth there is a rarity, although the medical literature describes unusual cases where a tooth has been found in the tongue, throat, sinuses, and ear canal.

The wound eventually healed, and "the patient returned to his regular activities 15 days after the operation." Let's hope those regular activities didn't include putting his foot into another person's mouth.

More tales of misplaced things:

• Engineer lived with bullet in his head for 8 decades
• Swallowed pen still works 25 years later
• Woman's breast implant disappears during Pilates

Want more weird health news? Find The Body Odd on Facebook.

New England Journal of Medicine

This image shows the bullet that was lodged in an 85-year-old man's head -- specifically, his foraman magnum -- for more than 80 years.

When a Russian man was only 3, his older brother accidentally shot him with a pistol. More than eight decades later, the bullet was still there, according to a case report just published online in the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. 

The bullet hit the little boy right below the nose and eventually lodged itself in his foramen magnum, the opening in the bottom of the skull that allows the spinal cord to pass through and connect to the brain. The 3-year-old lost consciousness for several hours. At the time, a doctor examined the poor kid, but didn't remove the bullet for fear of causing more harm than good, says Dr. Marat Ezhov of Moscow's Cardiology Research Center, who examined the patient more than 80 years later. Incredibly, the boy recovered completely. 

"The body has an amazing ability to 'get used to' things," explains Dr. Richard O'Brien, a spokesman for the American College of Emergency Physicians. "Also, children have a great ability to overcome hardship and rebuild themselves when injured."

Eighty-two years later, Ezhov and Dr. Maya Safarova were treating the man at the cardiology center for his coronary heart disease. His patient history included the story of the accidental shooting, so doctors did a CT scan to check it out, which revealed the stowaway bullet. But the bullet had left no sign of neural damage -- further evidenced by the man's successful career as an award-winning engineer. 

"High-speed missiles, like a bullet, can cause great damage and usually do," explains Dr. David Ross, an emergency physician at Penrose Hospital in Colorado Springs, Colo. "However, because they are high-speed, they generate a lot of heat. That heat usually means the missile is sterile -- meaning it is unlikely to serve as a basis for infection if it stays in one place for many years. So if it did not cause much damage, which it apparently didn't, it was unlikely to cause him ongoing troubles."

A weird little detail: Ezhov notes that the during his engineering career, the man oversaw construction of ballistic missles.

Doctors at the Russian cardiology center decided that at this point, the bullet didn't need to be removed -- after all, he was in good condition, Ezhov noted, and he had been doing well for decades. Besides, even his scar wasn't affecting his life negatively -- the bullet did leave a scar under his nose, but his curved, Roman nose keeps it invisible, Safarova said in an email. 

Related:

• Swallowed pen still works 25 years later
• Woman's breast implant disappears during Pilates

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When twins Danielle and Nicole Fisher gave birth to baby boys within minutes of one another, people wondered whether it was the result of some sort of special twin telepathy. After all, what are the chances that two young women would get pregnant within weeks of one another and then deliver 13 minutes apart?

The duo insists they didn’t consciously plan to get pregnant together. Twenty-three year old Nicole Fisher put it down to the “twin thing.” “It just has something to do with that twin communication,” she told her hometown New Jersey newspaper, The Courier-Post.

But twin experts aren’t ready to explain this away with ESP.

“I’ve heard of these things happening before,” said Nancy Segal, a professor of psychology at California State University at Fullerton and author of “Entwined Lives: Twins and What They Tell Us About Human Behavior.” “It’s fascinating. But I don’t think there’s any kind of ESP going on.”

Segal thinks the more likely explanation is shared genetics. While genes aren’t destiny, she said, they tend to greatly influence our lives.

“Twins’ lives tend to be in synch, particularly identical twins,” Segal said. “And you could see how genetics might come into play when it comes to the ease of conception, for example.”

Segal has interviewed hundreds of twins and for the most part she hasn’t come across many instances of any special sort of twin communication.

“They can have very close connections,” Segal said. “They can spend a lot of time together because they get along so well.”

It’s not just the power of genes that makes twins feel so close, said Ricardo Ainslie, a professor in the department of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and author of “The Psychology of Twinship.”

“They grow up together in the same developmental context,” Ainslie said. “That’s very powerful. And because of it there will always be a kind of intimacy between twins that doesn’t exist between siblings that are different ages.”

Model Lauren Scruggs, who lost her left eye after being struck by an airplane propeller, has a fraternal twin sister, Brittany. In a recent post on CaringBridge.org, their mom, Cheryl Scruggs, reported that Brittany’s left eye had been twitching for days. “She knows it’s because of their deep connection she and Lo have, and God allowing her to go through this with her at the ‘twin’ level,” she wrote.

Still, the whole mythology of twin ESP can be oppressive, Ainslie said. Some twins even feel they come up short because they can’t communicate telepathically.

“When I interviewed twins,” Ainslie said, “I asked about this phenomenon. And what is interesting is that many twins seemed to feel that they didn’t measure up to that myth. They’d say ‘My twin and I try to communicate in these ways. Maybe we’re just not as twin-like as other twins.’” 

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Petr David Josek / AP

There are weepy drinkers, inappropriately affectionate drinkers, giggly and goofy drinkers. But there's one type of reveler you really want to avoid: the angry drinker. New research suggests how to spot one. 

Impulsive, live-in-the-moment types are likely to become aggressive when they're intoxicated, according to a new study from Ohio State University's Brad Bushman, a professor of communication and psychology at the school. "We already know that alcohol increases aggression. And people who have aggressive personality traits also tend not to think about the consequences of their actions," Bushman says. "You put the two together, and it's really a toxic mix." 

The average age of the study's 495 volunteers was 23, all of whom described themselves as social drinkers and none of whom had any past or present drug, alcohol or psychiatric-related problems. They each took a questionnaire designed to measure which of the participants were future-focused, and which were more impulsive. Half of the volunteers were given alcohol mixed with orange juice; the other half were given orange juice with just a teensy bit of alcohol -- but researchers sprayed the rims of the glasses with alcohol so it smelled like a full-on alcoholic drink (genius).

Then they played a little game: The participants were told they were playing against an unseen same-sex opponent in a speed reaction test, and that the winner got to give the loser an electric shock -- harmless, but still a little painful. (But, actually, they were playing against the researchers themselves.) As the game wore on, the shocks got longer and more intense, making it seem like the opponent was getting meaner and meaner with every win. The more impulsive the participants had rated themselves, the more likely they were to retaliate by upping the intensity and length of the shocks they sent the "losers." 

“The less people thought about the future, the more likely they were to retaliate, but especially when they were drunk.  People who were present-focused and drunk shocked their opponents longer and harder than anyone else in the study,” Bushman explained. "Alcohol didn’t have much effect on the aggressiveness of people who were future-focused."

While the impulsive types who were not intoxicated did up the intensity of the shocks, it wasn't to the same degree as the impulsive folks who were drunk.

"If you carefully consider the consequences of your actions, it is unlikely getting drunk is going to make you any more aggressive than you usually are," Bushman said.

That's because alcohol is a disinhibitor, explains New York City psychiatrist and regular TODAY contributor Dr. Gail Saltz. It doesn't cause a personality trait; it reveals what's already there, hiding somewhere inside your personality. A drunk friend may appear to be acting out of character, but we don't know what that person might be keeping under wraps, Saltz explains.

Think you're only an angry drunk when you're throwing back, say, shots of tequila? It's not that simple, says Bruce Bartholow, associate professor of psychology at University of Missouri College of Arts and Sciences. (Bartholow led a study we wrote about earlier this year on alcohol and behavior.) Bartholow says there isn't much research looking at how drinking an unfamiliar type of alcohol changes cognitive function.

"There’s a social influence on your drunken behavior," Bartholow explains. "People drink different kinds of things in different situations. If you're at a dinner party at your boss's house, you're probably not going to be doing shots of tequila." There, you might be drinking a good sauvignon blanc, so you learn to associate the experience of drinking wine with mind-your-manners behavior. "There's a difference between what it feels like to be drunk off of wine and what it feels like to be drunk off of shots of tequila because the situations are vastly different," Bartholow explains. 

Related: 

Post-booze blackout, how people fill in the blanks

Blame it on the alcohol? Maybe not

Why do hangovers seem so much worse as we get older?

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The pen is said to be mightier than the sword. But an unusual case report has shown that a pen may be mightier than stomach acid.

The case, which appeared in the British Medical Journal Case Reports, described a 76- year-old British woman sent to a GI specialist because of weight loss and diarrhea.

She was diagnosed with severe diverticulosis, a condition that's common in older people in which small pouches bulge out from the colon. But when doctors did a scanning test of her belly they noticed something strange: "A linear foreign body in the stomach." (Click here for photos.)

When asked about it, the woman remembered accidentally swallowing a black felt-tip pen 25 years earlier. (In case you're wondering, dentures and toothpicks are two of the most common items that adults accidentally swallow.)

According to her gastroenterologist Dr. Oliver Waters, who authored the case report, she was standing on her stairs using an uncapped pen to poke a spot on her tonsils. She was also holding a hand mirror to guide the pen to the exact spot. Somehow, while doing this, she lost her balance and stumbled. The fall managed to push the pen down her throat. It glided down her gullet and found a home in her tummy.

She told her husband and her doctor what had happened, but they were skeptical of the story. X-rays done at the time were normal and found no trace of the pen. Flash forward to the present, to a different doctor and even better stomach-scanning technology to investigate the case of the missing marker. More than two decades later a scan hit pay dirt: The pen.

Although the woman's current digestive problems had nothing to do with the marker she had unintentionally downed, doctors decided to remove it anyway. Their rationale was a case in the medical literature of a child accidentally swallowing a ball-point pen that bore a hole in his bowel. Incredibly, the pen had stayed in her stomach for 25 years without causing any significant damage to her GI tract, Waters says.

After bathing in stomach acid for a two-and-a-half decades, the pen was corroded and the plastic was flaky, but, amazingly, the pen still had usable ink and could write!

"This case highlights that plain abdominal x-rays may not identify ingested plastic objects and occasionally it may be worth believing the patient's account however unlikely it may be," the report advises doctors.

Write on!

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• Woman's breast implant disappears during Pilates
• Un-paralyzed by a crash? Docs say it's unlikely
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Nigel Roddis / Reuters

Wolverhampton Wanderers' Ronald Zubar challenges Manchester United's Nani during their English Premier League soccer match in Manchester, on Dec. 10.

The stress of watching the final nail-biting minutes of a Manchester United match is enough to trigger life-threatening anxiety for one 58-year-old superfan, according to a new report published this week in the British Medical Journal. 

The woman experienced palpitations, panic, light-headedness and even a "sense of impending doom" toward the end of the most high-profile matches played on Man U's home turf at Old Trafford Stadium, particularly when the opposing teams were rival clubs like Chelsea or Manchester City. "On these occasions she considered leaving the stadium because she felt so unwell," write the authors of the report, including Akbar Choudhry, who treated the woman. In contrast, when her beloved Red Devils were playing a team that didn't stand a chance, her symptoms became barely noticeable. 

As a result of her football fanaticism, doctors were able to diagnose her with Addison's disease, which means her adrenal glands do not produce enough of their hormones, including cortisol. The drop in cortisol triggers an Addisonian crisis, a medical emergency that can be life-threatening. 

Addison's disease is difficult to diagnose, and as many as 60 percent of those with the disorder are seen by at least two clinicians before the diagnosis is even considered, according to the BMJ report. That's likely because the most visible symptoms include fatigue, lethargy and a mild depression, all of which are characteristics of many chronic conditions. But this woman's severe anxiety during high-stress games led her doctors to diagnose her with Addison's disease. 

Doctors treated the woman with cortisol replacement therapy -- fortunately for her, the start of her treatment happen to coincide with the start of Manchester United's 2011/12 season, allowing her to attend games without any Addison's symptoms. "Luckily, the patient was on holiday for United's 6-1 defeat by local rivals Manchester City in October," Choudhry said in a report on BMJ.com.

Related:

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Getting hammered to the point of not remembering much, if anything, about it is a pretty common experience for some people on college campuses or during a long holiday weekend. Reconstructing what happened during a bout of booze-fueled amnesia can either make for a hilarious movie plot like "The Hangover" or an interesting research project.

Although not inspired by the Hollywood blockbuster, a recent study looked at alcohol-induced memory blackouts hoping to learn how people "fill in the blanks" afterward and whether this information is accurate. Researchers found that people frequently turn to  unreliable sources to piece together these forgotten memories.

In the study, published in the journal Memory, 280 British college students completed an online survey. Students were asked whether they had experienced either a partial blackout  --  where they remembered bits and pieces of what happened after they started drinking, or a total one -- forgetting everything about what they did or saw until they woke up the next day.

Among the students who drank, 24 percent of them admitted to having a total blackout while 37 percent had a partial one. Drinking a lot within a short period of time typically causes a blackout, explains lead author Robert Nash.

Researchers found that blackout sufferers were somewhat more likely to ask people who had also been intoxicated for details of the hazy episode rather than asking people who weren't drunk but had also witnessed it. Nearly 44 percent said they had seen a photograph or video reminding them of what happened.

"I was surprised at how highly motivated people were to reconstruct these forgotten alcohol-soaked experiences, despite knowing that doing so can often lead to considerable embarrassment or panic," admits Nash, a lecturer in psychology at the University of Surrey in Guildford, England.

He says asking other people who were there is often the only way we can find out what happened. But that relying on friends or acquaintances who were probably drunk can make their recollections less than 100 percent reliable.

Unreliable sources can lead to memory errors and sometimes false beliefs about behaviors during a forgotten time-period. This may be true not only for boozy blackouts but for other past experiences, whether it's cobbling together childhood memories or even in cases of wrongful conviction.

Interestingly roughly three-quarters of the study participants admitted they might have unintentionally made up information when a friend passed out, such as claiming the person had sex with a stranger or puked on someone.

And nearly 17 percent of blackout sufferers later discovered they were misled by incorrect information, often coming from friends.

But having a blackout and being eager to know what happened, seems perhaps to change people's perspectives on whether a particular source could be trusted, Nash points out. "So we place faith in information sources that we would othewise consider highly untrustworthy."

His advice? "Be aware when reconstructing events of whether you are placing trust in a source because someone is truly reliable or because that person is the only option."

Related: 

• About last night: Biology of the booze blackout
• Why do hangovers seem so much worse as we get older?
• I'll never drink again! Never mind. Cheers! 

Want more weird health news? Find The Body Odd on Facebook.

There's really no other way to put this: During a Pilates stretching exercise, a 59-year-old woman said her body "swallowed" one of her breast implants. Sounds like something we just made up, but the woman's case is the subject of an unbelievable report, just published online in the latest New England Journal of Medicine. 

The woman was a breast cancer survivor who'd had a double mastectomy, and afterward had gotten breast implants. During a Pilates routine, she was doing a Valsalva maneuver, a breathing technique in which a person takes a deep breath and holds it while bearing down. (In other words, you're going through the motions of exhaling forcibly, but without letting any air escaping through the mouth or nose.)

Doing a Valsalva maneuver increases pressure inside your chest cavity. In this lady's case, enough pressure built to essentially send her right implant through the thin tissue between her ribs and into the space in between the lungs. This left her more perplexed than anything -- where did it go?! Fortunately (and incredibly), she said upon arriving in the the emergency department of the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore that she wasn't experiencing any chest pain or shortness of breath. 

"I can picture how this could happen in a freak occurrence," says Dr. Anthony Youn, a Michigan-based cosmetic surgeon and frequent contributor to msnbc.com, who didn't treat this patient but gave us his professional opinion on what the heck happened here.

Note that Youn called this a "freak occurrence" -- this is not exactly going to happen to your average Pilates lover, as this woman's case had some extra complications. She'd recently undergone a surgery to repair her heart's mitral valve, a procedure that typically involves some separating of the muscles that run between the ribs. 

"What likely happened in this instance is that the breast implant was placed under the chest muscle and on top of the ribs, an extremely common practice in breast reconstruction," Youn says. "When the patient Valsalva'd, the pectoralis (chest) muscle likely contracted and pushed the implant through the space between her ribs," which was particularly fragile after the valve surgery.

"The weakened scar tissue was easily torn, and the strength of the pectoralis muscle pushed the implant deep into her chest," Youn explains. 

The woman was treated at Johns Hopkins, where surgeons retrieved the implant from within her chest and put it back where it belonged. 

Related: 

• Un-paralyzed by a crash? Docs say it's unlikely
• Your new nightmare worms its way into view
• Gym-goers trip, flip and fall in pursuit of fitness

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Getty Images stock

By Markham Heid
Men's Health

A little snap judgment goes a long way toward making friends: According to a new study from the University of California, Berkeley, all it takes is 20 seconds to decide whether or not a stranger is trustworthy.

Researchers recruited 24 couples and asked each person to talk about a time when he or she had suffered. Meanwhile, cameras recorded the reactions of the speaker’s partner. A separate group reviewed the videos, and was able to identify fake compassion in the reacting partners within 20 seconds.

How to Earn Her Trust

After researchers took DNA samples of the study participants, it turned out that 60 percent of the least-trusted participants lacked a gene receptor, GG genotype, that may control your compassion and empathy. The receptor helps regulate your body’s level of oxytocin, which past studies have linked to feelings of trust, empathy, and generosity, explains Alexsandr Kogan, Ph.D., a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto and the study’s lead author.

Of those rated most trustworthy, 90 percent carried the gene. But since the gene is only linked to perceptions of sincerity, it doesn’t mean you’re unsympathetic if you don’t have it, the study authors say. Observers could weed out the sincere from the dishonest because, Kogan says, “there are certain behaviors that are found to be signals of trust and support.

Whether you’re dealing with a salesman, a new colleague, or a blind date, you can identify bogus behavior if you know what to look for, says Marc Salem, Ph.D., a behavioral psychologist and the Men’s Health resident expert on non-verbal behavior. Look out for these signs:

1. Inconsistent behavior
“If normally someone is very still, and suddenly they become very animated, or vice versa, that change-up is a red flag,” Salem says. The same goes if a person is speaking smoothly and rapidly, but suddenly their speech becomes more deliberate or clipped. “Shifts from the norm are red flags for deceit,” he adds.

2. A steady gaze
“When people think or contemplate, it’s natural for them to break eye contact and look around,” Salem explains. If a person’s gaze is too constant, they’re either not listening or consciously trying to earn your trust. Both are signs of insincerity.

3. Not enough mouth
Coughing, clearing the throat frequently, or any other gesture of covering the mouth can indicate that a person is trying to hide something, Salem says. The same goes for a shoulders-down, hunched-body pose. That’s a sign of caution, he adds, and indicates a person is not opening himself up completely.

4. A quick smile
A genuine smile changes a person’s whole face, Salem says. Their eyes light up, and their cheeks and eyebrows rise along with the corners of their mouth. That smile also takes a few seconds to fade. A fake smile appears in an instant, and disappears just as quickly.

How to Spot a Liar

More from Men's Health:

How to Detect a Liar

How to Spot a Lying Politician

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Whether the public blames Wall Street or its bankers for bad decisions depends a lot on the group's level of cohesion as well as its mindfulness, or ability to "think," suggests a new study.

The researchers wanted to find out how people choose to blame large collectives, such as a major corporation, political party, governmental entity, professional sports team or other organization, while still treating members of those groups as unique individuals. They found that the more people judge a united group as having a "mind"— the ability to think, intend or plan — the less they judge each member as having their own capacity to complete acts requiring such a mind. The opposite also held.

"We thought there might be certain cases where instead of attributing mind to individuals, people actually attribute mind to the group," study researcher Liane Young, an assistant professor of psychology at Boston College, said in a statement.

Young gives a political example of a group mind. "If you're a Democrat, you might think that the Republican Party has an agenda, a mind of its own, but that each individual Republican is just following the crowd, incapable of independent thought," Young said. "That's the trade-off we're after, between group mind and member mind."

To test their theory, the researchers conducted four experiments on a total of 129 participants via online questionnaires. In the studies, participants had to rate the extent to which various groups had a mind, and the extent to which each group member individually had a mind. These groups ranged from corporations, like McDonald's, to sports teams, such as the New York Yankees, to government entities, such as the U.S. Navy and even groups like Facebook.

Participants also rated each group's cohesiveness, and in some of the studies, they indicated how morally responsible the group was for its collective decisions and how morally responsible the group's members were for both personal decisions and collective decisions.

Results showed that to the greater extent subjects judged a group to have a "mind," the less likely they were to judge each member of that group as having an individual mind; as such, the participants tended to assign each individual within the group less responsibility for their own actions.

This suggests that people assess a group as a whole differently than they do the individuals in the group, and use that judgment when doling out blame, the researchers said.

For instance, on a scale from 1 (not at all) to 7 (very much), participants gave Burger King's "group mind" an average of 3.55 and their "member mind" as a 5.45; as such, when asked how morally responsible Burger King as a group is responsible for collective actions, participants gave an average rating of 5.9 and a 2.85 for how responsible individual members were for their own personal actions. The U.S. Congress got the same group-mind rating and a 5.9 for member mind, while the U.S. Navy scored a 3.6 and 5.1 for group and individual mind, respectively; Twitter users scored an average of 2.7 and 6.35 for group and individual mind, respectively.

"When people consider corporations to be mindful entities, this gives them moral rights, such as the right to contribute to political campaigns, as was granted to them by the Supreme Court last year, as well as legal responsibilities," study researcher Adam Waytz of Northwestern University said in a statement.

"We think the topic of whether people think of groups as having minds has a number of implications for legal decisions, such as regarding conspiracy—a charge that requires collective intent, how people think about social movements and their members, as well as judgments of corporate personhood," Waytz added.

The study was published in the December issue of the journal Psychological Science.

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Pop stars like Ke$ha use vocal fry to drop their voices down into lower notes. Researchers say the croaky sounds are becoming more prevalent in college-aged women's speech.

The influence of pop singers like Britney Spears and Ke$ha may actually be changing the way some young women speak, suggests a (small) new study.

The report, recently published online in the Journal of Voice, examines the prevalence of a speech pattern called "vocal fry," the creaky, rough, guttural sound that pop singers sometimes use to slip into lower notes. Nassima Abdelli-Beruh, one of the study authors (along with Lesley Wolk and Dianne Slavin) and a speech scientist at Long Island University, describes the sound like "rattled, popping air." 

Can you hear in your head the way Spears croaks the line "Oh baby, baby" in "Baby One More Time"? (If not, watch the video here.) The first two seconds of the Ke$ha hit "Blah Blah Blah" is another good example. And as our pals over at Maddow Blog point out, you can hear vocal fry in practically every word out of Kim Kardashian's mouth. Listen to an example from the study provided by Abdelli-Beruh here:

Vocal fry has historically been considered a speech disorder, the study authors note, often seen in patients with vocal cord damage. Specifically, the speech habit can cause contact granulomas, benign but painful lesions on the vocal cords.

But this study suggests the quirk is becoming normalized. Researchers from Long Island University recorded speech from 34 college-aged women, and found that more than two-thirds of them used the croaky "vocal fry" sounds, usually dipping into the low, creaky register at the end of a sentence.

"My colleagues and I have noticed this speech pattern in our young female college students," says Abdelli-Beruh, adding that about 99 percent of their students are female. After publishing the data on vocal fry in college women, she and her team did a similar study on college men, and found that the guys are much less likely to speak in croaks. "Interestingly, some research indicates that in some dialects of British English, male speakers use fry more often than female. So maybe it is also a gender marker," Abdelli-Beruh says.

It's likely also a generational marker. "(A)necdotally, vocal fry is judged to be annoying by those who are not as young as the college students we tested," she says. "My son, who is a teenager, listens to 92.3 NOW in NYC. I noticed the way the voice said 'NOW' on the radio (is) clearly glottal fry."

The volunteer speakers didn't use vocal fry when speaking vowel sounds, suggesting the trend is more habitual or social than anything else. "It is possible that these college students have either practiced or observed this vocal register and modeled it to match popular figures," the authors write, noting that future research will explore the social nature of vocal fry. But the continuous use of the guttural speech could put these young women at risk for vocal cord damage. (It's tough to produce the sound loudly, so the croak may cause increased vocal cord tension and fatigue.) 

Have you noticed croaky, throaty sounds in young women's speech? Share your favorite example in the comments, or on our Facebook page.

UPDATE: Best comment so far, from Facebook fan Amelia Price: "These girls sound like a bunch of neurotic dolphins who do not make sense." Brilliant. Can you top that?

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By Jeanna Bryner
LiveScience

When the office slacker makes a mistake that could cost them a pay raise — do you truly feel bad, or do you have to work to hide your smile?

If you smiled, you've just experienced schadenfreude, a bit of enjoyment at the misfortunes of others. And now researchers know more about why we experience this seemingly odd emotion. Turns out, it can be a sure way to make you feel better about yourself. It's a self-affirming boost.

"If somebody enjoys the misfortune of others, then there's something in that misfortune that is good for the person," said study researcher Wilco W. van Dijk, adding that it could be due to thinking the other person deserves the misfortune, and so becoming less envious of them or feeling better about one's self.

In the study, van Dijk, of Leiden University in the Netherlands,and his colleagues had 70 undergraduate students (40 women and 30 men) read two interviews about a high-achieving student who was likely to land a great job. Then they read an interview with the student's supervisor revealing that the student had suffered a big setback in his/her studies. Next, they rated their level of agreement with five statements meant to gauge their schadenfreude, such as: "I enjoy[ed] what happened to Marleen/Mark"; "I couldn’t resist a little smile."

Those with low self-esteem (assessed at the study's start) were both more likely to be threatened by the overachieving student, and to experience schadenfreude. However, the researchers found that regardless of self-esteem, those who felt more threatened by this student also felt more schadenfreude.

The researchers thought that perhaps the reason for this was that schadenfreude was self-affirming for these "threatened" individuals.

As a follow-up experiment, the researchers gave about half of the students a self-affirmation boost by shoring up their beliefs about what the students had indicated was a very important value to them, and then asked them to repeat the same interview-reading stint.

Participants with low self-esteem were again more likely to experience schadenfreude, and also more likely to feel threatened by the high-achieving student. However, those who had been self-affirmed were less likely than those who hadn't to reap pleasure when reading about the other student's academic slip.

"I think when you have low self-esteem, you will do almost anything to feel better, and when you're confronted with the misfortune of others," you'll feel schadenfreude, van Dijk told LiveScience. "In this study, if we give people something to affirm their self, then what we found is they have less schadenfreude — they don't need the misfortune of others to feel better anymore."

If you feel an evil sort of glee at the slip-ups of another, are you a bad person? Well, van Dijk says that just about all of us experience schadenfreude at some point in our lives.

"We know that it's very good to feel empathy and sympathy for people, so if you feel schadenfreude without any sympathy or compassion for that other person," that would not be good, van Dijk said. "Our society thrives on compassion and empathy."

While some of us get a kick out of the small blunders of a colleague, say, others experience schadenfreude due to another's grave misfortunes, as van Dijkhas found in research yet to be published.

The current study is detailed in the December 2012 issue of the journal Emotion.

When have you experienced schadenfreude? Tell us on Facebook.

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Bas Czerwinski / AP file

Monique van der Vorst, paralyzed since age 13, says a crash two years ago reversed her paralysis. Um. We have so many questions.

It sounds like a plot right out of a TV movie: A woman paralyzed since the age of 13 miraculously regains feeling in her legs and is able to walk again after being injured in a traffic accident.

But that’s exactly what 27-year-old Monique van der Vorst says happened to her two years ago. Van der Vorst had turned to hand-cycling after losing feeling in her legs as a teen. She got so good that she won two silver medals in the Paralympics.

Two years ago while she was on the road training for the 2012 Paralympics, Van der Vorst was mowed down by a speeding bicyclist.

While in the hospital after the collision with the bicyclist, van der Vorst says she suddenly developed a tingling in her legs -- and within a year she was walking again. This week the announcement came that she’d joined a pro-cycling team and was looking forward to competing at the Olympics as an able-bodied athlete.

Van der Vorst’s doctors haven’t been able to come up with an explanation for her miraculous recovery -- and neither could any of the doctors interviewed by msnbc.com.

With the caveat that it’s impossible to comment on a specific patient without seeing actual medical records, physicians agreed that it was unlikely that anyone who had lost all feeling in their lower extremities could be healed by being hit hard in an accident.

“I have never heard of a case of damage to the spinal cord where someone lost feeling and strength in their legs and then had a second accident that gave them feeling back,” said Dr. Michael Boninger, professor and chair of the department of physical medicine and rehabilitation at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and director of the rehabilitation institute at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. “The fundamental truth is that accidents don’t cause damaged nerve cells to regenerate.”

Still, Boninger added, “I would have to also say that there’s a lot in medicine that we don’t know and a lot we have yet to learn.”

The cases where you do see recovery tend to be those in which patients still have some feeling and ability to move right after a spinal injury, said Dr. Bruce Dobkin, professor of neurology and director of the Neurologic Rehabilitation and Research Program at the University of California, Los Angeles. “If some sensation and movement is retained after such an injury (as in most of the athletes injured on a football field), recovery of walking is likely in 90 percent of cases,” he added. “The process of improvement after such an injury can take up to a year after the incomplete cord injury.”

Van der Vorst says she initially lost feeling in her legs after suffering nerve damage from an ankle operation when she was 13. That problem was compounded by a later car accident in which her spine was injured.

If a person’s peripheral nerves -- the ones that run from the spinal cord to the extremities -- are damaged, they can at least partially regenerate, Dobkin said. “The longest nerves, the ones that move the toes and ankles, may take 18 months to partially regrow, but do not always extend far enough to improve voluntary movement,” he explained. “So, rehab specifically aimed at improving whatever voluntary movement is available can benefit a patient at any time, but is most valuable in the first 12 to 18 months after an injury.”

What do you think of van der Vorst's recovery story? 

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Friends who yawn together stay together, new research suggests.

By Jeanna Bryner
LiveScience 

Next time you catch yourself yawning, look around: Did anyone close to you let out his or her own sleepy "ahhh"? Turns out, close friends and family are more likely than acquaintances or strangers to catch someone's yawns, a new study finds.

The researchers suggest this yawning contagion is, in part, the result of empathy, in which we can attempt to see things from another person's angle and respond to that person's emotions.

"I think what the study does is it supports the idea that empathy is the mechanism that underlies contagious yawns," said Matthew Campbell of Emory University, who wasn't involved in the study. "The idea is that it's the same mechanism by which we catch smilesor frowns or fearful expressions."

While yawns would not seem to have a connection with any particular emotion (unlike, say, smiles, which could indicate happiness), in some ways we are forming an emotional connection by mimicking a yawn or another expression, Campbell said. By mimicking the yawn we see, we become better able to understand how tired, perhaps, or bored the other person is.

In fact, past studies have shown stronger empathetic responses of all kinds toward kin and loved ones. Past research has also found kids with autism don't experience contagious yawning, also strengthening its ties with empathy since autism involves problems with social interaction and communication. On the other hand, canine pals can catch yawns from humans, suggested a study on various dog breeds.

"Yawning contagion" has been studied among various primate species, with most of the studies occurring in lab settings. In the new study, by contrast, Ivan Norscia and Elisabetta Palagi of the University of Pisa in Italy observed adults in various natural settings, including restaurants, workplaces, waiting rooms and their homes.

The 109 adults in the study were from Europe, North America, Asia and Africa, and they were about evenly split by gender. The researchers were able to analyze 480 bouts of yawns. After considering for factors that could have affected the time between a person's yawn and an observer's imitation, they found social bond was key.

To avoid confusing a spontaneous yawn for one triggered by another person, the researchers limited their recording time to three minutes. In about two-thirds of the cases, relatives of the yawner responded with their own yawn within a minute, as did about half the friends of the yawner.

Most strangers and acquaintances took two or three minutes to respond, Norscia told LiveScience.

"Not only is contagion greater between familiar individuals, but it also follows an empathic gradient, increasing from strangers to kin-related individuals," Norscia and Palagi wrote online Dec. 7 for the journal PLoS ONE. [8 Humanlike Behaviors of Primates]

Thinking about using yawning as a way to determine your empathetic friends? Norscia told LiveScience in an email that during his and Palagi's study, she was "complaining because her husband had responded to a couple of yawns from one of her friends (a woman) – but that was just a joke." He noted that empathy is subjective and that yawning can be influenced by various factors, including boredom or fatigue.

While the results suggest empathy causes one person to catch another's yawn, they don't tell us whether the phenomenon was specifically adaptive to our ancestors and passed down to modern humans. One idea supporting this adaptive theory is that coordinated behaviors would have been crucial for our primate relatives.

"If getting sleepy and climbing up into the trees as a refuge safe from predators" was practiced by our ancestors, and if yawning facilitated that behavior, it makes sense yawning would be evolutionarily selected for, said Euclid O. Smith of the anthropology department at Emory University. "He who yawns last might be dinner for a predator." Smith wasn't involved in the new study.   

There's also a chance that catchy yawns were just a byproduct of other mimicked expressions, Campbell told LiveScience. Perhaps we copied others' smiles and frowns first, which led us to do the same for yawning even though that particular behavior wasn't selected for specifically over the course of human evolution.

Either way, researchers still seem mystified by yawning contagion.

"Very little is known about the function of contagious yawning," said Atsushi Senju of the Center for Brain and Cognitive Development at Birkbeck College in London. Senju, who was not involved in the study, told LiveScience:  "It might be useful to coordinate the level of alertness within the group, but there is no evidence supporting it. Or it could be a byproduct of empathy — closely attending to family and friends and [feeling] for them, which would help maintain relationship."

What about you? Do you tend do "catch" yawns from your friends and family? 

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“Laughing seizures” have long been one of the mysteries surrounding epilepsy. During an event, an epileptic suffering a laughing seizure can guffaw, sometimes hysterically, but certainly not because he or she finds anything funny. Now a new study published in the journal Brain, from a team led by Josef Parvizi of Stanford University, has helped clear up some of the mystery.

Earlier research traced these events, more formally called gelastic seizures, to abnormal clumps of neurons in the hypothalamus called hamartomas. “The hamartomas start firing on their own and cause the seizures,” Parvizi explained.  

But exactly where in the hypothalamus are gelastic seizure-related hamartomas located? That answer’s important because the hypothalamus has several regions, or nuclei, that manage input and create output related to a variety of body functions like temperature regulation, sexual behavior and hormone release. Parvizi likens it to a college campus. “Just like a campus, you have different buildings and every department has its own students and own connections,” he said.  

In looking at 100 cases of children with gelastic seizures who’ve had their brains imaged, Parvizi and his colleagues were able to show that in every case the hamartoma lesions were located in a region known as the mammillary bodies. (They don’t have anything to do with breasts. They just sort of look like breasts and the neuroscientists who first described them were men, so there you go.)

These structures, located on the posterior part of the hypothalamus, are associated with memory functions. Alcoholics can wreck their mammillary bodies, and if they do, they can start to unconsciously fill in memory gaps with confabulations. 

Nobody knows exactly what that has to do with laughter, if anything, but, Parvizi says hopefully, “it gives us an anatomical clue. Next, we have to zoom in there and understand the cellular biology of that region and its connectivity.”

By cellular biology, he means what chemicals -- neurotransmitters -- cause the neurons to fire and what chemicals they, in turn, produce to communicate with other parts of the brain. “That way we can track and trace them,” he said.

In future studies, he hopes to figure why gelastic seizures don’t produce some other effect. “Why not screaming?” he asked rhetorically. “Why not coughing? Why is it laughing? That is a fascinating topic.”

Ultimately, he thinks the answer to those questions will lead to an explanation for why and how any of us laugh.

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The nose knows more than you'd think, a new study suggests

By Rachel Rettner
LiveScience

Getting to know someone usually requires at least a little conversation. But a new study suggests you can get a hint of an individual's personality through his or her scent alone.

Participants in the study assessed, with some degree of accuracy, how outgoing, anxious or dominant people were after only taking a whiff of their clothes. The study is the first to test whether personality traits can be discerned through body odor.

While the match-up between responses by the judges and the judged were not perfect, they do suggest that, when forming a first impression, we take into account a person's smell, as well as visual and audible cues to their personality traits, the researchers said.

We not only express ourselves through our looks, "we also express ourselves with how we smell," said study researcher Agnieszka Sorokowska, a doctoral candidate at the University of Wroclaw, in Poland.

The study will be published in an upcoming issue of the European Journal of Personality.

Sorokowska and colleagues asked 30 men and 30 women to don white cotton t-shirts for three consecutive nights. Participants could not use fragrances, deodorants or soaps, and could not smoke or drink or eat odorous foods during the study. Participants also took a personality test.

Shirts from the "odor donors" were collected and rated by 100 men and 100 women. Raters were asked to smell the shirts (placed in non-transparent plastic bags) and evaluate five personality traits of the donors, on a scale of one to 10. Each rater assessed six shirts, and each shirt was assessed by 20 raters.

The judges' ratings matched up with the self-assessments of the donors for three personality traits: extroversion (the tendency to be outgoing and sociable) neuroticism (the tendency to feel anxious and moody) and dominance (the urge to be a leader).

The matches were far from perfect. But the raters predicted the donor's level of extroversion and neuroticism through smell about as accurately as participants in a different study predicted personality traits based on a video depicting a person's behavior, Sorokowska said.

Judgments of dominance were most accurate in the case where an individual rater was assessing the odor of someone who was the opposite sex, suggesting such judgments are especially important when it comes to choosing a mate, the researchers said.

Extroversion, neuroticism and dominance are all traits that may, to some extent, be expressed physiologically, including through our emotions.

For instance, people who are neurotic may sweat more when they experience stress, which would modify the bacteria in their underarms and make them smell different, the researchers said.  

Personality traits may also be linked with the secretion of hormones that could alter a persons' scent. People who are high in dominance may have higher levels of testosterone, which in turn may modify their sweat glands, the researchers said.

The findings are preliminary and more studies need to be done to confirm the results, Sorokowska said. It's not clear whether the same link would be found in other cultures known to have weaker body odors, Sorokowska said.

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MSNBC

In 2004, Florida resident Diana Duyser sold this 10-year-old grilled cheese sandwich for $28,000. Can you see the Virgin Mary's image in the sandwich?

You might have scratched your head in wonderment when a 10-year-old cheese sandwich sold at auction for a cool $28,000 simply because people thought they saw the face of the Virgin Mary in the folds of the stale food.

But there’s a long history of people finding meaning in mundane objects. And scientists now say they know why this happens -- and how it works.

We’re wired to pay attention when we see objects that remind us of something we already know, says Joel Voss, an assistant professor at Northwestern University. Our brains automatically identify similar objects and then organize them according to type. That’s why we can look at a baseball cap and a fedora and know right away that both are hats, Voss explains.

After noticing so many examples of people seeing familiar -- and highly meaningful -- images in ordinary objects, Voss and his colleagues started to wonder what parts of the brain might be sparking when this happens.

So the researchers rounded up 10 volunteers who were willing to lie in a brain scanner while looking at a bunch of squiggles. The study volunteers were asked to rate the squiggles on a scale of 1 to 5 as being meaningful, or not, as the images flashed by.

By meaningful, the researchers meant, did the abstract scrawls remind volunteers of something real, like an animal or a face?

Each time a squiggle passed by, various parts of the visual cortex flashed bright, including a region at the front known to be involved in analyzing the meaning and importance of data that the eyes are transmitting to the brain.

Next the volunteers were then asked to look at a larger series of squiggles -- which also contained the ones that had already been viewed. The instructions to the volunteers this time were to pick out the ones that had flashed by in the first part of the experiment.

Again, various regions of the visual cortex lit up as the volunteers watched the squiggles flash by. But, intriguingly, the frontal region stayed quiet when “meaningful” squiggles flashed by again.

Story: Jesus toast under the Christmas Tree?

What this means, Voss says, is that the volunteers’ brains had cataloged these squiggles in the earlier viewing as faces or animals or something else meaningful to them. That meant that this time there was no need to analyze the shapes again.

The purpose for all this brain circuitry is most likely to promote our survival, Voss says. Back when we were evolving on the savannah it was important to recognize anything that looked like a predator.

Thus, if you were wandering out at night you needed to recognize which shadows might be menacing. “If you failed to identify the shadow that looked vaguely like an animal, you might get eaten,” Voss says.

In the modern world, we still are looking for important patterns. So now, when we see potato chip that looks like Elvis, our brains just think they’re seeing another manifestation of The King, himself. 

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