5-Hour Energy

Beware, energy shot devotees.

For many of us who march in the sleep-starved army that is the American workforce, it’s as critical to our survival as air, food, and bad reality TV: Caffeine. Beloved, energizing, career-preserving caffeine.

But here's a word of caution to you true overachievers: the slightly sweaty/foot-tapping/takenobreathsbetweenwords caffeine junkies. For you, coffee was the gateway drug -- to energy drinks and, later, to energy shots. Too much of a good thing may help shrink that massive work stack before the 5 p.m. whistle, but it also may kill you -- or just land you in the hospital.  

Case in point: The 22-year-old woman who arrived at an emergency room complaining of upper abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting and a slight fever, according to the June 22 edition of the Journal of Medical Case Reports. A scan of her midsection was normal. She was sent home. She returned, however, even sicker, and bathed in a yellowish tint -- jaundice -- meaning her liver was failing. Doctors diagnosed the woman with acute hepatitis. 

The staff checked her for viruses, alcohol and drugs. Nothing. Then the woman revealed a key part of her diet over the previous two weeks: 10 bottles of 5-Hour Energy per day.   

Math time, lady: If the product indeed provides a five-hour boost, that two-week binge totaled 700 hours of “energy.” There are only 336 hours in two weeks. Must have been one hell of a deadline.

Doctors believe the woman overdosed on one ingredient: niacin -- also called vitamin B3 -- which can damage the liver when ingested in high amounts. She was successfully treated and discharged after her symptoms vanished.

Makers of 5-Hour Energy print recommendations on their labels: “Do not exceed two bottles” per day. The shots “contain caffeine comparable to a cup of … coffee,” they add. The drink’s sales pitch: “Zero sugar. Four calories. No waiting. No hassles.”

“Energy drinks are propped up by all sorts of sexy marketing, but they’re not as magical as the ads would have you think,” says TODAY nutritionist Joy Bauer. “The ‘lift’ they give you comes from caffeine -- nothing fancy there. … The high doses of B vitamins and amino acids they dump in are purely for glitz and glam -- they don’t actually help you instantly perk up.

“Energy shots offer a very concentrated dose of caffeine, which makes it difficult to stop when you feel like you’ve had too much, unlike if you’re slowly sipping a cup of coffee.”

But even coffee has its human limits, according to the website energyfiend.com -- which offers a macabre calculator to reveal the fatal dose of nearly any caffeinated beverage, based on body weight.

A 130-pound person, for example, would “be pushing up daises” after guzzling 151.67 cans of Mountain Dew, the site estimates. And for a 200-pound person, the site warns, “Gulp down 143.68 cups of Starbucks Tall Cafe Mocha and you’re history.”

In that case, hold the whipped cream.

Bill Briggs is a frequent contributor to msnbc.com and author of “The Third Miracle.”

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Few things feel better than stepping out with a fat paycheck in your pocket. But a new study in the Journal of Public Economics proves that it just might be anything but good. In fact, it can be downright deadly.

University of Notre Dame economist William Evans studied four major demographic groups—seniors on Social Security, military personnel, families receiving tax rebate checks and recipients of Alaska’s Permanent Fund dividends—and found that mortality rates significantly increased the week after checks showed up in their mailboxes. The three causes of death with the largest increases were substance abuse, external causes (all kinds of accidents) and heart attacks.

“After getting paid, people are just more active -- they go out to dinner, head to the store, drive more, go to bars, etc.,” said Evans. “Some of this behavior is inherently risky, like drinking too much or driving drunk. Some of the activity will naturally increase risk -- if you drive more, the risk of being in a car accident has increased.” 

“Some of the links are not so obvious,” he continued. “For example, more activity may spur on a heart attack. And some of it is increased risk taking, as with substance abuse.”

So, do you need to be worried when payday rolls around? According to Evans, probably.

“What impressed us the most was the fact that the effect was so broad-based -- we found increases in mortality after payday for senior citizens, young people and tax payers,” he said. However, younger people, in particular, tend to have larger increases in payday mortality, as evidenced by the study’s results for the military group. You may not need to be worried, but you might want to be more careful.

Evans’ final suggestion for ensuring that payday doesn’t lead to mayday? “Stay off the roads."

Ever done something totally misguided on payday? Tell us about it.

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It’s the stuff of nightmares and even a “Twilight Zone” episode: You fall asleep -- and something crawls into your ear and does nefarious things.

Just like what happened to 12-year-old Wade Schlote of Parker, Colo.

As the boy was sleeping Sunday night, a moth crawled into his ear, reported NBC station KUSA-TV.

When he woke, he told KUSA, “I had a moment of panicking. I was in pain. It was hurting so much I was screaming and crying.

Itchy ears: Could it be an allergy ... or a bug?

After washing it out at home didn’t work, he and his mother, Kathy, headed to the emergency room. Doctors there tried, and failed, to flush it out before resorting to tweezers to extract the winged creepy-crawly -- who was surprisingly unfazed.

“When they did it was still alive and started flying,” he said.

They captured it, put it in a jar and gave it to Wade -- a perfect visual aid to go with his new bug-in-the-ear bragging rights.

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Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Yersinia pestis, the bacteria responsible for the plague, caused the death of a renowned vaccine researcher in 2009, raising fears about laboratory-acquired infections. Though rare, they can be devastating, prompting health experts to remind lab workers of the importance of following protocols.

The death of a University of Chicago scientist who contracted plague while working in his lab is a reminder of the rare –- but real –- risks to researchers who work with potentially dangerous bugs, a new review of the fatality  finds.

An estimated 500,000 workers are employed in laboratories in the United States, where they’re routinely exposed to a range of bacteria, viruses, molds and other infectious agents. No one knows how many get sick each year, mostly because there’s no systematic reporting of laboratory-acquired infections, health experts say.

In the last several months, however, federal health officials have investigated an outbreak of salmonella infections tied to dozens of microbiology students and workers across the country -- and, in several cases, their children and other family members -- who fell ill from a lab bug likely spread by contaminated cell phones, car keys and other personal items.

And now the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine updates the case of Malcolm Casadaban, 60, a professor of molecular genetics, who died in September 2009 after falling ill following experiments using a weakened strain of the Yersinia pestis bacteria that cause plague.  It was the first time a lab worker had contracted plague in 50 years and the first reported death tied to a lab, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In both situations, investigators said that said lack of attention to lab protocols might have contributed to the illnesses. Failure to consistently wear gloves when required, or bringing personal items like car keys and MP3 players into the lab environment raises the risk that infections move beyond the petri dish -- and into people.

University of Chicago Medical Center

Malcolm Casadaban, a University of Chicago professor, died in 2009 after working with the plague bacteria in his lab.

“It’s not the lab strain, it’s bad practice,” said Dr. Karen Frank, an assistant professor in the department of pathology at the University of Chicago and author of the latest research letter.

In Casadaban’s case, investigators also concluded that the vaccine researcher had a genetic condition that made him particularly susceptible to infection from the bacteria. He suffered from undetected hemochromatosis, a condition in which too much iron builds up in the body. The plague bacteria had been engineered to be safer by removing some of the germ's iron, but the scientist’s condition added it back.

“He had extra iron, which allowed this organism to make him sicker,” said Frank. It’s not clear how Casadaban was infected, but investigators suspect it was transmitted through contact with skin or mucous membranes.

Casadaban wasn’t identified by name in the NEJM letter or in a previous CDC report, but news accounts at the time and a university obituary indicate he was the respected lab worker who died after an infection.

Such incidents raise public fears of lab bugs escaping to infect the general population, but those fears are unwarranted, Frank said.

“There’s less risk coming from lab workers than from all the people visiting patients in the hospital,” Frank said.

In both of the cases in question, the lab strains of bacteria were found to be as safe as expected, she said. She characterized the level of lab workers’ personal worry about infections as “almost none.”

“As long as you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing, you should be fine,” she said.

Follow msnbc.com health reporter on Twitter @jonel_aleccia.

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Your coffee habit may be helping to protect your brain.

For years we’ve been told that caffeinated coffee was bad for us. It’s unhealthy and addictive, doctors warned. But as vindication for all who stuck by their energizing elixir, a new study shows that guzzling caffeinated coffee may actually be good for our brains. In fact, it may help keep Alzheimer’s at bay.

The study, which was published early online in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, was in mice whose DNA had been tweaked to contain a human Alzheimer’s gene. Just like humans with familial Alzheimer’s, these mice become increasingly forgetful as they age.

Amazingly, the equivalent of four to five cups of caffeinated coffee every few days led to much improved memories in the Alzheimer’s mice, says study co-author Gary Arendash, a scientist at the Florida Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center in Tampa.

Earlier research by Arendash and his colleagues showed that caffeine could at least partially block the production of beta amyloid, the sticky protein that clogs the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. They also found that a substance called granulocyte-colony stimulating factor, or GCSF, sparked the production of new axons, the communication cables that link nerve cells together, as well as new nerve cells themselves.

What’s really interesting is that caffeinated coffee -- but not decaf -- boosted the production of GCSF. 

For the new study, Arendash and his colleagues “treated” healthy mice and Alzheimer’s mice with either caffeinated or decaffeinated coffee. Then the researchers ran a test to see if either beverage led to better memories.

The test they used mimics one that is given to humans to diagnose Alzheimer’s. In that test, people are given a bag of objects to look through (we’ll call that Bag A). And then they’re shown another bag of objects (Bag B). Later on, they’re asked to remember what was in Bag A.

Studies have shown that people with Alzheimer’s have a tough time remembering what was in Bag A because the distraction of looking through the objects from Bag B gets in the way of storing the contents of A in their long term memories. That’s generally not a problem for people with healthy brains.

The two part mouse test involved water mazes. The mice has to find -- and remember -- the location of a submerged platform in a tub of water that is deep enough that they need to swim till they find the platform.

After they find the platform in one tub, they’re moved to another tub where they have to find yet another platform. Mice with Alzheimer’s generally have a tough time remembering the location of the first platform when they’re placed in the original tub. But in Arendash’s study, Alzheimer’s mice that got caffeinated coffee had memories that were just as good as those of normal mice.

Lest you dismiss this study because it’s just in rodents, Arendash says he’s got new data in humans. That data is still being analyzed, he says, but so far it looks like caffeinated coffee has the same impact in people as it does in mice.

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Wash your dishes with fungi!

You probably consider your dishwasher a time-saving appliance that makes life easier by doing a dreaded household chore.

But many of the same qualities that make the dishwasher an indispensable cleaning machine -- the moisture, heat, food scraps -- also make it a perfect breeding grounds for fungi, including some that could be harmful to your health.

Researchers collected microbial samples from 189 dishwashers in 18 countries, including Australia, South Africa, China and Slovenia. They were stunned to discover that 62 percent of the dishwashers tested positive for fungi. And 56 percent had a fungal species known as Exophiala, a kind of black yeast that looks like black slime.

"We were surprised to find some fungi that are extremely rare in nature but had really high numbers in dishwashers," says Nina Gunde-Cimerman, a professor of microbiology at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia.

The study, published in the journal Fungal Biology, focused on the fungi found by swabbing the rubber seals of dishwasher doors, an area these organisms can degrade and hide within.

Two kinds of Exophiala species were seen and even the microbiologists were amazed they withstood the high heat, detergents, and salt concentrations found inside dishwashers. Cimerman suspects the fungi arrived via tap water, and the hardness of water also seems to play a role.

Exophiala is known to colonize on the lungs of patients with cystic fibrosis. It may sometimes cause fatal infections in healthy people, too.

Researchers warn that "the invasion of black yeasts into our homes represent a potential health risk." Their presence on plates or forks, for example, may spread infections even though none were reported in the sampled households. Only further study can determine if these dishwasher fungi can be dangerous to human health.

Until then, clean any disgusting black slime off the seal of your dishwasher.

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Look at the scary dentist image! Now you'll remember everything in this post.

If you want to remember new information, looking at photographs that stir up negative emotions may do the trick, suggests new research from Psychological Science.

Yeah, we know that sounds counterintuitive -- but it appears to work.

When study participants viewed color images of a dead cat, a pointed gun, or a person getting a dental exam -- pictures that evoke negative feelings -- it actually improved their recall of recently learned information.

In this case, 40 college students were asked to bone up on 100 vocabulary words in Swahili along with their English translations. (Example: "Mashua" means "boat" in Swahili, if you're going to east Africa.)

Volunteers were then tested on the vocabulary pairs, 10 words at a time. After they gave a correct answer, participants were shown a negatively arousing photo, a neutral image, such as a fork or shoelaces, or a blank screen. If they gave the wrong response, they saw a blank screen or neutral image.

Later they had a final exam on all 100 words.

Recall was much better for words after viewing the emotional image than it was following the neutral ones or a blank screen.

"The negative picture might have enhanced later recall because emotion, in particular negative emotion, can enhance memory," says Bridgid Finn, PhD, a postdoctoral research associate in psychology at Washington University in St. Louis. Researchers suspect this occurs because the emotional centers of the brain are closely linked to the ones involved in memory.

What about positively arousing images -- wouldn't they put you in a better frame of mind to learn Swahili? Finn says they tried using photos that were exciting, such as a ski jumper or sky diver, or even some that were sexually arousing in follow-up studies.

"We haven't found that retention is better using the positive pictures compared to the neutral pictures," explains Finn, the study's lead author.

But she is quick to admit that showing a classroom of students a picture of an awful dental exam or a cat that has been run over, as they did to study participants, probably isn't the best way for kids to learn.

And that wasn't the point of this research, either. The scientists had wanted to find out if after you retrieve something from memory, you continue to process the information. And they discovered that the time period right after you retrieve new information from your memory is key for strengthening its retention.

Instead of looking at dead cat photos, Finn offers this advice, "If you want to maximize retention, test yourself. Restudying is not going to get you as far."

She says taking practice tests is a great way to prepare. And if you get the wrong answer, finding out the correct response will benefit your learning.

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Texas Rangers outfielder Josh Hamilton blames his blue eyes on some misses at bat.

Texas Rangers slugger Josh Hamilton is blaming his lousy daytime batting average -- less than a third of his nighttime average this season -- on his baby blues.

He claims his blue eyes are super-sensitive to sunlight.

I’m not sure I buy it.  After all, Hall of Famer Cal Ripken, Jr., he of the palest of pale blue eyes (be still, my heart) actually hit slightly better during the day over his career.

Dr. Calvin G. Eshbaugh, whose 13-year-old son worships Josh Hamilton, by the way, thinks there may be something to the claim.

“The deal is, if someone has less pigment in their iris, they could potentially be more sensitive to sunlight,” although not every blue-eyed person would be equally affected, says Eshbaugh, vice-chair of clinical affairs in ophthalmology at Scott & White Hospital in Temple, Texas. There are other factors involved in light sensitivity besides eye color, he says, such as the density of rods and cones — the light receptors — in your retina.

Matt Slocum / AP

Cal Ripken Jr. was one of the best ballplayers in history -- and had swoon-worthy pale blue eyes.

Maybe Ripken wasn’t as sensitive and benefited from what Eshbaugh calls the pinhole effect (remember making pinhole cameras in grade school?). Everybody sees better when they squint. Well, when you stand in bright sunlight, your pupil shrinks down to a pinhole.

We do have some suggestions that might help improve Hamilton’s performance on sunny days: Heard of sunglasses? What about that black stuff athletes like to smear under their eyes to reduce glare? A wide-brimmed batting helmet, perhaps?

Or maybe Hamilton could try to get traded to the Seattle Mariners.

Do you have blue eyes? Are they extra-sensitive to sunlight? Tell us your blues in the comments area.

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In the absence of prominent “jazz hands,” or obvious rainbow flag toting, many of us have lousy "gaydar." That’s likely because most people don’t really spend much time caring about who’s gay and who’s straight. (And the fact that gay people don't actually walk around with jazz hands.) 

Fertile women, on the other hand, or even women who are simply thinking about sex, do care, though they may not know it. In fact, ovulating women may have more accurate gaydar than the rest of us, according to a study in the journal Psychological Science.

When Nicholas Rule of the University of Toronto and colleagues showed a group of heterosexual college women 80 photos of men, 40 of whom were straight and 40 of whom were gay, women who were nearing the most fertile time of their monthly periods were much better at guessing which men were gay. There was no motion or sound. The photos did not differ in expression, attractiveness or facial adornments like the 'stache on the Village People biker.

As Rule explains, past experiments have shown straight men and women all have a bias toward judging men in photos as straight. “This makes sense since straight men outnumber gay men as much as 9:1,” he said. But when women are fertile, they can overcome this bias.

Why? Is it because a man’s sexual orientation becomes more relevant at times when women can get pregnant so they don’t pick a man who will be, reproductively speaking, unavailable? Or is there something about fertility that makes women more attentive to facial cues they miss at other times of the month?

To answer that question, Rule showed straight women 100 photos of lesbians and 100 photos of straight women. While accuracy was greater than random chance, it didn’t matter if the women were fertile or not.

Next, Rule had women read a story of a romantic encounter to induce “mating-related” thoughts (science speak for sex). The women who read the story were much more accurate at guessing a man’s sexual orientation regardless of whether she was fertile or not.

“What we do know is that a mix of women at any given point in their cycles did better when primed to think about mating than when not primed to think about mating,” Rule said.

So it seems male sexual orientation is a more relevant matter for women when they are fertile, and because it’s more relevant they pay attention. I asked Rule if heterosexual women are born with this ability or they learn it. He replied that he thinks he has an answer, but he has just finished a study addressing the issue and since it has not yet been published, he doesn’t want to give it away.

But whether learned or inborn, when female thoughts -- even unconscious thoughts -- turn to mating, women are able to turn down distractions and turn up the cues that say, “Hey there, baby daddy!”

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Women may be saying more with their mouths than you realize.

Here's a fun fact to share at parties this weekend: The shape of a woman's lips may predict the likelihood of her having an orgasm. (Seriously.)

Stuart Brody, a psychology professor at the University of the West of Scotland, is famous among researchers of sexual behavior for some of his studies, like ones linking a woman’s finger sensitivity to partnered sex behavior, and most especially a 2008 doozy that linked a woman’s gait -- “fluid, graceful,” “free of blocked or distorted pelvic rotation” -- with a greater chance of having so-called vaginal orgasms. In other words, he said, you can tell a lot about a woman by the way she walks. 

Now, in a paper published last week by the Journal of Sexual Medicine, and called “Vaginal Orgasm Is More Prevalent Among Women with a Prominent Tubercle of the Upper Lip,” Brody has come out with another marker for female orgasm; the little spot just at the midline of the upper lip. Called the tubercle, it poofs out a little more in some people than in others. (Brody stresses he’s not referring to puffy Angelina Jolie lips, just to that one tiny spot.)

According to the results of an online survey featuring 258 mainly Scottish women with a mean age of 27 years, having a prominent tubercle means a woman has a greater chance of ever having had a vaginal orgasm.

If you think that sounds kooky, you may be onto something. There are a couple of controversies to consider. First, not all scientists believe that there is any real difference between a “clitoral” orgasm and a “vaginal” orgasm (mainly because the little man in the boat is really just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak, that extends into the vaginal wall). In Brody’s research, tubercle size did not predict orgasm by clitoral stimulation.

Second, there could be confounding factors. When I asked if it was possible the women with the prominent tubercles may have been more attractive and so had more opportunities for sex and attracted better lovers, Brody replied that “I am not aware of research linking women’s attractiveness to their likelihood of vaginal orgasm. That could be a future study.”  There is, however, “research that some male attributes are associated with likelihood of vaginal orgasm.”

Third, the women themselves, rather than an independent party, judged their own tubercle characteristics based on eyeballing their own lips.

Still, Brody may really be on to something, not only with this study, but with his gait research and what seems to be an ongoing hunt for markers that signify sexual response.

As he speculates in the paper, “anatomic study has indicated that by week 17, the human fetus may have already developed the tubercle of the lip.” While he could find no research relating the tubercle to sexual response, “we did locate evidence of an embryonic neural process that organizes midline cranial features, which could plausibly relate morphology to behavior in other contexts.”

In other words, it is probably not the lip feature itself that makes the difference (if any difference really exists), it may be that the same developmental forces that shape a fetus’ tubercle, also affects neural circuits. “It is possible,” Brody writes, “that a flatter or absent tubercle might have something in common with the at times subtle lip abnormalities associated with subtle neuropsychologic abnormalities” and these subtle differences may, in turn, affect vaginal orgasm.

It is true that prenatal events dramatically shape our future sexual lives. Perhaps the shape of our lips are one telltale sign.

Related:

• Your walk may reveal more than you think
  

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Be careful how hard you laugh at some of this summer’s blockbuster comedies. "Bridesmaids," "Horrible Bosses" or "The Hangover" sequel could just be the death of you.

“Years ago, I went to see 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' with a friend and I thought I was going to die laughing,” says Jim Dailakis, a 41-year-old comedian from Queens, N.Y. “We had this brutal karate instructor who looked just like this little golden head that Harrison Ford holds up at one point. I saw that head and started howling like a girl. And then I couldn’t catch my breath and had to think of something else so I wouldn’t pass out.”

Dailakis, who says he’s usually goaded into uncontrollable laughing fits by his buddies, says he’s actually blacked out laughing over the years.

“The first time it happened, I thought I was going to die,” he says. “I was on my knees laughing, and then suddenly I couldn’t breathe. It was scary and freaky but I couldn’t stop laughing. And then I began to weep uncontrollably and I thought that was so hilarious, I went into another manic fit of laughter. My friend was laughing so hard, he had to leave the room.”

After that, Dailakis saw stars -- then passed out.

“The next thing I knew, I was lying down and looking up,” he says. “And I could still hear my friend laughing in the next room.”

According to Dr. Martin Samuels, professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School, blacking out while laughing may be related to over-breathing, and is probably not too dangerous.

“This is most likely benign and unlikely that it would lead to death,” he says.

But that doesn’t mean death doesn’t sometimes wear a smile. In the third century B.C., the Greek philosopher Chrysippus was said to have died laughing after getting his donkey drunk on wine. More recently, a Danish audiologist died laughing in 1989 while watching "A Fish Called Wanda." (It's also the subject of an old Monty Python sketch, in which a writer pens the "funniest joke in the world" -- and immediately dies.)

“Happy news is just as dangerous as sad news with regard to the risk of sudden death,” he says. “I have cases of people who died after hitting holes in one, after bowling perfect 300 games and upon hearing the words ‘Not Guilty.’ Death during sexual activity is also well known. Ecstasy, happiness and good news are definitely risky.”

Why would good news or happy circumstances put us at risk?  It’s all about that old fight-or-flight response, he says.

“Extreme excitement, whether that be sadness or happiness activates the part of the brain that’s responsible for the flight or fight response to threats in the wild,” he says. “This releases a natural chemical -- adrenaline -- which in large animals can be toxic to various organs, in particular the heart.”

As a result, extremely strong emotional states -- whether positive or negative -- can be harmful to the heart, on rare occasions causing an abnormal rhythm which can be lethal.

Dailakis says his laughter blackouts used to bother him, but now that he knows what to expect, he’s not worried.

“Afterward, I feel exhausted but so alive,” he says. “I wouldn’t change it for the world. Why should I go to a doctor? It’s obviously a natural thing. It would be like telling the doctor, ‘I get turned on really easily. Can you stop that?’”

When's the last time you laughed so hard you couldn't catch your breath? What happened? Leave a comment telling us about it.

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Ahhh.

Ever notice that you sleep like a baby on a hammock? Maybe it's just the slow, soothing rocking motion that reminds grown-ups of being in a parent's arms until their little eyelids finally close.

Inspired by that concept, some Swiss scientists decided to examine the idea of rocking a person to sleep. Researchers wondered whether the see-sawing movement would make adults drift off sooner and how it affected sleep quality.

So they developed an "experimental hammock" -- a custom-made bed that gently swayed from side to side. They asked 12 participants, all of them men ages 22 to 38, who were all good sleepers, to take a 45-minute afternoon nap in this cradle for grown-ups.

They monitored the volunteers' brain waves throughout the nap and compared the results to having these same participants nap in the same bed without any rocking motion. The research appears in the June 21 issue of Current Biology.

"We observed a faster transition to sleep in each and every participant in the swinging condition," says Sophie Schwartz, a neuroscientist at the Sleep and Cognition Neuroimaging Lab at the University of Geneva in Switzerland and the study's lead author.

"Not only does rocking make us fall asleep more quickly, but it also makes people sleep more deeply throughout the nap," she explains.

Compared to nodding off in a stationary bed, those napping in a swinging one had a longer duration of N2 sleep, a type of non-rapid eye movement sleep that makes up about half a night's shuteye. Scientists also observed a dramatic boost in brain-wave patterns seen in deep sleep. 

"Motion has specific effects on the brain, and this is precisely what our study shows," says Schwartz. Although researchers expected that rocking would make volunteers conk out sooner, they were surprised it changed the quality of sleep and in such a sustained manner.

Now that they've seen how rocking affects a short nap in healthy adults, the next step is to see how it benefits an entire night's sleep. Other questions they might research include whether the brain changes seen in adults from rocking are also observed in babies, whether motion improves sleep in those with insomnia, and whether it has positive effects on waking performance.

Still there's no need to wait for answers. This summer, put science to the test: Find yourself a hammock or rocking chair in the shade and enjoy that time-honored tradition in some cultures -- the siesta.

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How old are you? Spit it out! A new UCLA study shows that your age can accurately be predicted from, of all things, your saliva.

It's not as ridiculous a scientific endeavor as you might initially guess. The researchers, led by principal investigator Dr. Eric Vilain, explain that the finding could serve as a forensic tool for crime scene investigators to accurately pinpoint the age of a suspect, narrowing the age of a suspect to a five-year range.

"Regular DNA analysis at a crime scene gives information on the characteristics of the person that are immutable," explains Vilain, a professor of human genetics, pediatrics and urology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. The "immutable" characteristics he lists are things like a person's DNA sequence and how it matches with suspects. But Vilain explains that the "spit test" could give investigators valuable information on a characteristic that changes with time, which "could help the investigators zoom in on the right people."

To find saliva's age-predicting power, Vilain and his team of UCLA geneticists used a process called methylation, a chemical modification of the DNA, which is influenced by our environment -- the food we eat, the toxins we're exposed to, "and, as it turns out, time passing," Vilain says. 

"When methylation happens at certain places in the DNA, it tells certain genes to turn on or turn off. So the sequence of the genes themselves is not modified, but their expression is," he explains. "What we found is that the degree of methylation at a small number of places in the human genome is linked to our age. The correlation is high enough that we can predict what the age of a person is by just having access to a sample of their saliva."

The weirdest part about this very weird research: "It was an accidental finding," admits Vilain. He and a team of researchers rounded up 34 pairs of identical, male twins, ages 21 to 55, for a study on differences in methylation when it comes to predicting a person's sexual orientation. That study was a bust, from a scientific point of view -- but it did lead them to finding the spit test for age. They used saliva samples to scour the twins' genomes, and identified 88 sites on their DNA that correlated methylation to age. (They repeated the findings in non-twins -- 31 men and 29 women ages 18 to 70.)

They then identified the top two genes with the genes that were most highly correlated to age, and used those to build a predictive model that could correctly predict the person's age within five years.

We're talking about a very small sample of saliva -- about 0.1 ounces, Vilain says. Thanks to this unexpected finding, he's now surprised to be asking himself research questions inspired by an episode of "CSI": "Can we do it with saliva on a cigarette butt?"

Follow msnbc.com health writer Melissa Dahl on Twitter.

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We're getting stressed just looking at this.

Honking cars, creaking buses, loitering kids, slow-walking tourists --  living in a city can be the worst. Now, a new study shows that native city dwellers -- as in, those who were raised in urban areas -- react more strongly to stress than their country-living peers, the Associated Press reports. More specifically (and somewhat hilariously), city folks appear to react more strongly to stress caused by other people.

The study, done by scientists at the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany, was just published in the journal Nature. Here are the basics of what the researchers did: Thirty-two volunteers were put in brain scanners, where they were instructed to solve some tough math problems -- so tough, that they bungled the answers for most of them. The erroneous answers were met with criticism from the researchers, who even went so far as to wonder aloud whether each volunteer was really cut out for a study like this. (All of this was done while the participants were still in the scanner.)

In people from the largest cities, researchers found that the amygdala -- the piece of the brain that processes emotions -- lit up with activity when the researchers chastised them. (Here, a big city was defined as one with a population of 100,000 or larger.) They couldn't say exactly why criticism fueled stronger brain reactions, but they figured it could be because of previous exposure to stress caused by other humans.

Native city dwellers, do you think you're more easily stressed than most? What about those of you from rural areas -- does it take a lot to stress you out?

Follow msnbc.com health writer Melissa Dahl on Twitter.

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The littlest art critics -- a bunch of 9-month-olds in Switzerland -- preferred the works of Picasso over Monet in a recent study. 

Paintings by the Spanish artist appealed more to the diaper-clad set than those by the Frenchman in a series of five different experiments published in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts.

Now, you may wonder: How much insight can an infant offer when comparing cubism to impressionism?

"At 9-months of age, infants' vision is already much the same as in adults," says Trix Cacchione, a psychologist at the University of Zurich, and the study's lead author. "To an infant, a painting is most likely only a perceptual pattern and their aesthetic preferences are most likely guided by low-level functions of the visual system."

Tim Hales / AP

Everyone is a critic. Even babies have an opinion when it comes to art, prefering Picasso to Monet.

Researchers wanted to understand whether the little ones would favor one artist's style over another, what types of visual images appealed to them (Picasso's highly-abstract elements vs. Monet's more realistic landscapes), and whether babies display a preference for certain colors, shapes and contrasts.

Not yet art snobs -- well, barely able to offer more than some high-pitched squeals, smiles and drool -- the babies were shown the artwork on a computer screen while sitting on a parent's lap.

In one of the experiments, 24 infants (14 girls, 10 boys), were shown either six paintings by Picasso or the same number by Monet, and researchers measured their "look time" at each image. They then introduced two paintings side by side, one from each artist, Picasso's "Landscape of Juan-les-pin" and Monet's "Poppy Field Near Giverny."

Babies who had been viewing the Monets preferred the Picasso -- it was something new and different to their eyes. But the infants who had been shown the Picassos also looked longer at the new Picasso.

Some tykes were booted from the study because of "fussiness." Being a research participant is tough stuff when you're not yet 300 days old and your diaper may be filled with a stinky mess.

In another trial, 19 babies were shown the same Monet and Picasso paintings they had seen before in color, but this time they saw them in black-and-white (thanks to the wonders of Photoshop). Once again, the little ones still went for Picasso over Monet.

Cacchione says she's previously observed that infants are fascinated by abstract paintings, like Picasso's. "What surprised me was that the preference was not connected to colors."

The Picasso paintings featured bold, vivid colors and sharp contrasts while Monet's had softer hues and subtler contrasts.

Although Cacchione admits she can only speculate on why infants were partial to Picasso, her hunch is "they were easier to process and afforded the most stimulation to their still developing visual system."

When asked how parents could put some of these findings to practical use, she suggested, "Maybe we should decorate young infant's toys with patterns including bright contrasts and not with less contrastive calming colors."

Perhaps that may inspire a new generation of artists.

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Mary Altaffer / AP

Children cool off at the Hamilton Fish swimming pool on the Lower East Side of Manhattan on Aug. 4, 2009, in New York.

You teach your kids to wash their hands before eating and after using the bathroom, but do you make sure they shower before swimming in a public pool or water park?

Probably not, says a new poll that surveyed parents of elementary school children. Conducted by the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital at the University of Michigan, the poll found that of the 865 parents surveyed, only 26 percent felt it was very important to take a shower before swimming. In contrast, 64 percent said it was very important for children to avoid swallowing the water they swam in.

“Parents seem to understand the risk of contaminated water for their kids but few have their kids take the necessary preventive steps to keep everyone healthy,” said Dr. Matthew Davis, who directed the poll and is an associate professor at the University of Michigan Medical School.

The findings also suggest that many parents don’t understand the range of risks for contracting waterborne infections.

More than 10,000 Americans are sickened annually by recreational water illnesses, which can cause diarrhea, vomiting, abdominal cramps and fever or skin, ear, respiratory and eye infections. Such illnesses can be acquired by swallowing contaminated water and having contact with it in swimming pools, water parks, water play areas, lakes, rivers and oceans.

Unfortunately, such cases are on the upswing. There has been a substantial increase in outbreaks associated with swimming in the past two decades, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).  Currently, the leading cause of swimming pool-related diarrheal illnesses is the parasite Cryptosporidium, which can survive for days even in well-maintained pools. Reported cases of cryptosporidiosis increased more than 200 percent between 2004 and 2008, from 3,411 to 10,500 cases.

North American water parks, which drew approximately 79 million visitors last year, work to ensure their water is clean and safe, Aleatha Ezra, a spokesperson for the World Waterpark Association, told msnbc.com. “There are very specific water-quality guidelines in place to keep the water clean and chlorinated,” she said. “You can’t operate a public pool or water park without following them.”

Still, the chlorine-filtrated water is not meant for drinking, and that’s where proactive efforts like showering can make a difference. “It really does cut down on the chances of putting germs in the water in the first place,” Ezra said.

Many parents, though, aren’t getting the message. According to the C.S. Mott poll, only 15 percent of parents think their children are at high risk for contracting an illness at a water park, while 33 percent believe there’s a high risk of their children drowning. In fact, the risk of drowning is much lower than that of getting sick. The solution, say experts, is a collaborative effort between park and pool operators and parents that focuses on simple preventive measures. Among them, according to C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital:

• Shower or wash thoroughly with soap and water before swimming.
• Take children on bathroom breaks or check diapers often.
• Remind children to not swallow the water or get water in their mouths.
• Do not swim if ill with diarrhea.

One way to learn these lessons, aside from a painful firsthand experience, is to participate in the CDC’s Healthy Swimming Video Contest. The winning entry, which should be 60 seconds long and highlight tips for illness-free swimming, will receive $1,000. The deadline for submissions is July 4. 

Other stories you might like:

• Norovirus strikes Alaska cruise ship three times in a month
• Parents dream of kid-friendly airports
• 5 best new ice pops in the U.S.

Rob Lovitt is a longtime travel writer who still believes the journey is as important as the destination. Follow him at Twitter.

Itch a little, and it's a bother. Itch a lot, and it can be a nightmare. And not just for you: Your family and friends may suffer too, even your parishioners.

Just ask the Rev. Kathy Morris, a United Methodist minister in Atlanta. A longtime sufferer of psoriasis, endless itching used to keep her up at night and turn her into a "grouchy pastor" during the day. "It takes a lot of your mental energy dealing with it, monitoring it and worrying," says the 39-year-old. She describes the feeling as "never-ending itching. You scratch until you bleed."

Now, a new study confirms what Morris already knows: chronic itch can be devastating. In fact, many sufferers say they'd be willing to accept a shorter lifespan in return for an instant cure. 

"They're pretty miserable; that's what it comes down to," says study lead author Dr. Suephy Chen, an associate professor of dermatology at Emory University School of Medicine. "If you've got a severe symptom like pain or itch, it significantly affects your life, and you're willing to give up part of your life not to have the problem."

But the rest of the world, including many doctors, doesn't pay much attention to itchers and itch itself. "I call it the Rodney Dangerfield of our profession," Chen says. "It really doesn't get a lot of respect. And in the research world, it's definitely underappreciated. There hasn't been a lot of research put into the basic understanding of itch, let alone the therapy."

For most people, itching is a common but minor and temporary inconvenience, the result of an insect bite or a scratchy suit like the one you had to wear for Easter when you were 10. But for other folks, an itch can be nothing short of permanent.

"I actually treat patients who have overall itch. They itch from head to toe," Chen says. (Just like you might be doing as you read this post: As we told you earlier this year, itching may be contagious. Sorry about that.)

Many medical conditions cause chronic itch, including the obvious (eczema, psoriasis) and the not-so-obvious (kidney failure, cancer). In some cases, the cause never becomes clear. "Most people like a reason," Chen says, "and when we can't give them one, that makes it that much harder to get them to feel better."

For the new study, Chen and colleagues interviewed about 70 patients with chronic itch and about 140 with chronic pain. The itchers said they'd be willing to shorten their lifespans by an average of 13 percent, akin to those suffering from similar levels of chronic pain. 

Chen said she hopes the study, which appears in the Archives of Dermatology, will focus more attention on chronic itch and spur researchers and pharmaceutical companies to act. Treatments for chronic itch include anti-itching lotions and drugs like antihistamines that calm the immune system. But in many cases, most of these don't work, and patients are stuck with no way out, she says.

The medical world "has put their attention on pain for 30-plus years," she says. "If we get a little bit of that brainpower and money for itch, we should help these people who are suffering."

After 12 years of suffering with psoriasis, Atlanta minister Morris finally found relief through an antihistamine that dampens her immune system, although she still has occasional outbreaks. If you've got an itching problem, she says, "you should find a doctor who takes it seriously. It can affect so many different areas of your life, but there is hopefully some hope."

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Claudio Onorati / EPA

George Clooney rocks gray hair.

Exactly why hair turns gray remains one of life's little mysteries. But an important new discovery may help untangle the secrets behind the silvery strands.

Scientists may have found the root cause of what makes hair go gray. For the first time, researchers have identified the signaling protein that coordinates the process between hair follicle stem cells, which produce hair, and color-supplying stem cells, or melanocytes.

"We have shown that one specific molecular pathway is necessary in the regulation of melanocyte stem cells -- the Wnt pathway," says Mayumi Ito, PhD, an assistant professor of dermatology at the New York University Langone Medical Center in New York, and the study's lead researcher.

As Ito explains it, when the Wnt pathway is activated, melanocytes can produce pigments that color hair. When inactivate, melanocytes lose the ability to produce color, resulting in gray hair.

Ito's research, which is published in the journal Cell, looked at hair follicle stem cells and pigment-producing melanocytes in a mouse. But she said these findings are relevant for people because "mouse and human hair follicles are very similar in the way they function."

Knowing the Wnt pathway is important in regulating pigment-producing cells may "provide a new target for designing therapies for color loss and restoration," suggests Ito. So eventually this new understanding may be coming to a head of hair near you.

Slideshow: Celebrities who are silver foxes

But for many of us the news is too little, too late. Our tresses -- or what we still have left of them -- already have more gray hairs than we'd like. Although small comfort, we'll unlock some interesting facts about gray locks. 

Age, gender, genetics, and ethnicity are the main factors affecting when you go gray, says Orr Barak, MD, a dermatologist at Tufts Medical Center in Boston. White men tend to go gray beginning in their mid-30s, while Asian men start graying in their late-30s, and African men in their mid-40s. Women typically start to gray five years later than men.

Stress probably contributes to this physical sign of aging, explains Barak, but there's not yet any science to support this claim. Asked whether you can go gray "overnight," he says there was one rare case reported four decades ago in a man in his 40s who developed alopecia areata, a sudden hair loss. He had salt-and-pepper hair, but because of this disorder only his regular colored hair fell out, so he was left all gray. Barak points out some other oddities:

• Hair on your scalp grays first; next comes facial hair and body hair is last. The longer a hair can grow, the sooner it might gray -- but cutting it has no influence on the process.
• Premature graying for whites may begin in their early 20s, for Asians in their mid-20s, and for Africans in their mid-30s. Some premature graying may be due to disease states, such as vitamin B-12 or niacin (B-3) deficiency, thyroid problems, or progeria (a genetic disorder that speeds up aging).
• Gray hairs are often first seen at the temples then gray spreads evenly back from there, with the crown of the head last.
• Your odds of going gray increase 10 to 20 percent every decade past 30.
• People who had radiation treatment to the scalp may find it stimulates their pigment-producing cells into action once again, and gray hair may grow back in its regular color.

At what age did you find your first gray hair?

Related (kind of):

• George Clooney, Elisabetta Canalis split

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Maybe all the Grinch needed for his heart condition was to hit the treadmill. A new study shows that exercise helped improve the symptoms of patients with "Grinch Syndrome," named for the Dr. Seuss character because most sufferers have hearts that really are "two sizes too small."

About 500,000 Americans -- mostly women -- suffer from the condition, which is also known as postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. It causes such such dizziness and tiredness that many are unable to stand for long periods of time. "(T)he lightheadedness or fainting is also accompanied by a rapid increase in heartbeat of more than 30 beats per minute, or a heart rate that exceeds 120 beats per minute, within 10 minutes of rising," according to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

Researchers in Texas gave the 18 study participants either a beta blocker or a placebo, accompanied by three months of exercise training. They found that regardless of whether the volunteers were assigned the placebo or the beta blocker, all of the patients who did the exercise training saw improvement in circulation and kidney function, according to the report published in Hypertension: Journal of the American Heart Association.

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Talk about your teenage angst.

Imagine being a 17-year-old girl and having to choose between having drippy, sweaty palms -- or losing the ability to send text messages. OMG!

That’s exactly the dilemma outlined in the latest issue of Archives of Dermatology, in which researchers say that the Botox treatment that helped treat the girl’s excessively sweaty hands also seemed to immobilize her texting thumbs.

The girl sought help after trying all the usual tricks to cure her extra-sweaty palms, a condition known as palmar hyperhidrosis. It’s a version of general hyperhidrosis, which affects 3 percent of the U.S. population, or about 8 million people, according to the International Hyperhidrosis Society. Those are folks whose overactive glands can produce up to five times the volume of sweat as normally perspiring people.

The girl tried a three-month stint with Dryol, a high-powered antiperspirant. She used a super-saturated concentration of aluminum chloride. No luck.

Then she turned to Botox, the popular wrinkle-relaxing drug, which also has been approved to stop excessive sweating in places like the armpits, hands and feet. Treatment called for 30 injections in her palm and three in each finger, an uncomfortable but not excruciating ordeal.

The upside: The Botox injections temporarily blocked the chemical signals released by the nerves stimulating her sweat glands. Within a week, she reported “dramatic improvement,” the study said.

The downside, however, came later, when the girl discovered her thumbs didn’t work quite right, a condition doctors termed “transitory texting impairment.”

Still, the girl may be back for more. Although that problem lasted for six weeks, her palms stayed sweat-free for five months. Definitely something to text about.

Follow msnbc.com health reporter JoNel Aleccia on Twitter @jonel_aleccia.

Related:

• Dripping in sweat? Maybe it's hyperhidrosis 

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If you've ever thought that listening to your child whine was worse than having a buzz saw cut wood inside your house, it turns out you were right.

A new study has found that the power of whining to distract people while doing simple math was even greater than other noises that people typically find annoying. It didn’t matter whether someone was a parent or not.

Still, this could explain why packing a lunch while your children caterwaul over whose magic marker can touch a particular piece of paper makes your head want to explode.

 “You’re basically doing less work and doing it worse when you’re listening to the whines,” said study co-author Rosemarie Sokol Chang, a professor of psychology at SUNY New Paltz. “It doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman, everybody’s equally distracted.”

The researchers asked people to do subtraction problems while listening to an infant crying, regular speech, silence, whining, a high-pitched table saw and “motherese” -- exaggerated baby talk that adults often find irritating.

To ensure that people weren’t distracted by the words themselves, they used foreign language for the speech samples in the study, which was published in the Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology.

In raw numbers, people made more mistakes per math problems completed when listening to the whines than any of the other speech patterns or noises (though the only statistically significant differences were between whining, the table saw and motherese).

And people completed fewer subtraction problems when listening to the whining, crying and baby talk than when it was completely quiet.

This comes as no surprise to Eileen Wolter, who is raising a 6-year-old and nearly 3-year-old in Summit, N.J.

“My older son has this whole 'no fair, no fair' mantra that drives me insane, and the younger one, the minute you say ‘no’ to him over anything, he just gets crestfallen and then there are tears. There is a lot of whining,” she said.

Lately, she’s made a concerted effort to stop being so bothered by it, to simply lay out the rules and remain above the fray.

But, as a mom, she has an almost physical reaction to the noise, even if it’s just a minor argument over sharing a toy or who gets read a bedtime book first.

“It’s just really truly amazing that that’s their first instinct. It’s the first place they go. And there’s no differentiation in the scope of what’s upsetting them,” Wolter said. “My stress can’t tell the difference -- it’s just the sound. I can’t tell whether this is a real emergency or a real problem.  I just know that my kid is upset so I need to react.”

On some level, that seems to be the evolutionary point of the whining, Chang said. Most people would tell you ignore it, and the child will eventually stop.

While she hasn’t yet tested this theory, except with her own 2-year-old, she suspects that trying to figure out what the underlying issue is may be equally -- if not more -- effective.

“It’s telling you to tune in,” she said. “Nobody wants to sit around and listen to a fire engine siren either, but if you hear the siren go off, it gets your attention. It has to be annoying like that, and it’s the same with the whine.”

Related:

• Mommyyy! How do you stop your kids from whining?
• What bugs you? Book uncovers science of what irks us

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It's Friday, which means two things: We all have that Rebecca Black song in our heads, and it's time for us to answer a reader question. Today, we're tackling a beauty query from our Facebook pal Suzanne Pyles:

But we think this question brings up another question: Why do overplucked hairs stop growing back, anyway?

"Overplucking of the brows can lead to a diminution in the size of the hair follicle, thereby making the new growing hairs smaller and finer as well. This happens when people wax a lot," explains Dr. Carolyn Jacob, a Chicago dermatologist. "Older women tend to lose eyebrow hairs, too, so you don't want to make your brows thin when you are younger. It doesn't look right, and you wont have much, if anything, to work with when you're older."

Onto the real question here: Can the eyebrow hairs you accidentally made disappear ever grow back?

"Sometimes, if the plucking is too forceful or if there is chronic irritation or inflammation, this can lead to damage or scarring of the hair follicle, thus a new hair does not grow," says Dr. Paradi Mirmirani, a dermatologist practicing in Vallejo, Calif. "This is a rare occurence, but once the follicle is damaged it is permanent.  There is no treatment other than hair transplantation that would lead to successful regrowth of another hair shaft."

Short of hair transplantation, you could always consider permanent makeup, although we hear that doesn't always work out so well.

Got a weird health question you're itching for us to answer? Ask away -- leave a comment here, or find us on Facebook or Twitter.

Follow health editor Melissa Dahl on Twitter: @melissadahl.

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Elisabetta Villa / Getty Images

Watching these "Jersey Shore" goofballs might influence your smarts more than you realize, a new study suggests. Oh, dear.

Take note, fans of mindless reality shows like "Jersey Shore": New research suggests watching something dumb might make you dumber. In other words, you are what you watch.

It's called media priming -- the idea that the things we watch or listen to or read influence our emotions and our behavior, perhaps more than we realize. This particular study may be the first to use fictional characters in a narrative to show an effect on people's cognitive performance, says lead author Markus Appel, a psychologist at Austria's University of Linz.

In an experiment, volunteers were told to read a fake screenplay about a character they refer to as a "foolish soccer hooligan." (A subsequent finding of the study: Austrians are adorable.) The story describes a day in the life of a man named Meier: He wakes up, reads (and misunderstands) the message in an inspiration-of-the-day calendar, meets his friends in a bar and gets very drunk. Meier then goes to a soccer game, gets into a fight and comes home to crash; he sleeps through the next day. (Substitute the soccer game for a nightclub, and you have something very similar to the televised daily shenanigans of Snooki or The Situation.)

Some of the 81 volunteers were instructed to read a longer version of the "soccer hooligan" story, while others read a shorter version -- and the control group read a rather boring story in which Meier does nothing stupid. Then researchers gave the volunteers a multiple choice general knowledge test, including questions like, "What is the capital of Libya?" and "What kind of speed is expressed by the letter 'c' in physics?" and "Who painted La Guernica?"

To be fair, these are tough questions to answer sans-Internet regardless of whether you've just watched something vapid like "Toddlers and Tiaras." But, as the researchers write, "participants who read a narrative about a stupidly acting soccer hooligan performed worse in the knowledge test than participants who read a narrative about a character with no reference to his intellectual abilities.

"The present study is, to our knowledge, the first to show media priming effects of story characters on cognitive performance," they explain in the report, which was published online this month in the journal Media Psychology.

Think you're too smart to be influenced by the media you consume? That's cute. Anything we see -- a person on the street, an ad on TV, a character in a movie -- has some influence on our next thoughts, emotions or actions, simply because it's top of mind, says Joanne Cantor, a psychologist and member of the American Psychological Association who has studied the emotional and behavioral effect of TV and movies.

“What you’ve been thinking about recently or seeing recently (is) at a higher level in your consciousness, so your brain is kind of predisposed in that direction,” says Cantor, professor emerita of communication arts and outreach director center for communication research at the University of Wisonsin-Madison. “So if you’ve just seen a movie about really altruistic people and you get an opportunity to behave altruistically, you’ll probably do it, rather than if you’ve just seen a movie about selfish people." (So fans of "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" aren't particularly charitable? Noted.)

Cantor explains that empathetic people are likely to be especially affected by media priming. "But also, people who expose themselves to TV more are probably going to be more affected,” she says. Something to think about next time you find yourself lured into an hours-long marathon of your favorite reality show. On the other hand, some of us could likely use more gym and laundry, if not tanning, in our lives.

Have you ever noticed a TV show, movie or book influencing your emotions or behavior -- in a positive or negative way? Leave a comment telling us about what happened.

Follow msnbc.com health editor Melissa Dahl on Twitter: @melissadahl.

More from Body Odd:

• Why some see Jesus in the face of their toast
• Bottom line: Doc explains mysteriously massive buttocks
• Can eating too much make your stomach burst?

Related:

• 'Jersey Shore' cast wants more money -- again
• Who's responsible when reality TV goes too far?
• Watching Jon Stewart might make you more creative
  

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Rich Lam / Getty Images

People run out of a Hudson Bay Co store with merchandise on Wednesday in Vancouver, Canada. Vancouver broke out in riots after their hockey team the Vancouver Canucks lost in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals.

Wednesday night's riots in Vancouver over the Canucks' lost to the Boston Bruins in the last game of the Stanley Cup finals may seem shocking to Americans who view Canadians as our mild-mannered polite cousins. But there's a long tradition of hockey-related civil disturbance in the Great White North, dating at least as far back as 1955, when Maurice “The Rocket” Richard was suspended for 15 games, setting off rioting in Montreal. 

Of course, the sports-related riot is practically an American tradition -- just ask Ohio State campus police and the LAPD -- and European soccer is known as much for its off-the-pitch violence as it is for FC Barcelona’s skill on it.

But why? What causes otherwise presumably sane and rational people to go nuts? 

“People invest themselves, their identity, very much in the sports clubs,” explained Professor Ervin Staub, a psychologist and the founder of the program in Psychology of Peace and Violence at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “There is evidence that when a team loses, fans get a little depressed and when the team wins, they get a little high.”

In fact, research over the past 25 years has shown that men especially suffer a drop in testosterone when they, or a sports team they love, lose a contest. This is also true for elections. In a study conducted during election day of 2008, scientists from Duke University and the University of Michigan found that male McCain voters suffered a significant drop in testosterone leading them to feel “significantly more unhappy, submissive, unpleasant, and controlled.”

Such biological effects, Staub explained, are directly linked to behaviors. Losers feel “diminished” and “powerless,” he said, and people then become tempted to “use destructive means rather than constructive means to regain one’s sense of effectiveness.” So they lash out. (Maybe the team lost, but I can bust a department store window!)

Winners, on the other hand, can feel so high and empowered they “feel they have the right to do anything. They feel ‘I am special!’” Staub said.

Combine these psychodynamics with the fulfilling sensation of acting in concert with a large crowd, which enhances one’s sense of power and effectiveness, “and the usual inhibitions about behavior and the social norms that guide us get lost,” Staub said. “You lose yourself to the group.”

You can toss in a little alcohol to suppress the brain’s judgment, but contrary to what most people think, you don’t need booze to get a riot.

Staub, author of the book “Overcoming Evil: Genocide, Violent Conflict and Terrorism,” published this year, said that “those who would allow themselves to lose their individuality in a sports riot by smashing windows likely [hopefully!] have strong values and beliefs” that would prevent them from engaging in mass killing. Still, the same psychological forces that drive the sports riot can evolve into genocide and terrorism committed in the name of nation, clan or religious sect.

Think about that the next time your team loses. Or wins.      

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