If you haven't seen this striking slideshow showing the toll of drug addiction -- you must. The sheriff's office in Multnomah County, Ore., collected mug shots showing before and after shots of drug-users' faces, and it's impossible to look away from the images. But we fear some of our readers are missing the point: Many are asking, "So how come Charlie Sheen still looks good?"

Sheen has had a rough week: an embarrassing outburst on a nationally syndicated radio show, CBS' decision to stop production of "Two and a Half Men." And he's been hospitalized three times in three months -- most recently, after a night of partying. He's been in rehab a number of times, most recently getting treatment at his own home. We don't know what, exactly, he's been treated for, but celebrity blogs are spreading rumors of addiction -- and that's all you readers can focus on, apparently. Your comments below:

Charlie Sheen has money and has lost all his natural teeth. But you would never know that because of the thousands of dollars and handlers he has working with and for him to make him look good. But he is imploding and its about time.
- starfox7000-1848290
(Editor's note: He's not too far off about the teeth, actually.)

Charlie sheen is only in his 40's. I think he looks 10 years older, and that's with all his money going to cosmetic surgery.
- oltorf

Charlie Sheen is a millionaire and doesn't live on or close to the street. Eats, drinks, lives well, goes where he wants when he wants. Gets the best physical care, also. $,$$$,$$$ doesn't make cents (sense)!
- alfred e newman

And a bit of advice from one commenter:

Charlie Sheen: Pay attention. This is what meth looks like on users after a very short time.
allison-1391898

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Wrinkle-busting Botox has long been used to rev up the sex lives of women who blame waning allure on facial lines and creases, but doctors now say the injections can help smooth problems below the belt as well.

The newest use for botulinum Toxin A, the active ingredient in drugs such as Botox or Dysport, is to help ease painful vaginal conditions that plague women with excruciating burning sensations or constrict their muscles so tightly that sex is all but impossible.

“Almost to a patient, they say it’s like hitting a brick wall,” said Dr. Peter T. Pacik, a New Hampshire plastic surgeon who is conducting an FDA-approved clinical trial testing the use of Botox on severe cases of vaginismus. “Most patients I treat are unable to consummate, unable to have a family.”

Such patients – perhaps as many as 6 percent of all women worldwide – suffer from what Pacik describes as a reflex reaction to sexual penetration that causes their muscles to spasm. The problem is often rooted in fear caused by sexual abuse or a rigid upbringing, but it becomes unmistakably physical.

“It’s uncontrollable and involuntary,” said Pacik, the author of “When Sex Seems Impossible: Stories of Vaginismus & How You Can Achieve Intimacy.”

To treat the problem, Pacik injects the muscles at the entrance of the vagina with Botox, which works as it does in the face, interrupting nerve impulses and allowing the muscles to relax.

“When I inject them, I put them asleep,” he said. “You would not be able to approach these people with a needle.”

When they wake up, the women find that they are relaxed enough to allow penetration and, soon, to have normal sex with their husbands or partners. Pacik has treated 78 patients so far and all but one have virtually been cured after a single session, he said.

His work was echoed this week by a new report in the journal Archives of Dermatologythat said a 26-year-old woman was cured of vulvodynia, an excruciating, persistent burning vaginal pain, with the use of botulinum Toxin A injections.

And it was confirmed by Patti Dyer, a 59-year-old Maine nurse who said she has suffered from vaginismus for more than 30 years. Despite having three children, all delivered by cesarean section, Dyer said sex has always been painful to the point of tears. She and her husband, Bill, toughed it out because of their love for each other, she said. But when she heard about Pacik’s work, she had to try it.

On Jan. 10, Dyer had the $6,300 Botox treatment. Within two weeks, she said, she and her husband were able to have sex for the first time in a dozen years. With a month, they were catching up on lost time.

“We’re like honeymooners,” she said. “This is so exciting. This is what it should have been 30 years ago.”

Dyer would recommend Botox down below to anyone suffering like she was. But when it comes to using the drug in her face, she draws the line.

“Oh, no,” she said. “I’m not that vain. It’s just for the part that needs it.”

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Cari Nierenberg writes: If two hands are better than one, then imagine what you could do with three. In a new study, Swedish researchers were able to trick participants' brains into believing their body had an extra arm.

Brain scientists at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm conducted five different experiments on 154 healthy men and women, in the paper published in the February issue of the online journal PLoS ONE. To create the impression of having a third arm, participants sat with their right arm resting on a table and their left arm hidden from view, behind a screen.

A rubber prosthetic right hand was placed beside the person's real hand and a cloth was placed over the participant's right shoulder to hide everything but the forearms on both the real and fake right arms. If the volunteer glanced at their right hand, they appeared to have two of them.

Known to neuroscientists as "the supernumerary hand illusion," researchers used two different paintbrushes to stroke the skin on the index and middle fingers of the participant's real right hand and false one at the exact same time for a minute or two. During this process, participant's were told to look at the artificial limb.

After each brushing session, volunteers completed a questionnaire. Participants reported that they felt the touch of the brush on both the real and fake hand. They also described feeling as if they had two right hands and both limbs felt like a part of their body.

"Our study shows that the human brain has the ability to experience an extra third arm," says Arvid Guterstam, the study's lead author and a neuroscience doctoral student. You might think that being born with two arms and two legs would limit your body image to this idea, he says. "But within less than a minute, you can fool the brain into believing it has an extra arm, which is quite fantastic."

In another experiment, the researchers held a knife close to the volunteer's hand and the rubber hand as if it might pierce the skin. They wanted to see if the body and mind perceived the knife as a threat. The same stress response was seen in both the real hand and the prosthetic one. (The researchers measured the amount of sweat coming from the skin as a measure of emotional arousal of the nervous system; the same response to the threat of the knife was seen whether it was close to touching the real hand or the fake one.)

As for why the mind is so easily duped by the third-hand illusion, Guterstam explains that when a study participant sees a fake right hand next to his own, the brain wonders "Which right hand is mine?"

"Instead of choosing to experience only one hand as your own, we surprisingly found that the brain accepts both right hands as part of the body image, and the participant experiences ownership of an extra third arm," say Guterstam.

While some of these experiments might seem like fun parlor tricks, the results have practical applications.

They could be important in developing advanced prosthetics, suggests Guterstam. The findings, for example, may benefit stroke patients who need an artificial arm because one side of their body is paralyzed. Scientists would better understand how patients can control this extra arm and experience it as their own.

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Most of us get a little excited when we see a big spider, but for the unfortunate few who fall victim to the bite of the daunting Brazilian wandering spider, that “excitement” takes on a whole new meaning: The venom of the wandering spider -- also known as the banana spider (or more formally Phoneutria nigriventer) causes erections in men.

“The venom of the P. nigriventer spider is a very rich mixture of several molecules,” says Dr. Kenia Nunes, a physiologist at the Medical College of Georgia who is currently studying the odd side effect. “These molecules are called toxins, and then we have various toxins in this venom with different activity. Because of this, when a human is bitten by this spider, we can observe many different symptoms including priapism, a condition in which the penis is continually erect.”

In addition to the hours-long painful erection, the wandering spider’s bite can cause loss of muscle control, severe pain, difficulty breathing and, if not treated, death, due to oxygen deprivation (with anti-venom, the victim usually recovers within a week.)

Luckily, deaths from this impressive creature – it boasts a leg span of four to five inches – aren’t all that common. According to a website maintained by Rod Crawford, curator of arachnids at the University of Washington’s Burke Museum, “authoritative sources state that over 7,000 authentic cases of human bites from these spiders have been recorded, with only around 10 known deaths.”

Usually found on banana plantations in the tropics, wandering spiders do tend to, uh, wander, though, with recent sightings reported at a Whole Foods in Tulsa, Oklahoma and an IGA store in Russell, Manitoba and a biting reported in Somerset, England in 2005.

But while the spider’s bite may be painful – or even deadly -- its oddball venom may actually prove to be a valuable asset when it comes to treating erectile dysfunction in men.

“In Brazil, we have several reports of human accidents involving this spider and priapism as a symptom,” says Nunes, who recently published a study in the Journal of Sexual Medicine on the spider venom and its potential use in treating ED. “So we started to investigate which part of the venom – which toxin – would be responsible for this symptom. We found the toxin responsible and performed experiments using hypertensive rats which have severe erectile dysfunction. The toxin was able to normalize the erectile function in these animals.”

After isolating the toxin (known as PnTx2-6), Nunes and her colleagues then studied the mechanism of action and found that the toxin acts in a different pathway as compared with other erectile dysfunction drugs, such as Viagra.

“This is good because we know that some patients don’t respond to the conventional therapy,” she says. “This could be an optional treatment for them.”       

 Does the Brazilian wandering spider venom hold any potential benefits for sexually dysfunctional women?

 Nunes says she hasn’t performed any experiments “to investigate the action of this toxin in females yet,” but she intends to do it “soon.”

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NBC's Michelle Kosinski travels to Ireland to speak to Brendan Holland, an Irishman in his late 50s who recently discovered he is related to the famed "Irish Giant." (We wrote about Holland's family tree discovery last month.) The "Giant's" real name was Charles Byrne, and his 7-foot-7-inch skeleton is on display at The Royal College of Surgeons in London. Recent research involving the two men is leading doctors in Ireland to wonder if gigantism may be an inherited condition.

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Ross D. Franklin / AP

Henry Morello, of Anthem, Ariz., talks about his ordeal in the desert during a news conference on Tuesday.

An Arizona octogenarian was stranded in his car for five days, subsisting on nothing but leftover pasta and windshield wiper fluid, the Arizona Republic reported earlier this week. That's five days with nothing to drink but windshield wiper fluid. We're so glad Henry Morello survived -- but it's unbelievably lucky that he did, explains Dr. Eric Lavonas, a medical toxicologist from the Rocky Mountain Poison and Drug Center in Denver, Colo.

"Five days with very little to drink would put most people in kidney failure," says Lavonas, who's a spokesman for the American College of Emergency Physicians. Indeed, Morello -- who's a diabetic -- will be treated for kidney damage in a Phoenix hospital for a few days, doctors at John C. Lincoln Hospital said at a news conference Tuesday. His doctors also said that it wasn't immediately clear whether the wiper fluid had caused him any serious harm.

Lavonas explains that windshield wiper fluid usually contains methanol, a toxic substance that's often used as an antifreeze. "It’s a poisonous alcohol that can cause bad chemical derangements in the body and can cause blindness. If you drink windshield wiper fluid, you can expect to get very sick and go blind ... within a few hours to a day." (For extra clarity, he adds later, "Yeah, just don't drink windshield wiper fluid.")

Some reports have said that Morello used a napkin to filter the wiper fluid, but Lavonas says that's not a great idea. "The parallel of that would be saying, 'I've got a rum and Coke, and I'm going to filter the rum out.' Yeah, not going to work," he says.

It's an especially remarkable tale considering that Morello is 84 years old. Younger, healthier people tend to be able to withstand dehydration -- and just about anything else, for that matter -- better than older, sicker folks, of course. The effects of dehydration -- muscle cramps, dizziness, decreased blood pressure and vision distortion -- can appear in as soon as a day, and lack of fluids becomes life-threatening within just a few days. (Most experts agree we can last about three or four days without any water at all.) As for food, we can go about three weeks without eating -- as long as we're getting enough fluids, that is. (The "starving yogi" would like to dispute that -- last year, the Indian yogi claimed he'd gone 70 years without eating or drinking anything, although experts say that's impossible.)

In Morello's case, "I would say that he’s a very lucky gentleman," Lavonas says. A better idea than downing wiper fluid: Keep an emergency kit in your car. Lavonas keeps an old duffel bag in his trunk -- it contains a gallon jug of water and a 15- to 20-year-old Army MRE (leftover from his days in the reserves), plus a blanket, flares, a crank-handle flashlight and a couple of old wool caps, to ward off the Colorado chill. You've already got most of this stuff lying around, he says. "Just jam a few basic items like that together in a duffel bag, throw it in your trunk and it could save your life."

It's either that, or risk a survival situation like Morello and others have experienced:

• In 2007, a college student was trapped in his car at the bottom of a steep embankment in Maryland for eight days and seven nights, reported the Washington Post; he depended on the adjacent creek for his survival, eating fish he caught with his hands and using his high-top sneaker to drink water.
• A 33-year-old Washington state woman was found alive after being trapped in her car for eight days at the bottom of a steep ravine in 2007; she was treated for dehydration and kidney damage, but she's well enough now to have written a book about the ordeal.
• Tillie Tooter, an 83-year-old grandmother, survived for three days in August 2000 while trapped in her car, which was stuck in a thicket of mangrove trees. The only food she had on her was a stick of gum, a peppermint and a cough drop.
• And a 32-year-old West Virginia man was stuck in his wrecked car for six freezing days -- with only an old jar of peanut butter and a few Taco Bell sauce packets for food.

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Eep! Most of us grown-ups would freak if we came across a critter like this one -- but a new study suggests that babies and very young kids aren't afraid of these and other creepy crawlers.

Like the girl in that old Jim Stafford song, most people don’t like spiders and snakes. But according to new research involving infants and children, we don’t start off this way.

According to Vanessa LoBue, assistant professor of psychology at Rutgers and co-author of a recent study in Current Directions in Psychological Science, spider and snake phobias are incredibly common. But they’re also rather baffling, since most of us have never been directly threatened by a wolf spider or garter snake.

“When you look at the way people learn to be afraid of things, they usually have a negative encounter,” she says. “A dog bites you when you’re little, so you’re afraid of dogs. But most people haven’t been bitten by a snake or spider.”

One popular view to explain our disproportionate fear is that humans have developed a genetic advantage to recognize – and fear -- snakes and spiders very quickly. In other words, natural selection favors people who scream bloody murder whenever they see what appears to be a poisonous critter.

According to a series of experiments conducted on more than 70 small children, though, while quickly recognizing creepy creatures appears to be innate, fearing them is not.

In one experiment, researchers showed videos of a snake and some other exotic animal (like an elephant or giraffe) to 48 infants, ages 7 to 9 months or 16 to 18 months. They then played either a “happy voice” or a “fearful voice” to the children and observed what the children were looking at when listening to the voices. Children looked at the snake picture longer when listening to the “fearful” voice.

Other experiments involved asking 24 toddlers and 24 adults to look at nine pictures and identify a target picture such as a flower or mushroom or cockroach or spider. Much like the adults, the 3-year-olds detected snakes more quickly than flowers or frogs or caterpillars and detected spiders more quickly than mushrooms or cockroaches.

“Children and infants respond in similar ways as adults,” says LoBue. “They respond to [spiders and snakes] really quickly. But they’re not afraid of them. Not a single one got upset.”

Where does our horror of these creatures come from, then? LoBue says that’s what she’s trying to figure out with new research, which involves studying how toddlers behave when they encounter a live tarantula or live snake.

“The fear itself is what I’m interested in,” she says. “How do 3-year-olds who can rapidly detect snakes and are biased to associate snakes with fear become fearful adults? Do they learn it from their parents? Do they learn it from textbooks? Do they just learn that snakes are things that can cause harm? Or do they observe moms or teachers or friends behaving fearfully?”

Gina Lindblad, a 32-year-old public relations account manager from Seattle, says she has no doubt where she learned her fear of snakes.

“When I was 5, my grandmother and I were playing around a stack of small boulders at my family’s lake property and we both noticed a snake slither between two rocks,” she says. “Grandma freaked out and scurried back towards the cabin and naturally, I went with her. She refused to go back by the rocks for the rest of the day and I was afraid to even go back on the lawn. Later, she felt bad and told me we should name the snake Cinderella and call the boulders her ‘castle.’ But I’ve been terrified of snakes ever since.”

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This post originally appeared on the blog Persephone Magazine.

By Teri Floyd

In my head, the letter "N" is green. The number 5 is blackish gray, and in his early 20s. The month of February is lavender colored and covered in ice.

So in case you haven’t guessed, I have synesthesia.

I’ve had it all my life, I suppose. People who are experts on such things say that we are born with it, that it is a brain disorder. The wires in your brain get crossed, and you experience all five senses simultaneously. They overlap where they should be separate.

Everybody who has it has a different form of synesthesia with minor undertones of other kinds. Mine mainly exists with letters and numbers. I see numbers, letters, words, etc in color. All of my letters and numbers have different colors, personalities, textures, ages and gender. I literally see them as living beings. Colors themselves also have gender. When I was a child often I’d play ‘house’ with my crayons instead of dolls. Seriously, I’d have red and blue get married or green and orange have a sordid affair. My grandma used to think it was so funny. It was just normal to me. Words have colors – for instance, my son’s name, Callum, is a bright, sunny yellow with flecks of baby blue, particularly in the L’s.

The inside of my head kind of feels like a Jackson Pollock painting. All splotches and globs of brightly colored paint, roads leading nowhere, just an explosion of thick, goopy color with a nonsensical message. Convergence, 1952 by Jackson Pollock is my favorite painting. Probably because it’s the colors of my name. Yellows, a hint of orange, lots of black, and a little fleck of blue peeking out; all of it streaked into oblivion. My name looks just like that; it did long before I ever saw a Pollock painting.

I also have synesthesia with regard to music. Certain songs bring vivid colors into my head. If I listen to "Happiness is a Warm Gun," by the Beatles, my head fills with alternating flashes of mustard-yellow and bright, silvery white. It has a distinct pulse and a gritty, sandpapery feel. David Bowie’s voice always invokes a bright sky blue that sometimes turns darker, or has shades of gray, depending on the mood of the song. Rap music invokes a kaleidoscope of colors and shapes all spiraling through my head at warp speed. I prefer one sole theme, which is why I think I don’t usually care for rap music unless it’s really unique or exceptional (for instance, Lil Wayne’s voice is a silvery gray with purple undertones that I find really pleasing). Classical music takes me through a landscape of color, shape and feeling. Usually I close my eyes when listening. It’s like having my own personal DVD of "Fantasia" playing through my head whenever I listen.

Usually when I tell people about my synesthestic experiences they look at me like I’m some crazed hippie. I probably am a crazed hippie in reality, but what I experience is more than just psychedelic. It’s spiritual. My synesthesia is so ingrained into me that if I lost my ability tomorrow, I would feel as if I’d been blinded or deafened.

Occasionally I experience the other types of synesthesia that have to do with taste, sensation and smell, but only occasionally. Smells and tastes definitely invoke a distinct color in my brain. For instance, the smell and taste of fresh garlic makes my head fill with bright, vibrant green. Diet drinks with their saccharine sweetness always appear in my head as being a shimmering, blinding silver.

It can be strange, having synesthesia. If I’m out to dinner with a friend, and they scrape their fork on their teeth, my brain fills with unnamed metallic colors, and my ears roar with the sound of it. I can’t stand it. I can taste the metal on my own tongue and it is unbearable. It can cause obsessive compulsive behavior sometimes. Occasionally the sound and taste of silverware is so loud in my brain that I have to use plastic cutlery when I eat.

Synesthesia certainly enriches my life as an avid reader and a writer. It always helped my poetry and as I become better at essays and stories I find that it enriches them, too. Certainly F. Scott Fitzgerald was synesthetic. No one can read "The Great Gatsby" and tell me that he wasn’t. I think that is why I feel so decadent and wistful when I read his books. I’ve read "Gatsby" dozens of times and never tire of the language and the way his words flow in an endless barrage of color. Many artists and celebrities are synesthestes, including Tori Amos, Eddie Van Halen, Friedrich Nietzsche, Stevie Wonder, Vladimir Nabokov and many, many others.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t grateful to have synesthesia. I have had it so long that it is like second nature to me now. I often forget that I do have it, and just go through life assuming that people are experiencing the same sensations as I do. I see the months of the year like a giant Rolodex, spiraling through an open space. They all have colors, genders, ages and personalities. I also benefit from having a somewhat photographic memory with directions, phone numbers, addresses and names, because I see them as a pattern of colors.

It all tastes blue to me.

More from Persephone Magazine:

A day in the life of a 14-year-old boy with autism 

Ableism: Get it  |  Another view of ableism 

An introduction to chemotherapy

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A quick love lesson, specifically for guys who like girls: If you're into a new lady, whatever you do -- don't let her know it. A new study using Facebook suggests that women are most attracted to dudes who play hard to get.

Researchers recruited 47 female undergraduate students at the University of Virginia, and the participants checked out four fake Facebook profiles of cute college boys (two white, one black and one Asian). The women were told that these were real guys, and that these guys had checked out and rated the women's own Facebook profiles. The study participants were told one of three things: Either the guys gave them high ratings, average ratings -- or the researchers told the volunteers that they couldn't reveal the ratings, for experiment-y purposes.

Turns out, that last category drove the women wild. The study participants filled out a survey rating how much they liked each guy, and then were asked how much each fella had "popped into their head." The women who didn't know what the (fake) guys thought about them rated those guys the highest -- even higher than the women who knew their (fake) guys were into them.

Lead author Erin Whitchurch, of the University of Virginia's psychology department, says that the idea for the study came to her while she was reading a women's magazine, and happened across conflicting dating advice between the covers of the same issue "In one story, it (was) saying that it's better to be honest about your attraction to a person, and in another (it was) saying the exact opposite, that it's better to 'play the game' so to speak," Whitchurch says.

"At about the same time, a very good friend of mine told me that after a year of seeing a guy, she still got butterflies," she continues. "I ... wondered if part of it was because despite the fact they had been seeing each other for so long, they never had 'the talk,' still only saw each other two or three times a week, never exchanged 'I love you's.' I wondered if she was still getting butterflies because she was still uncertain about their relationship status."

Although the study only included women, Whitchurch believes she'd get similar results were she to use male participants. But she knows the love lessons her research reveals can sometimes be hard to follow.

"My best friend absolutely hates my research, as she firmly believes in telling people how she feels," Whitchurch says. "While I agree that, in principle, that would be nice, I tell her to think about what she wants in the long-run. If it's the guy, then a little discomfort on her end, not being quite so open about her intentions and creating a little uncertainty will pay off tenfold."

When's the last time you played hard-to-get? How'd it work out?

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Remember that popular YouTube clip that features an affable dude dancing into a street? He's dancing from side to side, as he backs his way into the middle of a neighborhood street -- and WHAM! An ice cream truck that seems to come out of nowhere crashes into him. He's OK -- he even got his "web redemption" on a recent "Tosh.0" episode-- but getting hit by a truck is what you might call a shock, both to him and to his eventual millions of YouTube viewers.

But watching situations that are jarring to us are no big deal to our brains, suggests a new study published in the February issue of the journal Cortex. The processes in our brain's orbitofrontal cortex (the brain's "decider") remain the same, no matter how unexpected or frightening an event may be, says lead author Armin Schnider of the University Hospitals of Geneva in Switzerland.

"The context of this research is the brain’s ability to remain in phase with ongoing reality while allowing thoughts (memories) to freely float," Schnider explains. But while brain patterns don't change if you're merely surprised, all bets are off if you're in actual danger and need to quickly react, not think about it, she says.

Schnider supervised a team of researchers, who recorded functional magnetic resonance images, or fMRI, while volunteers were repeatedly shown an image of a pair of faces. The participants were told to predict the face on which a "target" would appear -- either a simple black circle, or a freaky spider. Whether the spider or the circle showed up, a cerebral network that included the orbitofrontal cortex was activated.

Schnider agrees that his findings are comforting, in a way -- unexpected events may give us a jolt, but to our brains, it's business as usual.

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By Linda Carroll

The best judgment call made by Congressman Christopher Lee may have been to have someone else read his apology.

The upstate New York lawmaker was made to say sorry -- and resign -- on Wednesday after Gawker revealed the married silver fox posted a shirtless, flexing photo of himself on a Craiglist dating forum.

Canadian scientists have discovered that there are ways to tell the difference between people who are sincerely remorseful and those who are just faking it -- but you have to be able to watch them while they’re saying they’re sorry.

The researchers, led by Leanne ten Brinke of the University of British Columbia, rounded up 31 college students who were videotaped while making sincere or insincere apologies, according to a new study published in the journal Law and Human Behavior.

The study volunteers were first asked to describe, while being videotaped, a non-criminal event that they felt intensely and genuinely remorseful about. They were then asked to describe an episode of cheating for which they felt no remorse, but to act as if they did.

Craigslist woman speaks up about topless ex-congressman

When researchers compared the two sets of recordings, they saw major differences between the people who were truly sorry and those who were just faking it.

People who aren’t really sorry tend to show a greater swing in mood -- from sorry to happy, for example. People who are sincerely apologizing will go through a neutral mood before showing any signs of happiness.

The truly unremorseful also tend to speak with more hesitation. So, if you hear “um” a lot in between words, that’s not a good sign.

The point of the research was to help judges, juror and parole board members determine who is really sorry.

We’ll all have a chance to try out the new findings if ex-congressman Lee decides to make an apology in public.

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Scientists have sniffed out a novel idea to stop hearing loss in its tracks: A new procedure essentially provides a way for people to hear with their noses. (Can you smell me now?)

Australian scientists say that taking stem cells from the nose and transplanting them to the ear may help preserve hearing for those whose auditory problems begin in infancy or childhood, according to a new study published Thursday in the journal Stem Cells. The research focused on early-onset sensorineural hearing loss, which is caused by a loss of sensory cells or neurons in the cochlea. (That's the part of the inner ear that holds the actual sensory organ of hearing.)

It was a study in mice, but the researchers believe the findings may apply to human ears, too. A team of scientists, led by Dr. Sharon Oleskevich of the University of New South Wales, injected mucosa-derived stem cells (ick) into the cochlea of mice who were showing signs that their hearing was deteriorating. (Mice were used in the study because the way early hearing loss works in the little critters is similar to the way it works in humans.)

“One of the challenges in tackling this condition is that the regenerative ability of the human cochlea is severely limited," Oleskevich said in a statement. “It has been proposed that the transplantation of cells from other parts of the body could treat, prevent or even reverse hearing loss. The transplanted cells have the potential to repair tissue by replacing damaged cells and enhancing the survival of existing cells, preventing the condition from developing further.”

A month later, researchers tested each mouse's hearing threshold, using an auditory brainstem response test, which measures the lowest sound level to which the brain responds -- and the mice with the transplanted nasal stem cells did better when compared to mice without.

This is the craziest story I've smelled all day. What about you? What do you think of the new research?

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Sprouts are the latest food fad to hit grocery shelves, as a new Associated Press story tells it. Both organic-friendly stores like Whole Foods and more mainstream chains are offering all kinds of sprouted stuff: sprouted whole-wheat bread, sprouted rye crackers, sprouted baking flour, sprouted brown rice. Sprouts sprouts sprouts sprouts sprouts sprouts! Everybody!

But what's trendy in food today sometimes seems to disappear by tomorrow. Last year, kombucha tea -- that sinister-looking brew containing live bacteria and yeast -- had a brief moment in the spotlight, thanks in part to celebrity guzzlers like Reese Witherspoon and Lindsay Lohan. Before that, flashy Internet ads begged us to try their one tip for a tiny belly -- acai berries. I doubt you need to be reminded of that intense national love affair with bacon. And while this year we're gulping down Greek yogurt, in 2008 it seemed like no one was interested in eating yogurt that didn't help, ah, move things along.

A decade ago, it was low-carb everything; a decade before that, low-fat or fat-free food was king, even though that didn't always work out so well. (Remember Olestra-packed chips -- and those stories of anal leakage?) And a decade before that, on a blessed day in 1982, Diet Coke made its debut. (OK, so some fads stick around -- even in spite of health warnings.)

What about you, readers? What weird food fads do you remember? Which ones do you hope will make a comeback -- and which ones do you pray are gone for good?

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It's a question you might ask yourself after the fifth lip balm reapplication on this wintry February day: Is it possible to get hooked on this stuff? The answer: Yes! (Kinda.)

"It's an interesting question," says Perry Romanowski, a cosmetic chemist and a blogger over at The Beauty Brains. (So interesting, in fact, that he and his fellow beauty brainiacs have penned a soon-to-be-released book asking that question, plus others.) "You can’t get addicted to lip balm in the way you can get addicted to cigarettes; that’s actually a chemical addiction that affects your brain." But as he explains it, lip balm can certainly be habit-forming.

The lower layers of your skin produce fresh, new skin cells, which die and can dry out a bit by the time they reach the top layer, Romanowski explains. "When you put the lip balm on the dry skin, what that does is interfere with the signaling mechanism that signals to the lower cells to start producing more," he says. "Using lip balm, while it makes your lips feel good initially, when it wears off your skin feels dry again and your skin doesn’t have time to replenish that." So you apply more lip balm. And when that wears off, you apply more. And more. And more! "And so in that way you can get 'addicted'; it becomes sort of a psychological habit."

Another explanation: Some lip products out there contain products -- like the antiseptic chemical phenol, or even peppermint -- that can act irritants, and can potentially dry your lips out, suggests Dr. Margaret E. Parsons, a Sacramento, Calif., dermatologist.

What about you? Are you hooked on lip balm? (But you could stop any time you wanted to, right?)

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Some people swear by bacon. Or Red Bull. Or a big bacon cheeseburger with fries -- the greasier the better.  

Thanks to new research out of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, though, we now know the exact cause of the hangover headache and the Absolut … er … absolute best way to get rid of them. (And no, it’s not a hair of the dog that bit you.)

Turns out, the scientifically-proven best hangover cure may be plain old coffee and aspirin.

As Dr. Michael L. Oshinsky explains, alcohol in the body is metabolized to acetaldehyde, and then to acetate. “The dogma has always been that acetaldehyde causes the headache because it’s poisonous,” says Oshinsky, assistant professor for the department of neurology at Thomas Jefferson University. “But there’s been no direct evidence to demonstrate that.”

So Oshinsky and his colleagues decided to investigate what actually causes hangover headaches -- by throwing a series of parties for their lab rats.

“We used 190 proof, medical proof alcohol and gave them the equivalent of one shot,” says Oshinsky, director of preclinical research at the Jefferson Headache Center. “It was like drinking one beer or one mixed drink or one glass of wine. It was a very small amount of alcohol – we just gave it to them in a pure form.”

In order to pinpoint the exact cause of the hangover headache, the researchers separated the strings of the alcohol metabolism process.

The first step was to block the breakdown of the alcohol, but that didn’t have an effect, i.e., the rats continued to party, headache-free. Then they blocked the breakdown of the acetaldehyde by giving the rats antabuse, the drug given to chronic alcoholics. (Antabuse prevents the breakdown of acetaldehyde to acetate, which causes shortness of breath, nausea, vomiting and other unpleasant side effects.)

“The rats didn’t get a headache,” he says, explaining that they do sensory testing around the head and face of the animal to detect the presence of a headache. “Although there was a decrease in the analgesic response. We couldn’t tell if they were nauseous, though. Rats don’t throw up.”

Finally the researchers shot the rats full of acetate, the final step in the alcohol metabolism chain.

“Sure enough, they got a headache,” says Oshinsky. “Then we gave them a higher dose and they got more of headache for a longer amount of time.”

Oshinsky says their research disproved other commonly held beliefs such as hangover headaches are caused by dehydration or congeners, substances produced during fermentation that are responsible for the taste, aroma and color of the alcohol.

Once the source of the hangover headache was located, the researchers then set about figuring out how to get rid of the pesky things, using known headache blockers. Turns out the combination of caffeine and over-the-counter inflammatory drugs (i.e., NSAIDs – things like aspirin and ibuprofen) were best at blocking the head-pounding effects of the acetate.

Although as with everything, timing is crucial.

“If you drink a small amount of alcohol, three or four hours later, drink some coffee,” he says. “Or take caffeine in some form, like an Excedrin that has caffeine in it. If you take the caffeine at the same time as you drink, it will be gone when the acetate levels are high.”

As for those greasy hamburgers, he says, they’re definitely not the way to go.

“I don’t see what the mechanism for that would be,” he says. “It’s a lot easier to take an NSAID with a cup of coffee or tea.”

Marina Frykholm says the caffeine and aspirin route sounds feasible, but she’d rather stick with her tried and true hangover cure -- frozen mango.

“I lay flat on my back and put part of a frozen bag of mangos on my forehead,” says the 29-year-old TV advertising/promotions associate from Seattle. “And I only move to put partially defrosting chunks of mango in my mouth.”

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New Yorker

If you're a nobody who desperately wants to be taken seriously, Northwestern University researchers have this advice: Stop slouching, already.

Even if you're just a lowly intern, the way you hold yourself can make you feel more powerful than the boss man or boss lady -- and that can make a difference in how other people perceive you, says Adam Galinsky, of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern, who authored the new study.

As an example, Galinsky mentions a 2005 New Yorker cover depicting President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. Obviously, Bush is the man with the more powerful position. But take a look at each man's body language: Bush's shoulders are slumped, making him appear smaller -- while Cheney is sprawled out on that easy chair, using his body to take up more space than it actually needs. No matter your politics, in this illustration, Bush is meant to look like the subordinate, Galinsky says.

In one experiment in the study, 77 undergrads (24 guys, 53 ladies) filled out a questionnaire that they were told was meant to assess their leadership potential. While they waited for feedback from the survey, they were instructed to sit in a specific condition in a computer chair (they were told this was part of a marketing test on ergonomic chairs). The participants who were instructed to sit in the "expansive posture" position were instructed to place one arm on the chair's armrest, and the other arm on the back of a nearby chair; they were also to cross their legs so that the ankle of one leg "rested on the thigh of the other leg and stretched beyond the edge of the chair," the report says. Other participants were instructed to sit in a "constricted posture," which involved sitting on their hands, hunching their shoulders and keeping their legs together.

Participants were then paired off to complete a puzzle; each of them was randomly assigned to be a manager or a subordinate. Afterward (my, but there were many steps to this experiment, weren't there?), the volunteers were asked to fill in the blanks for seven words that were missing letters -- words that could say things like "lead" but were written "l_ad" -- and were asked to write in the first letter that came to mind. Also (yes, there's more), particpants were given a 10-question survey asking how powerful they felt.

Phew. The interesting part was that no matter if the participant was assigned to be a manager or a lowly employee, those who had sat with the sprawling, "expansive" posture answered the questions in such a way to suggest that they felt more powerful. "It was incredibly surprising to me," Galinsky says of that finding.

Do you think your posture has an effect on the way you feel about yourself?

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Here at Body Odd, we thought we’d heard it all when it comes to strange spa treatments. But that was before we heard about the latest trend to hit the Manhattan/Southern California spa circuit: vaginal steam baths.

According to a story in the Los Angeles Times, chai-yok (not to be confused with bok-choy, also good steamed) is a “centuries-old Korean remedy that is gaining a toehold in the West,” thanks to its many purported health benefits.

Those benefits – none of which have been studied – are said to include everything from reducing stress to fighting infections to helping with infertility. Not surprisingly, vaginal steams are also supposed to help with hemorrhoids.

Treatments cost anywhere from $20 to $75 (depending on your location) and basically involve perching naked on a bottomless stool over a boiling pot of water infused with mugwort, wormwood and a variety of other herbs.

While some women swear by the “V-steam,” (a 45-year-old woman interviewed by the LA Times says she not only had fewer body aches and more energy, she also became pregnant after just five steams), doctors seem dubious.

“I just don’t understand physiologically how putting steam up the vagina is going to change your fertility or help you relieve stress,” says Dr. Laura Riley, director of labor and delivery at Massachusetts General in Boston. “There’s plenty of data that supports mind-body intervention and how that improves fertility and decreases stress. But steam itself in the vagina doesn’t make any sense for me. It’s not like it’s going to blow up some closed tube.”

This placebo effect might do it for some people, she says, but it wouldn’t do much for her.

“Someone who believes it’s going to work might get some benefit,” she says. “But I’d be more concerned about burning my vagina. That’s a very sensitive area.”

What's the strangest spa treatment you've had? Tell us in the comments.

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A case of the sads is often best addressed with a bowl of ice cream, a bag of Cheetos or whatever is the comfort food of your choice. Now, a new study shows that eating junk food is linked to depression. We spot a potential vicious cycle.

It seems the more trans fats you eat, the higher your risk of depression. Spanish researchers analyzed the diets, lifestyles and physical ills of 12,059 volunteers over six years -- before, during and after the study. At the start of the project, none of the volunteers suffered from depression, but at the end, 657 new cases had appeared. And of those new cases, the volunteers who ate more trans fats had a 48 percent increase in the risk of depression, when compared to the volunteers who didn't eat trans fats.

"I think (the) general population is informed regarding the association between diet and several physical diseases such as ... heart disease or obesity," says Almudena Sanchez-Villegas, lead author of the report and an associate professor of preventive medicine and public health at Spain's University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. "Nevertheless, there are not enough data regarding the hypothetical role of diet on mental disorders. In fact, only a few epidemiological studies have analyzed this possible association."

What was particularly interesting to Sanchez-Villegas and his team was that the diets of the volunteers actually included fairly low amounts of trans fats, which accounted for only 0.4 percent, on average, of the total energy energy consumed. "So, the repercussion of these results might be really important in other settings where trans fatty acids intake is by far higher (for example, it can be of up to 2.5 percent of total energy intake among the American population)," Sanchez-Villegas says.

But eating olive oil might actually lessen the risk of depression, another finding in the report shows. Consuming more than 20 grams of olive oil a day could reduce the risk of depression 20 to 30 percent, Sanchez-Villegas says.

Of course, the study addressed clinical depression, and not a case of "the blues." But when you're feeling down, do you ever let yourself indulge in your favorite snacks? What's your go-to comfort food?

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