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Achoo! What does your, ah, snot say about you?

You might be wearing the tell-tale colors of a cold: Your nose is dripping a clear liquid, and the skin near your nostrils is red from sniffling and sneezing. 

A doctor's exam may find the lining of your nose and throat is inflamed and red. And you could have white patches on your sore tonsils. 

But what about the gross gunk clogging up your nose, throat, and lungs? Can the shades of your secretions -- mucus and phlegm -- tell you anything about how long you'll be under the weather or what kind of bug you have? 

Dr. Stacey Tutt Gray is a sinus specialist at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary in Boston, and she says it's not unusual for her patients to bring in their mucus-covered tissues to show her what's coming out of their bodies. So Gray is quite familiar with these secretions and her color-inspired last name makes her an ideal expert to explain their various hues. 

But first she points out that mucus is a liquid gel made up of mucin, a protein, and infection-fighting substances. It acts as a protective blanket over the lining of your nose, and the sticky substance can help trap and clear dust, allergens, bacteria, and viruses. 

You make roughly a quart of clear, thin mucus a day, which you usually just swallow. But snot production often cranks up, thickens, and discolors when you catch a cold, have allergies, or get an infection. 

Phlegm is also mucus that's coming from the chest and lungs. Technically, doctors call it sputum. Most people don't normally have phlegm, says Gray, but the lining of the airways has mucus in it to keep the lungs clear. 

A rainbow of mucus and phlegm
As far as color goes, mucus is typically clear. But when the immune system sends white blood cells into the nose to fight off infection, they contain a greenish enzyme that shades the substance yellow or green. These are the same tones mucus takes on when it dries and clumps into boogers.  

Red- or brown-tinged snot could occur when tiny blood vessels in your nose break from frequently blowing it. Black mucus can come from the noses of smokers or people who work in coal mines or dusty environments.

The phlegm palette is similarly multicolored to mucus with clear or white sputum being normal, yellow or green hues from frequent coughing, and red or brown shades from blood that's new or old. If you're seeing a lot of blood in phlegm, give your doctor a call. 

To thin down mucus or loosen phlegm, drink plenty of hot or cold liquids, and take a hot shower or inhale steam. Nasal rinsing with warm water can also help flush out congestion to make breathing easier. 

Gray says she is often asked by her patients with sinus trouble whether the color of mucus means a person has a bacterial infection and if they need an antibiotic. "The color in and of itself doesn't necessarily mean anything," she explains.

 A physician will determine whether an illness is viral or bacterial, an allergy or a sinus problem based on what a patient is saying about their other symptoms -- fever, body aches, nasal congestion, how long they've felt this way -- not just the color of mucus.  

So if you have a cold, you might see a rainbow of gook from your nose and chest. But it doesn't tell you much and it's usually nothing to worry about.

Related:

• Symptom tracker: Cold? Flu? Or something else?

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"X Factor" judges L.A. Reid, Nicole Scherzinger, Paula Abdul and Simon Cowell are so judging your subpar singing skills.

Despite a glut of TV singing shows from "American Idol" to "The Voice" to "The X Factor" to "The Sing Off" and even "Glee," 10 to 20 percent of the population fails to sing in tune, according to an often-cited expert estimate. But a new study suggests the number of horrible singers is actually much higher than that, and it explains the reasons why many folks are vocally challenged when it comes to music.

Truth be told, having a great set of pipes is no simple matter.

"Singing is a complex act," says Sean Hutchins, the study's lead author and a postdoctoral researcher at the International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research at the University of Montreal. Singing is complicated because you need to match a note with your voice and perceive it accurately, you need to figure out the right way to configure your vocal muscles, and you need to control those muscles well enough to belt out a tune, he explains.

That leaves a slew of places for a rock star wannabe or car-radio crooner to mess up. Hutchins' research, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, attempts to identify where awful singers go wrong in the process.

In a series of five experiments, researchers compared small groups of people with or without musical training. They tested participants' accuracy at matching their voices to various pitches, to a target vocal or musical tone, or to other singers.

The study found that anywhere from 40 to 62 percent of non-musicians were poor singers, a rate much higher than shown in previous research.

It also found that roughly 20 percent of people can't sing accurately because they don't have good control of their vocal muscles. Another 35 percent of poor singers have trouble matching the pitch of their own voice to the same sound heard in other timbres, such as when it's coming from a trumpet, piano, or a person of the opposite sex. And 5 percent of lousy singers lack the ability to hear differences in pitch or discriminate between two different sounds.

To be sure, some aspects of singing are influenced by genetics. "There are certainly people who are more natural singers, and the physiological shape of their vocal tracts can give a more or less pleasing natural sound to the voice," Hutchins points out. But he says, the best singers just like the best athletes will be those who are blessed with natural talent and have devoted a large amount of practice to their craft.

However, it's the poor singers of the world who are the least likely to practice. And that's what's necessary to get better at it.

To improve, Hutchins suggests that "pitch -- hitting the right notes -- is the most important part of singing well."

If you need motivation to cultivate your vocal chops no matter how hideous you sound, there's what Hutchins calls the "vocal generosity effect."

He says listeners are quite forgiving of singing errors, more so than for other types of music. "Singers actually can be quite out-of-tune before listeners will notice the flubs, but they would pick up on a musician's subtle mistakes sooner in say, someone playing the violin."

What about you? Can you carry a tune?

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A yawn could be more than a sign of sleepiness or a show of boredom. A new study suggests it could be a way for your brain to cool off. According to this brain-cooling theory, yawning pays off because it helps control the temperature of your brain so you think more clearly.  

Researchers also noticed seasonal variations in the frequency of yawning. People appear to yawn more frequently in the winter after spending long periods of time outside in colder weather than they do in the summer heat.

"People are less likely to yawn when the surrounding air temperatures exceeds body temperature because taking a deep inhalation of air warmer than your own body would not result in cooling," says Andrew Gallup, a postdoctoral research associate in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University in Princeton, N.J.

The study, which was published in the journal Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience, took place in Tucson, Ariz., a climate where the thermometer routinely exceeds human body temperature of 98.6 F. Researchers compared the rates of contagious yawning in 80 people who were outdoors in "winter conditions," in Tucson, meaning milder temperatures and slightly higher humidity, to 80 people in "early summer," which has hotter weather and relatively low humidity.

Researchers asked people walking on the street to complete a survey about contagious yawning. The questionnaire included 20 photos of people yawning, and contained questions about how long participants had been outside prior to the survey, how much sleep they had the night before, and how often they yawned during the experiment.

People yawn for two main reasons: They do it spontaneously because of fatigue, stress, changes in mental or physical activity, and following a circadian rhythm in the body's internal clock, says Gallup, the study's lead author. Yawning can also be socially contagious. Seeing, hearing, reading, or thinking about yawning can cause you to do the same. (And yawning during take-off and landing is a helpful trick to "pop" your ears when flying causes air pressure changes.)

Scientists found that during the winter, nearly half of the study participants reported yawning during the experiment compared to about a quarter of them in the summer. Yawning also seemed to be linked to the amount of time spent outdoors exposed to those climate conditions.

Gallup explains that yawning may act like a car radiator by removing blood from the brain that's too hot while introducing cooler blood from the lungs as well as the arms and legs. Much like an overheated engine, an overheated brain doesn't function well.

"Yawning functions to promote attention and mental efficiency by reinstating optimal brain temperature," Gallup points out. "So it should be considered a compliment rather than an insult."

If you yawned while reading this article, it could mean that you're simply sharpening your brain power to be more alert.

Readers, have you ever been caught yawning at a poorly timed moment?

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First comes the splash, then comes the gasp, then comes the grueling decision as to whether you want to dip your hand into the forbidden waters of the toilet bowl and fish out what you've dropped.

And we've all dropped something -- usually a toothbrush or a cell phone, according to a recent survey conducted by Quilted Northern. (Yes, the toilet paper company. We know.)

Twenty-four percent of the 1,000 women queried, in fact, confessed to "frequently" dropping their cell phones in the toilet, while 22 percent said they had a penchant for accidentally tossing their toothbrush.

What else has a tendency to topple into the latrine?

According to the survey, 19 percent of women confessed to dropping a piece of jewelry while 17 percent said they had accidentally knocked lipstick, mascara or some other kind of makeup into the loo.

But it gets worse. An unlucky 13 percent admitted to dropping their medicine into the commode (hopefully while still in the bottle), while 11 percent said their eyeglasses had made a splash (unfortunately, not the right kind).

Wallets and money have also taken the plunge but only for seven percent of the women surveyed.

As for reaching in, retrieval appears to depend on the cost of the item. To go in, most women said the submerged object had to cost at least $75. A pristine 16 percent, however, said it didn't matter what they'd dropped into the bowl (their purse? their husband? the Hope Diamond?), no item was worth an encounter with toilet water.

So readers, confess. What have you accidentally dropped and fished out of your powder room "pond"?

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By Natalie Wolchover 
LifesLittleMysteries.com 

An Arkansas man identified as the "Toe Suck Fairy" was arrested Monday (Sept. 26) following a series of incidents in which he allegedly approached women in stores, commented on their feet and asked to suck their toes. According to Reuters, the culprit, Michael Robert Wyatt, 50, previously served a prison sentence for similar shenanigans. Last time, he even pretended to be a podiatrist in order to fondle and suck a woman's toes at a clothing store.

Though criminal cases are rare, foot fetishism itself is surprisingly common. Academic studies on the prevalence and membership of fetish discussion groups have found that feet and foot accessories are the most fetishized of all non-genital body parts and objects. Nearly half of all such fetishes focus on feet, and almost two-thirds of fetishes for objects associated with the body are for shoes and socks. [Can Brain Scans Read People's Minds?]

Sigmund Freud claimed that people sexualize feet because they resemble penises. Today, a more scientific theory comes from the neuroscientist Vilanayar Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego.

Ramachandran said he solved the mystery of foot fetishes while studying the brain malfunctions that lead to phantom limb syndrome, a condition where amputees feel as if their missing limbs are still attached to their bodies, and that they can move those limbs. He found that the syndrome resulted when a person's "body image map" — the brain's map of the body, in which different body parts are associated with and controlled by different brain regions — failed to erase the part of the map that corresponded to the amputated limb.

In the case of some phantom foot patients, Ramachandran found that the amputees' brains didn't just fail to erase the missing foot from their body image map, they accidentally rewired the map in a way that caused the person's phantom foot to become sexy. Phantom foot patients reported feeling sexual pleasure, and even orgasms, in their missing feet.

Long before Ramachandran began his work on phantom limb syndrome, it had been noted that the brain areas associated with genitalia and feet are adjacent to each other in the brain's body image map. But no one else had put 2 and 2 together  and realized that foot fetishes could possibly result from cross-wiring in the brain between the foot and the genital parts.

As Ramachandran wrote in "Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind" (Harper, 1999): "Maybe even many of us so-called normal people have a bit of cross-wiring, which would explain why we like to have our toes sucked."

• 10 Weird Things Humans Do Every Day, and Why
• Why Do We Have Sex?
• 7 Strange Ways Humans Act Like Vampires

Follow Natalie Wolchover on Twitter @nattyover. Follow Life's Little Mysteries on Twitter @llmysteries, then join us on Facebook.

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The joke sounds like a mordant New Yorker cartoon, or a crack from Dennis Leary’s stand-up routine: A pizza delivery guy lies dead from a gunshot just steps from his destination. The waiting customers find the pizza and one asks “How much do we think we should tip him?”

But this really happened to a real pizza delivery guy and a group of hospital doctors who ordered the pizza, leading one of those doctors to ask Northwestern University bioethicist Katie Watson a question: “Was it wrong to make the joke?”

Watson, writing in a report for the Hastings Center, a bioethics think tank in Garrison, New York, answers no. “To me, the butt of the doctors’ tip joke is not the patient. It’s death,” she writes in the report.

Gallows humor is a time-honored coping mechanism. Soldiers, emergency room doctors and nurses, reporters, cops, even families facing the imminent death of a loved one engage in gallows humor, much of it utterly unprintable here. One of the funniest people I know worked as a “death counselor” for the terminally ill and tragically injured, and it was amazing what she could do with material like stab wounds and brain cancer.

In the case of the doctors, when they found the pizza man, they struggled to save his life and failed. Yet they had a shift to work at the hospital and more patients to help. Cracking a joke, as crass as it may seem upon reflection, helped them do that.

“Doctors are not robotic systems for healthcare delivery,” Watson said in an interview. “They are human beings. Yet they are expected to behave as if vomit doesn’t smell, and death is not scary.”

Some of what Watson calls “backstage” humor -- jokes and stories told among doctors, or teachers in a teachers’ lounge, or war reporters in a bar -- is a way to relieve tension and excise demons.

Which is not to say it’s always OK. Watson believes doctors, or anybody else, should be guided by the thought of harm. Who will a joke hurt? Is the humor making somebody a punching bag when a doctor’s real anger is toward, say, his or her boss? Could future patients be harmed in any way?

Of course not all doctors, or reporters, or school teachers, or firefighters, want to publicize the fact that they make cracks behind closed doors at all. One surgeon, Watson said, “was upset with me for discussing it outside the healthcare profession. She worried it would make patients trust doctors less.”

To which we say -- nyuk, nyuk, nyuk – give us the doctor who laughs.

Follow msnbc.com contributor Brian Alexander on Twitter.

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By Benjamin Radford
Life'sLittleMysteries.com

Can people suddenly and inexplicably explode into a ball of fire?

It sounds like something in a horror film, but some people believe it happens. It's also what an Irish coroner recently concluded about the death of Michael Faherty, a 76-year-old Irishman who burned to death in his home in December 2010. There were scorch marks above and below the body, but no evidence of any gasoline, kerosene, or other accelerant. The coroner, Ciaran McLoughlin, reported: "This fire was thoroughly investigated and I'm left with the conclusion that this fits into the category of spontaneous human combustion, for which there is no adequate explanation."

Usually, of course, fires do not start on their own. When investigators are searching for the cause of forest fires they don't assume that the flame ignited itself, but instead that it was probably caused by a careless camper or a lightning strike. Though rare, spontaneous combustion has long been known to occur. Under the right circumstances many things can self-ignite on a hot day, including used rags containing oil or gasoline and piles of compost. Coal dust can also spontaneously ignite, one of many dangers that miners face.

Read another amazing story: How long Do Mafia Victims Take to Dissolve in Acid? 

But the claim that people can suddenly burst into flames for no apparent reason is a whole different matter. The best-known case of spontaneous human combustion (SHC) is actually fictional: in Charles Dickens's 1853 novel "Bleak House" a character explodes into fire. The phenomenon has also appeared in movies and on TV shows like "The X-Files."

But are there any confirmed real-life cases?

This is where things get trickier. Though some writers suggest that there are hundreds (or even thousands) of SHC cases throughout history, only about a dozen have been investigated in any detail. Researcher Joe Nickell examined many "unexplainable" cases in his book "Real-Life X-Files" and found that all of them were far less mysterious than often suggested. Most of the victims were, like the Irishman Faherty, elderly, alone, and near flames (cigarettes, candles, fires, etc.) when they died. Several were last seen drinking alcohol and smoking.

How could a body burn once it has ignited? If the person is asleep, intoxicated, unconscious, too weak, or otherwise unable to move or put the flames out, then the victim's clothes can act as a candle wick, drawing on the body's fat (which, because it is an oil, is flammable, and very near the skin's surface) to fuel the fire. Once a body starts to burn, it will continue to burn until the fuel (clothing, chairs, paper, body fat, etc.) is used up.

Fires are notoriously fickle; sometimes flames will spread to other places, other times they won't. Sometimes fires will consume the whole body, other times they won't. It all depends on the specific circumstances of each case.

The World's Greatest Hoaxes

Nickell also pours cold water on the idea that bodies can only be consumed by temperatures far higher than ordinary flames could provide: "Experiments show that liquefied human fat burns at a temperature of about 250 degrees [Celsius] (482 degrees Fahrenheit); however a cloth wick placed in such fat will burn even when the temperature falls as low as 24 degrees [Celsius] (75 degrees Fahrenheit)."

Michael Faherty's case may not be as mysterious as it looks. There was, after all, an open fire close to his burned body. It seems likely that a spark or ember might have popped from the fire onto his clothing, and caught his clothing on fire. It's not clear why the coroner conclusively ruled this explanation out.

If SHC is a real phenomenon (and not the result of an elderly or infirm person being too close to a flame source), why doesn't it happen more often? There are 5 billion people in the world, and yet we don't see reports of people bursting into flame while walking down the street, attending football games, or sipping a coffee at a local Starbucks. If spontaneous human combustion is a real — but very rare — phenomenon, statistically we should see far more cases. As it is, the only time when SHC is even suspected is in a very specific set of circumstances—usually ones that suggest a more logical explanation.

More true tales from Life's Little Mysteries:

• Dead Aliens and Magnetic Boys: 6 Hoax Videos Debunked
• 7 Things That Create Convincing UFO Sightings
• 10 Weird Things People Do Every Day (and Why)

Benjamin Radford is deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer science magazine and author of Scientific Paranormal Investigation: How to Solve Unexplained Mysteries. His website is www.BenjaminRadford.com.

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Former U.S. President Bill Clinton is among the nation's famous lefties.

How do we explain that through the centuries, all over the world, there has always been a consistent left-handed minority of people of around 10 percent? Author Rik Smits attempts to answer this question in his new book "The Puzzle of Left-handedness."

There’s no definitive reason why one person is a rightie and another is a leftie, argues Smits in his book. There are several theories, though, and plenty of left-handed lore.

"We know for certain that genetics is involved in left-handedness, since it runs in families" says Smits, who is left-handed and a science writer in the Netherlands. A left-handed parent is twice as likely to have a left-handed child, and two left-handed parents are three to four times as likely to have a southpaw son or daughter. 

Still genetics alone can't fully account for the constancy of the 1-in-10 distribution of lefties among the population. Another theory is that left-handedness can sometimes be a result of disturbed development in the womb or of brain damage (no matter how slight) before, during, or after birth. A third possibility is hormonal -- that lefties might be exposed to higher concentrations of testosterone while the brain is developing.

Smits presents an interesting theory of his own: Left-handedness is a side effect of identical twinning.

He explains his ideas this way: When the embryos split at an early stage in the pregnancy -- around the first week -- this division would result in identical twins. And twinning may give rise to minor mirror-imaging effects, including left-handedness. But Smits suggests that most embryo splits don't always result in two viable fetuses, and the process often goes wrong. He proposes that perhaps a left-handed fetus survives and is born while the "clandestine" twin, the rightie, is lost early in the pregnancy, before would-be parents know of its existence.

There are other intriguing links between twins and left-handedness. Left-handedness occurs roughly twice as often in twins -- both identical and fraternal sets. And in the majority of cases, left-handedness affects only one identical twin. Smits ideas have not been scientifically tested.

Southpaws rule! The most powerful left-handers

While the right-handed majority may consider lefties intriguing or peculiar, Smits argues that from an early age left-handed people always have to do something extra to figure out how to reverse the processes demonstrated to them -- whether it's handwriting, tying their shoelaces or a necktie, or slicing bread.

He also contends it's a myth that southpaws die nine years earlier than their right-handed counterparts, an idea first proposed in the early 1990s by psychologist Stanley Coren. Other researchers have since said that these conclusions were based on flawed analysis and arguments.

Although left-handedness has been linked with everything from hay fever and alcoholism to criminality and mental retardation, Smits claims there's no good evidence to support these associations either.

The truth is we know little about why people prefer to use one hand over another, and it's unique to humans to have a large right-handed majority. In the animal world, there are roughly equal numbers who prefer their left paw to their right.

"Most left-handers are just left-handed, nothing more," Smits concludes.

 Here are some interesting facts from "The Puzzle of Left-handedness":

• Left-handedness is slightly more common in men than women.

• Left-handers appear to have an edge in sports where two opponents face each other, such as baseball, tennis, boxing, and fencing. This is probably because southpaws get more opportunities to hone their skills against righties when practicing.

• Five of the last seven American commanders in chief were left-handed. (Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush were not.)

• In the 1992 US presidential election, the sitting president (Bush the elder), and both his challengers -- Bill Clinton and Ross Perot -- were southpaws.

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Hahahaha, laughs the live studio audience watching NBC's new sitcom, "Whitney."

Two new fall TV shows premiering this week, "2 Broke Girls" on CBS and "Whitney" on NBC, are counting on an old-fashioned sitcom standby to help them get chuckles and ratings: the laugh track.

Some TV networks and producers may love to use laugh tracks, and some viewers have grown to accept them as part of a program's background noise, much like the music or special effects used in a drama. Others -- including many television critics -- loathe the made-for-TV mirth.

But no matter your opinion of the canned ha-ha's, shows continue to use them because they work! They're meant to make the audience at home feel like they're part of a bigger crowd sitting in a movie theater or at a comedy club.

"We're much more likely to laugh at something funny in the presence of other people," says Bill Kelley, a psychology professor at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H, who has studied the brain's response to humor. Hearing others laugh -- even if it's prerecorded -- can encourage us to chuckle and enjoy ourselves more. In fact, a 1974 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology showed that people were more likely to laugh at jokes that were followed by canned laughter.

Kelley's own research compared student's reactions to an episode of "Seinfeld," which has a laugh track, to those watching "The Simpsons," which lacks one. Brain scans suggested that people found the same things funny and the same regions of their brain lit up whether or not they heard others laughing.

While his findings may give reason to do away with a laugh track, Kelley still sees value in them. When done well, he says, they can give people pointers about what's funny and help them along. But when done poorly, he admits, you notice a laugh track and it seems unnatural and out of place. 

Some beloved shows, like "30 Rock," "Curb Your Enthusiasm," "Modern Family," "The Office" and "Glee," have said no to the laugh track, preferring the audience's authentic reactions to their humor and punch lines. They let viewers decide for themselves when and how much something tickles their funny bone.

But not all laugh tracks are created equal. Both "Whitney" and "2 Broke Girls" tape before a live studio audience and record the audience's giggles and guffaws. Even though they get a genuine human reaction to the show's jokes and humor, producers often "sweeten" a laugh track, meaning they edit it. 

Sound engineers might insert some chortles if a wisecrack fell flat or lengthen the time an audience spends cracking up. They may also tone down the woman who loudly cackles at the wrong times or the obnoxious guy who is perpetually in stitches.

For comedies that don't shoot live, such as "How I Met Your Mother," they rely on "canned laughter," a pre-recorded mix of tee-hees and chuckles that may sound phony. Hearing it may make you wish had a mute button for the synthetic snickers. 

Popular shows that currently dub in the yuks, whether they tape before a live audience or not, include "Two and a Half Men," "The Big Bang Theory" and "Mike & Molly." Past sitcom sensations, from "Seinfeld" and "Cheers" to "Friends" and "Frasier," also turned to some form of electronically enhanced giggles.

Do shows with TV laugh tracks make you yuk or say "yuck"? Can you tune them out or do they drive you crazy?

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Women with brains and beauty -- like Christina Hendrickson from "Mad Men" -- are not encouraged to use both, says a British social scientist. But they should.

“Erotic capital” isn’t a Vegas hotspot. It’s a person’s innate sex appeal, an asset that is just as important to economic and personal success as education or social connections, according to British social scientist Catherine Hakim. Everyone, but especially women, should exploit it to the max, she says.

Hakim’s new book, the provocatively titled “Honey Money,” might seem at first to be a manifesto arguing that all women ought to become Hooters babes. That’s the way some have portrayed Hakim’s ideas.

But that’s not what Hakim wants, as she noted in an academic paper published last year. In short, Hakim is appealing for everyone to stop pretending that sex appeal -- a combination of style, looks, social skills, and attitude -- doesn’t matter. It does, but somehow, when it comes to women, success (however that’s defined) owed in some measure to sex appeal is bad.

The idea of using both one's brains and erotic appeal -- think, oh, Catherine Deneuve or, maybe bombshell Christina Hendricks from "Mad Men" -- has been given short shrift, Hakim argues. "Either a woman is valued for her human capital (her brains, education, work experience, and dedication to her career) or she is valued for her erotic capital (her beauty, elegant figure, dress style, sexuality, grace, and charm). Women with brains and beauty are not allowed to use both.”

That's not exactly true, of course. Just have a look at TV news anchor people. I was once interviewed by Natalie Morales on TODAY and could barely function; she's got a heap of erotic capital. She is also smart and skilled at her job. All these aspects are important contributors to her success, but few women feel comfortable acknowledging their sex appeal has anything to do with their careers since it is seen as not being part of "merit."  

Men don’t have to deal with this either/or problem. Nobody accuses David Beckham of selling out or being a less competitive athlete because he poses in underwear. But when female Olympic athletes use their sex appeal, they are condemned as anti-feminist.  

Hakim argues that “erotic capital is rising in social and economic importance today” in response to our increasingly sexualized society and that it “gives women an advantage, and is a key factor in women’s changing status in society and the economy.”

It might be accelerating now but as Hakim points out in one example, high-status women have never been afraid of using their sex appeal. “Diplomatic wives clearly deploy erotic capital in their social activities. We argue that erotic capital has greater value when it is linked to high levels of economic, cultural, and social capital.”

In “Rapture,” my book about biotechnology and the quest for immortality, a woman named Deeda Blair, a beautiful and fabulously connected Washington D.C. doyenne, was contacted by another important mover named Mary Lasker, founder of the Lasker Foundation, a prestigious medical charity. Lasker wanted to mount an attack on high blood pressure, so she called Blair “and said do you know anybody who knows Elliot Richardson,” then secretary of health education of welfare under President Nixon. Blair responded: ‘Well, two nights ago, there was a party at the British Embassy and I spent a large part of the evening waltzing between the columns with him.’”

The campaign was funded. That’s erotic capital.

Follow me on Twitter:    http://twitter.com/#!/BrianRAlexander

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Emily Van Camp stars in the new series, "Revenge."

In Wednesday night's premiere of ABC's new show "Revenge," viewers met the seductive, sophisticated Emily Thorne, who returns to Southampton, N.Y., 17 years later to wreak havoc on her father's enemies. It seems she'll pick them off one at a time.

But in real life, is revenge really as sweet as it seems?

Actually, it is -- at least, it is at first. “When (people) exact revenge, there is genuinely a feeling of relief and even a release of serotonin and oxytocin into the brain that will make someone feel better,” says Mia Bloom, PhD, professor of international studies and women studies at Penn State University.

Even if the act of revenge is as simple as approaching the person who slighted you for a conversation, ignoring an email or sabatoging a co-worker's project, getting back at the person who's wronged you can be simply satisfying.

“This is everything from the person who cuts you off in traffic and you show them a certain finger on your hand or you beep at them can be a way of making you feel better," Bloom explains. "It doesn’t have to be taking an AK-47 and going in and shooting up people who have done you wrong.”

Bloom examined female participation in the world’s most recognized terrorist groups in her book, “Bombshell: Women and Terrorism”, slated for an Oct. 1 release, says women typically resort to acts of terrorism and suicide bombings for five reasons: revenge, redemption, relationship, respect and rape. Like the character in the ABC drama series, the violent acts often aren’t for personal gratification. Most often, they are altruistic or a way of avenging wrongs done to their relatives, communities or religion.

Although executing a revenge plot makes us feel better because of the chemical reaction in our brains, Blooms says it also has a dark downside.

“It creates a cycle of violence,” she explains. “The moment a person exacts revenge, there is a response and another response. Violence is never a solution because it becomes never-ending.”

Bloom, who interviewed dozens of women who committed or attempted to commit violent acts include Catholic women in Ireland, Hindu women in Sri Lanka and American women recruited to go to Iraq and Afghanistan, say after the seeking revenge people often experience high levels of guilt, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and other forms of trauma.

“They express regret,” she says. “A failed bombers will say I went to the market, but I saw kids, and they couldn’t cross that line. It’s very difficult to take another life, no matter who that person is and what that person did.”

When's the last time you got back at someone? Tell us about it, and how you felt afterward. Did it make you feel better? Or did it end up making you feel worse?

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We're going to guess many poor decisions were made that night.

It’s a trap that most of us have fallen into: making a rash or regrettable decision after a few cold Coors Lights. Blame it on the booze, right? A new study out of the University of Missouri College of Arts and Sciences sheds light on how the brain processes mistakes in the presence of alcohol.

In a finding that runs contrary to previous thinking, it turns out we still know we are making mistakes when intoxicated. We just don’t care as much.

“I suppose the main implication is that people shouldn’t assume ‘I was drunk’ is a good excuse for doing things one knows he or she shouldn’t be doing,” wrote the study’s author, Dr. Bruce Bartholow of the University of Missouri, in an e-mail.  The study will be published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology.

“It’s not as though people do drunken things because they’re not aware of their behavior, but rather they seem to be less bothered by the implications or consequences of their behavior than they normally would be,” Bartholow added.

Bartholow set out to bring clarity to an area of ambiguity in brain research: Does the strength of the ERN – the error-related negativity “alarm signal” set off in the brain by mistakes – change with the presence of alcohol? Research out of the Netherlands in 2002 had concluded that intoxication reduced the brain’s capacity to detect errors.

However, Bartholow’s study challenged that assumption by asking if it’s possible that the ability to detect errors actually remained the same – but alcohol changed the brain’s reaction to those errors. 

“I wondered whether alcohol's effects on error processing were less about reducing awareness of errors and more about reducing the distress that normally accompanies errors,” Bartholow said.

In the study, a group of 67 people aged 21-35 were split into three groups. While two of the three groups received a placebo alcohol (10-proof vodka-tonics), or just plain tonic, the third (lucky?) group received alcoholic beverages -- 100-proof vodka-tonics. The participants in the alcohol group got to a blood-alcohol level of about .09 percent -- just over the legal driving limit. The other two groups remained at a .00 percent blood-alcohol level throughout the study. All participants were then tasked with completing a challenging computer task.

Bartholow’s team noted that while all the groups made mistakes, those which had consumed alcohol were less likely to notice their errors. The alcohol drinkers were also less likely to slow down after an error.

However, in addition to monitoring their performance on the computer, participants also measured the subjects’ mood.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the alcohol group reported feeling less negative. (Hilariously, the group which received the placebo had a more negative mood.) Using these measurements, Bartholow’s team was able to demonstrate a correlation between the mood of the participants and the strength of the ERN. A less negative mood equaled a less severe ERN.

For the study author, the findings represent an important step in understanding how alcohol affects the brain – and the mistakes made by people who have had a couple brew-dogs. Further avenues of research could include testing whether drunk people can be sufficiently motivated to care about their mistakes (and if so, would their brain responses be similar to those of sober individuals).

Another possible avenue Bartholow is pursuing is testing whether the error-related brain activity differences observed in the study will produce changes in other parts of the brain as people attempt to correct their mistakes. In what promises to be endless entertainment for the research assistants, Bartholow is pursuing the use of an fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging – or scans that measure brain activity) machine to take measurements of the study participants.

Related:

• Why do hangovers seem so much worse as we get older?
• I'll never drink again! Never mind. Cheers!
• And the definitive hangover cure is ... plain old coffee and aspirin, actually

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Pssst! Guys, if you want that hottie sitting beside you to remember your stunning good looks long after you’ve left, lower the pitch of your voice when you turn on the charm.

Lower voices seem to stick better in women’s memories, scientists now say. In a study published in this month’s Memory & Cognition, British researchers reported that women were more likely to remember something if they heard it from a man with a low voice than one with a higher pitch.

The theory is that women are hard-wired to pay better attention to a potentially superior mate.

“The reason that male voice pitch should be important is that the pitch of the voice gives an indication of how much testosterone the man has,” said the study’s lead author, Kevin Allan, a lecturer in psychology at the University of Aberdeen in the United Kingdom. “Lots of testosterone produces pronounced masculine features, in the voice and face most notably.”

Studies have shown that testosterone impacts the immune system, Allan said. “So, if a man has a rugged masculine face and voice then it implies that he has a good immune system and therefore good health,” he explained.

And that’s the payoff, in evolutionary terms: healthy daddies are more likely to make healthy babies.

To look at the impact of male voice pitch on women’s memories, Allan and his colleagues rounded up 45 young women whose average age was 21.

The women were shown an image of an object while listening to a voice read the name of the object. The male voices were manipulated to sound either high or low pitched.

Later on, the women were shown a picture of the object they’d looked at earlier, along with a picture that was similar, but slightly different -- a plain blue fish versus the same blue fish with a yellow blotch.

When the researchers tallied up the number of times each woman picked the right picture, they discovered that the women were more likely to remember if they’d initially seen the object while a low pitched male voice was naming it.

So, does it work the other way round?

Allan says not. “We did collect data from men who were listening to women’s voices that were high and low in pitch,” he explained. “We found no effect on the men’s memory at all. Our conclusion about the absence of the effect in men’s memory is that men are picking partners based purely on physical characteristics.” 

Related:

• Women think deep voiced-dudes are more likely to cheat, study shows 
• 'Baby fever' is a real thing -- and guys get it, too
• Women's 'gaydar' improves during ovulation

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Human beings – and no, not just Americans – are an overconfident bunch. That’s why most men will say they are more attractive than average, most doctors say they are better doctors than average, and a hilarious 70 percent of high school students say they are better leaders than average high school students, none of which is possible, of course.

You’d think this bias in favor of ourselves would always be a bad idea, but read the Declaration of Independence. Those guys took on the most powerful nation the world had ever seen. Sometimes being a little cocky pays off.

That potential for payoff is why Dominic Johnson, of the University of Edinburgh, and James Fowler of the University of California San Diego, write in the journal Nature that human society evolved to contain overconfident people. “There can be material rewards for holding incorrect beliefs about one’s own capability,” they argue in presenting a model of overconfidence. 

As a commentary that accompanied the article explained, if two parties want something, they can fight for it, which comes at a cost. If only one claims the prize, he gets it without a fight. If both parties are gifted with perfect judgment about each other’s strength, then there’ll never be a fight because the weaker party will know to back off.

But contrary to what advocates of “rational markets” argue, there is almost always uncertainty. In that knowledge gap, you can talk yourself into thinking that your reach does not actually exceed your grasp. So deluded, you may try for what you want and sometimes the real stronger party won’t compete. If you are, say, skinny, goofy, lisping Roger Rabbit, you can make a play for Jessica (va-va-voom!) and wind up with the sexiest babe in Toon Town. Hooray for you.

But there is a dark side. That’s where Las Vegas casinos make their money. And recall all those blustering house flippers and bragging Wall Street quants ordering Petrus back in 2005?

Whether or not overconfidence is positive or negative depends on costs. Back in evolutionary time, costs were usually contained to yourself if Gork the caveman beat you up over a chunk of meat. In the modern world the costs can be slight -- if Jessica turns you down for a date you might be a little embarrassed, but so what? You stand to gain Jessica Rabbit!

They can also be earth shaking. So if your smug shock-and-awe jingoism could cost a national fortune and kill tens of thousands of people, and your mondo clever financial wizardry could wreck the world economy, please think about checking that cocksure attitude, O.K.? 

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Partygoers dance with themselves (and others) at a silent disco at the July 2011 Open'er Festival in Gdynia, Poland.

Disco isn’t dead. It just went quiet. Just walk into a Silent Disco event and see for yourself: a couple hundred people, two DJs spinning, and a dance floor filled with gyrating dancers – in total silence.

To the spectator, it’s an odd sight. But this new dance party phenomenon, which started in Europe (of course), uses specially designed wireless headphones rather than a traditional speaker system to get music to the masses. This Silentpalooza is people-watching heaven.  And it’s now taking America by storm.

“People would think its anti-social, but it ends up being the exact opposite,” says Ryan Dowd, owner of Silent Events, Inc., who caters Silent Disco events around the country. “If you meet someone or give them the eye on the dance floor, there’s no way to talk in a loud, crowded club without going outside, but this way you can literally take off the headphones in the center of the dance floor and talk in an inside voice steps from the DJ.”

Silent Events is one of the first American companies to bring Silent Disco to the U.S. You can now find college campuses hosting Silent Disco parties for their students as well as music festivals, fairs, weekly silent nights at your favorite club, rooftop parties—Jet Blue even held one at their airport terminal at JFK. (It gets interesting around the 1:50 mark.)

Originally created to deal with noise ordinances, dance parties booming music that’s both private and shared provide a feeling of camaraderie. Everyone feels like they’re in on a secret since they’re all wearing the headphones. But when it’s just you and the music, you kind of forget other people and sing like you’re in the car or the shower. Plus, there’s a comedic value since spectators nab a voyeuristic pleasure from watching the group dance in what appears to be silence.

 “I think it’s become a phenomenon because there are so many ways to enjoy it,” says Dowd. “If you don’t like loud music, you can dial down the volume. If you don’t like a certain type of music, you can change the channel. If you don’t dance, you can people watch.” Often there’s a choice of several DJs or two or three types of music like rock, rap or electronica. Silent Events even created a bilingual option for a recent Coca-Cola silent dance party.

Dowd, who’s been at the helm of Silent Events over three years, says each year it’s become better known and better received. People stand in line to get in. When the headphones run out that means Silent Disco is really hopping.

Could you shed your inhibitions and dance without music blaring?

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All that yapping you do between sets at the gym may not be that counter-productive, after all. A new study conducted by the Ohio State University Medical Center suggests there may be a connection being social and losing love handles. 

That seems to be the case in mice, at least. According to the study, which was published in the journal Cell Metabolism, some rodents lost half the fat around their bellies by interacting with more complex and socially stimulating environments. 

The study builds on research published last year on how such enriched environments could help mice build resistance to cancer. “When we looked at those animals we noticed they were much leaner,” said Dr. Matthew During, who led the research team at OSU Medical Center. “We thought, ‘This is a little interesting.’” 

Researchers rounded up two sets of identical mice for the new study. One was housed in standard pens in groups of five. The others were placed, 25 at a time, in more complex environments that contained wheels, mazes and greater opportunity for social interaction. 

Researchers tracked variations in diet and physical activity. After a few weeks, the mice kept in enriched environments were leaner, even when their bored counterparts put in  two to three times as much work on their running wheels. And they were more resistant to becoming obese when fed high-fat diets. 

What kinds of social activities are you involved in? Do you feel like help keep you trim?

Related(ish):

Your most insecure pals may save your life

Four seconds is all it takes for silence to get awkward

Blush, and you'll get away with anything

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Cowlicks even strike vampires! "Twilight" star Kristen Stewart has one at the front of her hairline.

Alfalfa from the "Our Gang" TV serial had a famous one that stuck straight up. So did Dennis the Menace of comic strip fame. Supermodel Claudia Schiffer reportedly has two on her front hairline. "Twilight" star Kristen Stewart has one in front. And in a recent tweet, The Pioneer Woman, Ree Drumond, the blogger turned Food Network TV star wrote, "My cowlick is fired." Channeling her inner-Donald Trump, she perfectly captures how this wayward whorl of hair can drive people crazy.

Cowlicks seem to have a mind of their own and like to go against the flow.

The hair on your head needs to go in three directions -- some needs to go forward, some backwards, and some to the sides.

"In a perfect world, there would be a line so hair would know which way to go," says Dr. Orr Barak, a dermatologist at Tufts Medical Center in Boston. A cowlick is the body's answer to this, by having a centralized location on your scalp -- a crossing point for hair to grow and lie in different directions.

But an unruly cowlick often selects its own direction -- and pops straight up -- or chooses an angle at odds with your preferred style. That's when the frustration and annoyance sets in.

A cowlick's spiral pattern is likely caused because hair gets confused about whether it needs to go forward, backward, or to the side, and some hairs get caught in between creating that characteristic whorl, explains Barak. Cowlicks were supposedly named for the swirling pattern made on hair when a cow licked its calves.

Virtually everybody has a cowlick or two, with the most visible one found at the crown of the head and a second less obvious one, perhaps at the neck or on the front hairline by the part.

They form early in life -- in utero -- and once you have a cowlick, you're stuck with it unless you lose your hair. Both men and women are equally affected by them, although it doesn't seem that way since they are more noticeable in guys because they typically have shorter hair. 

Longer styles often camouflages a cowlick because the weight of the hair covers it up. And it's more obvious in straighter hair compared to curly.

According to Barak, there are some interesting associations between cowlicks and their rotating patterns on your head. He says that noted geneticist Amar Klar has found a connection between handedness and the direction of hair whorls.

In people who are right handed, at least 90% of cowlicks have a clockwise rotation while about 10% go in a counterclockwise direction.

Klar's research has found that people who are not righties are more likely to have a counterclockwise cowlick. In one experiment, he found that 50% of folks who are lefties or ambidextrous have a counterclockwise whorl pattern, suggesting that hand preference and cowlick rotation may develop from a common genetic mechanism.

Interestingly, in a study published in 2004 on nearly 600 men, Klar found that roughly 30% of gay men had a counterclockwise rotation on their scalp hair whorl compared to just 9 percent seen in the population at large.

No matter how your cowlick swirls, most people would be happy to know how to tame it. Although Barak is a doctor and not a hair stylist, he recommends keeping your hair long or going with the grain of the cowlick. Of course, the right cut and styling products can also do the trick.

Readers, what seems to work for your cowlicks?

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Why does the return trip feel shorter than the initial one? It's not necessarily because you're familiar with the route, says a new study.

Getting to a destination usually feels longer than heading back from it. Known as "the return trip effect," the popular wisdom has been that it seems to take less time to go the same distance because a person is now familiar with the route having traveled it before.

But a new study has found that familiarity and predictability might not be the reasons a return trip feels shorter. It suggests a mismatch of expectations is more likely to be one of several possible causes.

"Everyone seemed to think that the return trip effect was caused by recognizing things along the way," says Niels van de Ven, the study's lead author. "However, I also experience it during airplane travel, where I don't recognize things. So I wanted to know why the effect existed."

To find out, his research team first tracked 69 participants on a day-long bus trip. Although each leg took the same amount of time, volunteers reported the initial trip took longer. The more participants believed the outbound route seemed slower than expected, the faster the return bus trip felt -- even though familiar landmarks were seen. 

The research appears in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.

A second study looked at a different form of transportation -- a bike trip. This time, 97 college freshman biked to a forest clearing using two equally distant routes. Two hours later, one-third returned by the same route while the rest headed back on a different route that was the same length.

Although all the routes took 35 minutes to ride, students estimated the outbound journey took 44 minutes and the return leg took 37 minutes. Students who rode two different routes tended to over-estimate the time each trip took compared to those who went out and back the same way. 

Whether by bus or bike, researchers were surprised to find that "people felt the return trip was about 22 percent shorter than the initial trip," says van de Ven, an assistant professor of social psychology at Tilburg University in the Netherlands.

He believes that what happens is people are typically too optimistic about the initial trip, which then takes disappointingly long. So when they return, they're now anticipating it will take a long time. But compared to this expectation, the return trip does not seem as bad.

Even so, there are some instances when the return trip effect doesn't apply. One is when a route becomes very familiar, such as a daily commute, because your expectations of the travel time become more accurate.

A second may be when you're going to a negative place, perhaps the dentist. You may arrive sooner than you'd like making the return home seem slower.

Also, you may not experience this effect on an out-and-back marathon course, when you're more exhausted on the return trip. And you wouldn't get the effect if you hiked the same distance up a mountain and then down it because the terrain changes.

Readers, what's your experience: Do you typically feel like a return trip takes a shorter amount of time? 

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Some of the evidence of a night's sleep are visible when you lift your head off the pillow -- bed head, morning breath, dried-up drool, and eye boogers.

And while the cause of most of these sleep remnants is fairly obvious, the reason behind those sometimes-sticky, sometimes-crusty gobs of crud that can dot the lashes or cling to the corners of the eye is less clear. Why do our peepers churn out this gunk at night and what's in the stuff? For answers to these important questions, Body Odd turned to an eye expert.

"The general consensus is that this debris is the stuff leftover from dried out tears," says Dr. Sherleen Chen, director of the cataract and comprehensive ophthalmology service at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary in Boston.

Tears are made up of water, protein, oils, and a mucous layer known as mucin, which typically coat the surface of the eye to moisten and protect it from viruses and bacteria.

But when your eyes are closed and your eyelids are not blinking, dirt and debris within the eye isn't continually washed over by tears, which would help to dilute them. So at night, dryness causes the stuff in tears to precipitate out, explains Chen. Then the crud collects toward the inside corner of the eye, where tears usually end up.

Eye boogers can also accumulate on the outer corners of the eye or anywhere along the lash.

Throughout her years of medical training and specializing in ophthalmology, Chen says she's yet to come across a technical term for "eye boogers," so she simply refers to it as "mattering." But in everyday conversation, it may go by the name "sleepy sand," "eye goop," "sleep," or "sleep dust."

There's also the question of its consistency -- sometimes "eye boogers" are wet and sticky and other times they're dry and sandy. Does this depend on how long they've sat there or how much sleep you've gotten?

Chen says the texture is a function of a person's tear film. The crud is crumbly in people whose eyes tend to be dry --  their peepers have more solids and not enough liquid.

Folks who have more allergies, tend to have more mucous, which gives eye crud a wetter, gunkier quality to it.

People who wear contacts are prone to forming more "sleepy sand" because the lenses

irritate the surface of the eye, so it produces more mucous to protect itself. People who have allergies affecting their eyes or who rub them a lot, such as small children, may also have more eye crud.

If the indoor air is dry, you may also wake up with more "sleep dust." Although not an attractive look first thing in the morning, the stuff is basically harmless.

Chen says the best way to clear eye boogers is to lay a hot washcloth on the lid and lashes for a minute or two, then gently clean them off.

What do you call "eye boogers?" Ever had a particularly bad case of 'em?

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Heard the one about the Chinese man with an eel in his bladder? It’s the story zooming around the Internet today and while it seems incredible, and while we can’t confirm that it’s true, it is possible even if highly unlikely.

According to the story, a man went to a spa in China where he dunked himself in a tank of fish. The object of this seemingly bizarre exercise was to allow the fish to nip away at dead skin, a kind of fishy loofah. Pricey spas in the West have actually adopted this practice for use on clients’ feet.

Anyway, all was well until he felt a sharp pain in his penis. Naturally he rushed himself to a clinic where an eel was extracted from his bladder.

While the truth of this story cannot be confirmed, there are medical reports of critters crawling or swimming up the human urethra and finding their way into the bladder.

In India, for instance, doctors found a leech that had wriggled its way into the bladder of a 16-year-old boy. Apparently the leech entered while the boy was partially submerged in a rice paddy. After suffering with unexplained fevers and the feeling of urgently having to urinate for two months, the boy was taken to the doctors who eventually had to operate to remove the creature.

The most famous stories of a fish swimming into a human come from the Amazon with the famous (or infamous) candiru, a class of tiny parasitic catfish. Normally these fish attach themselves to the gills of other fish, or dead or dying creatures, and grab a quick meal, but supposedly, goes the legend, the fish are also attracted to a urine stream. Pee in the water, and they’ll follow the stream into your urethra. (I heard this tale from British scientists – ichthyologists -- I followed into the Brazilian Amazon for a story and when they told me this tale, as I was floating in a river and peeing, they laughed their heads off.) Actual cases are almost impossible to find, however, with most reports coming second or third hand. 

In 2007 Indian doctors reported a case of a small fish in the bladder of a 14-year-old boy. The boy claimed he was cleaning a fish tank and decided use the bathroom while still holding one of his fish. Somehow, the fish escaped his hand and wound up in his penis.

Doctors decided the boy was making it up as a cover for auto-erotic stimulation, the cause of most lost objects in human urethras, including, perhaps, candirus.     

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WARNING: Reading the following post will make you itchy.

There probably aren’t any tiny ants feeling their way over your limbs and across the back of your neck right now. But wouldn’t you feel better scratching anyway?

Why is it that seeing, discussing, or even just thinking about creepy crawlers makes us feel itchy all over? It turns out the experts aren’t sure.

University of Pennsylvania neuroscientist Dr. Wenqin Luo places the blame for phantom itch on memories of an itchy past. Thinking about bugs, she explains, might prompt memories of previous experiences – “itchy associations.”

Why, then, doesn’t thinking about injuries prompt our bodies to feel phantom pains?

Dr. Luo offers the following theory: “Compared with itch, pain is a serious protective mechanism that triggers avoidance behavior. Thus, the threshold to trigger a pain sensation may be much higher than that of itch.”

Basically: If our brains registered pain (a danger) as easily as they do itch (an annoyance), our bodies would be sent into constant states of false alarm.

Dr. Glenn J. Giesler, Jr., a neuroscientist from the University of Minnesota offers a slightly different guess as to the phantom itch culprit: Maybe our skin always experiences the tiny sensations capable of causing light itch – but we only notice them when we’ve already got itch (or its creepy crawly causes) on the brain.

“It is amazing to me how easy it is to induce itch in others,” says Giesler. “Whenever I give a talk on the topic, I am amused at the percentage of people in the audience who start scratching.”

“Perhaps,” he guesses, “the threshold for sensation of itch is lowered by thinking about it.”

Dr. Gil Yosipovitch is a professor of dermatology at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in North Carolina. He’s also the founder of the International Forum for the Study of Itch.

He explains that a related phantom itching phenomenon, “contagious itch” (that is: itch felt not because of a physical stimulus, but because we see another person scratching), is a behavioral response similar to contagious yawning. Both are our bodies’ way of subconsciously expressing empathy and compassion for our fellow humans.

In fact, Yosipovitch says, sympathy scratching spans species – primates exhibit it too.

So, after all that, are we any closer to solving the mystery of the phantom itch?

Please. We’ve barely scratched the surface.

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She must be the early-to-bed, early-to-rise type.

The early bird might catch the worm because it sleeps better than the night owl, not just because it awakens earlier.

At least that appears to be the case for humans, according to a new study.

Researchers found that night owls -- “evening-type individuals”-- are significantly more likely to suffer from poor sleep quality, daytime sleepiness and disturbing nightmares than early birds -- “morning-type individuals”-- or folks whose bedtime falls somewhere between the two.

“Evening-type people have more nightmares because of their sleep patterns,” says lead author Yavuz Selvi, assistant professor of psychiatry at Yuzuncu Yil University in Van, Turkey, whose paper was published online Aug. 25 in the journal Sleep and Biological Rhythms.

Staying awake late at night and waking up late in the morning disrupts the relationship between the body’s internal clock and its ability to maintain normal sleep patterns, Selvi explains. In other words, it really screws up your circadian rhythm.

Nightmares usually awaken you, so if they occur frequently, you might begin to fear falling asleep, cutting into your snooze time even more. Epidemiological studies have found that nearly nine in 10 adults reporting having at least one nightmare in the previous year, Selvi says, with 2 percent to 6 percent reporting weekly nightmares.

He and his coauthors studied 264 medical students, ages 17 to 26 years old, who weren’t yet dealing with crazy hours in their training. The researchers administered a battery of tests to assess whether the students were morning or evening types, the quality of their sleep and how frequently they experienced nightmares and how disturbing they were.

The “Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire” taken by the students asked what time they’d go to bed and get up if they were entirely free to plan their day and evening. Other questions touched on such matters as what time they’d prefer to hit the gym and how wide-awake they feel when they get up in the morning.

 The test revealed that 59 of the students were evening types, 67 morning types and the rest fell in the “intermediate” range. Men were more likely than women to be night owls; vice versa when it came to early birds.

As a self-described night owl, I wasn’t thrilled to learn from Selvi that the consequences of my sleep habits could go way beyond my morning sluggishness and frequent urge to nap.

“A possible relationship has emerged between eveningness and certain mental disorders, including substance abuse, bulimia, sleep disorders, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, suicidality and mood disorders,” he told me.

 One reason night owls tend to get stressed out, Selvi says, is because it’s tough to hold a job or attend classes if your brain doesn’t kick in until noon or so.

 Yikes. How about you? Are you a night owl, an early bird or something in between? Would you like to change your sleep habits, or does your pattern work for you?

Related:

• Sleep-deprived Americans nap in some weird places 
• Why do we drool in our sleep?
• Hammock naps are the best, research proves

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Although the United States is an international melting pot and the average American makes a dozen moves in a lifetime, regional accents are alive and well. In fact, regional accents are becoming stronger and more different from each other, says William Labov, a professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, although it's not entirely clear why.

One possibility, says Labov, is that these original sound differences are being exaggerated, like trains moving in opposite directions on two railroad tracks. "The other is that dialect differences have become associated with political differences, so that the Blue States/Red States division comes close to the boundary between the Northern and Midland dialects," he explains.  

Labov says that our dialects change little after age 18 and we tend to retain the accent we grew up with. Young people first match the dialects of their parents, but then they often change to match their peers. These changes, though, are unconscious, he explains.

Linguists say there are about ten major regional accents in the US, such as New England, mid-Atlantic, Inland North, for the cities surrounding the Great Lakes, and the West, the country's newest dialect. While some people sound more regional than others, everyone has an accent to some degree.

Some people are simply better at repressing some aspects of their local speech. The way they talk -- their pronounciation of words (some "r-less" dialects on the East Coast may say "cah" rather than "car") or choice of words ("pail" in the North versus "bucket" in the Midwest) -- adds a local flavor and diversity to speech. But it can also contribute to misunderstandings and confusion (hearing the word "buses" as "bosses").

While some people keep their regional speech styles because it's the hallmark of who they are and a tie to their communities, certain accents may have negative stereotypes or societal prejudices associated with them, says Amee Shah, director of the Research Laboratory in Speech Acoustics & Perception at Cleveland State University in Cleveland, Ohio.

Although there's nothing wrong with a regional accent, some people become ashamed or self-conscious of them for either personal or professional reasons and they want to tone them down.

Shah, who has training as a speech-language pathologist and has designed an assessment tool to measure the severity of accented speech, offers "accent modification therapy" to clients. Shah says a strong accent might take six to eight months to modify, a moderate one three or four months, and a light accent a month or two.

"My goal is to help a client modify an accent, not to correct or reduce it," says Shah.

Have you ever misunderstood a regional accent (with humorous results)? Or do you lapse into regional speech patterns when home?

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A smile is a "social magnet." We're drawn to this one, for sure.

A smile is much more than a cheerful expression, writes author Marianne LaFrance in her new book "Lip Service." The smile, she suggests, "is a social magnet, a trustworthiness meter, a device for diffusing anger, a patch for frayed interpersonal bonds, and a lubricant for keeping social ties in good working order."

Perhaps that's why turning the corners of the mouth upward is "the most instantly recognized facial expression." Whether discussing lop-sided grins, wolfish smirks, sinister sneers, or radiantly beaming, LaFrance, a Yale University psychology professor, delves into the science behind the smile and explains its affect on politics, work, relationships, and culture.

Although a smile often signals happiness, it can also convey a range of emotions from amusement and embarrassment to contempt and deception.

There are even gender differences in grinning: Studies suggest that on average girls and women smile more than boys and men.

One reason may be biological, says LaFrance. Researchers have found the primary smile muscle, known as the zygomaticus major, is thicker in gals than in guys. It's unclear whether women are born with a more well-endowed smile muscle so they use it earlier and often, or if the muscle bulks up from moving more.

A second explanation could be occupational: Women hold more service-industry jobs, as nurses, teachers, flight attendants, and wait staff, in which they may be required to do more smiling. (But there's some evidence that males in these professions smile the same amount as females. Perhaps both sexes recognize that smiling generates larger tips!)

A third reason is that girls are born with a more positive orientation to socialization. "It often falls to women to arrange the socal calendar, to reduce conflicts, and to care about other people's emotional lives," points out LaFrance.

Although smiles typically cast a positive glow, not all of them can be taken at face value: Smiles have a bright side -- a parent's delight at seeing baby's first smile -- and a dark side -- a two-faced smile in which the outward pleasantness camouflages a person's inner feelings.

There are other downsides to lifting your lips: "A smile can be a great mask," says LaFrance, and we can be easily taken in by one. Conartists often use a smile to get in our good graces and psychotics use it to seem charming. "Smiling is a method we use to get our way when other direct approaches don't work," LaFrance suggests.

Smiles can even be newsworthy: As surgeons perform more full facial transplants, one of their measures of success is the ability of the recipient to smile, which restores a vital part of human connection and communication.

Here are other interesting facts from the pages of Lip Service:

• Social psychologists regard a smile as the default facial expression for females and impassivity as the usual facial display for males.

• British smiles typically display both the upper and lower teeth, while Americans primarily expose their upper teeth.

• One study found that fake or deliberate smiles are on average 10 times bigger than geniune smiles, probably because fake ones are meant to be seen.

• In the US, the typical emoticon for happy is :-) and :-( for sad since Americans tend to focus on the lower part of the face to express emotion. But the Japanese pay attention to the eyes. So (^_^) means happy and (;_;) stands for sad or crying.

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Everyone knows not to get between a bear and her cubs, but if mama bears used bottles maybe they’d be a little more mellow.

A study published in the September issue of Psychological Science found that nursing mothers are roughly twice as aggressive as bottle-feeding moms and women without children when confronted by a threat.

“Maternal defense does not involve nursing mothers going out and looking for bar fights, but when they have a helpless baby, they’re more likely to defend themselves when the fight comes to them,” said Jennifer Hahn-Holbrook, a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA’s Department of Health Psychology.

Similar aggression has been observed in lactating monkeys, rats, mice, deer, hamsters, lions, prairie voles and sheep. When reading a book about how vicious predators become loveable moms, Hahn-Holbrook noticed that many of our preconceptions about mothers being quite docile were actually wrong for other species. She wondered if the same thing would hold true for humans.

She and other researchers recruited 18 nursing mothers, 17 women who were feeding formula to their babies and 20 non-mothers. The women were told they’d be playing a competitive computer game against a research assistant posing as a rude and aggressive study participant. When the women “won” a round of the game, each got to choose how long and loudly they would blast their opponent with an annoying sound.

After accounting for other differences, the researchers found that breast-feeding mothers delivered sound blasts to the rude opponent that were more than twice as loud and long as those administered by non-mothers and nearly twice as loud and long as those by bottle-feeding mothers.

The study suggests that lactation—and not just motherhood in general—kicks maternal protection into overdrive. During the confrontations, for instance, nursing moms exhibited lower blood pressure levels than the other two groups of women. That can actually dampen fear and stress responses and give them a little extra moxie to defend their offspring, the study concluded.

“We interpreted this as breastfeeding being nature’s way of helping moms calmly but effectively deal with potential threats,” Hahn-Holbrook said. But in a day and age when we’re not exactly likely to be chased by saber-toothed tigers, does the aggression factor add any benefit?

“That’s completely beyond the scope of our study, but I’m sure there are plenty of contexts in which moms could use a little extra help in that regard,” she said. “This wouldn’t just come up in terms of predators but might also encourage a mom to run back into a burning building and save an infant. I definitely think that moms generally are inspired to do that, but I wonder if lactation would just give moms a little extra push and a little extra courage.”

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