So stressed you feel like pulling out your hair?

Save a strand for the doctor. It could end up saving your life.

A new study shows your tresses store a long-term record of your stresses. And testing a few hairs may be able to predict your risk of an imminent heart attack, according to a report from LiveScience.

Troubles at work? Family strife? Money woes? All that angst is stashed in your hair in the form of cortisol, the so-called stress hormone, Canadian researchers found.

The hormone gets released in the bloodstream when you're freaking out and seeps into your hair follicles. As the hair grows, it provides a timeline of your anxieties -- and the toll they take on your heart.

Gideon Koren, a professor at the University of Western Ontario, took hair samples from 120 men and measured cortisol levels in the 1.2 inches of hair closest to the scalp. That’s about three months worth of growth.

He found that cortisol levels were significantly higher in men who had heart attacks compared with men who had other illnesses.

The finding, published today in the journal Stress, could pave the way for a noninvasive test that lets doctors know when a patient is suddenly a heart attack waiting to happen.

Baldies, however, need not apply.

How would you score on a stress test? Do tell.

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Randy Dotinga writes: If you're looking for a hook-up, a few drinks can suddenly make other people seem more attractive -- and receptive -- than they actually are, according to two new studies that help explain the "beer goggle" effect.

First, a suds-soaked fog diminishes a guy’s ability to detect facial symmetry, a crucial component of what we think of as human beauty. When this sense is dulled, an average-looking face may seem like it belongs to a hottie, suggests research on drunk college kids in the journal Alcohol.

To make matters even worse, another study shows liquor makes guys more likely to misinterpret a friendly female glance as a bold come-on.

"The average guy tends to perceive more women as being sexually interested after a few drinks and be more likely to make mistakes about what a woman feels," says study co-author Teresa Treat, an associate professor at the University of Iowa whose finding appears in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology.

On the other hand, Treat found that alcohol does not affect a man's ability to differentiate between modest clothing (jeans and a sweatshirt) and come-hither attire (a short skirt and tight top).

The researchers came to their conclusions after doing their best to approximate boy-meets-girl-over-drinks scenarios without actually going to a bar.

In the experiment, 59 young men looked at photos of young women. (Ah, the sweet life of a research subject.) Previously, men and women had deemed the photo subjects to be sexually interested or just friendly and more provocatively dressed or less provocatively dressed.

The male subjects looked at the photos while sober and then after they'd downed vodka cocktails and gotten a bit shy of legally wasted. While the study design didn't allow researchers to come up with specific statistics, it's fair to say that the drinks moderately disrupted the men's ability to interpret sexual signals, Treat explains.

This matters because misinterpreting a woman's signals "could be associated with men making an advance that's not reciprocated," Treat says. That could lead to damaged egos or worse, like date rape, she says.

What's going on? When people drink, they struggle to interpret things that are subtle and demand more thinking, says Robert F. Leeman, an associate research scientist at Yale University. It appears that sexual signals -- confusing in the best of times -- fit into those categories.

What to do? Women who want to just have a good time -- and not go home with a guy -- would be smart to dress conservatively, says University of Texas psychology professor Kim Fromme. "That's the more obvious cue."

In other words: Make sure you send signals that can be picked up even through a boozy blur.

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Attaining an even, all-over tan is a futile effort, no matter how much you sunbathe buck naked. The reason? Your booty.

Turns out, your hindquarters just don't tan as well as the rest of you. Instead, your derriere is more likely to simply turn red - probably not the look you were going for.

LiveScience reported on the new research conducted by scientists from the University of Edinburgh who were trying to learn why different skin cancers tend to be found in different parts of the body. Researchers exposed the back and the behinds of 100 volunteers to UVB rays, the type that cause sunburns. The findings? Some parts of your body respond differently to the sun, hence the red hiney.

But regardless, you probably shouldn't be soaking up the rays anyhow, either under the sun or in a tanning booth. The rate of skin cancer is on the rise, including melanoma, the deadliest form. Last year, international cancer experts called tanning beds as deadly as arsenic and mustard gas.

If that's not enough to instead send you to the self-tanning lotion, do it to avoid having a baboon bum.

What's your weirdest or worst sunburn? Tell us about it in the comments or, better yet, send us a photo. We'll publish some of the best pictures.

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Linda Carroll writes: When it’s time to discuss his favorite things, President Barack Obama favors the left. Hand, that is.

Scientists have discovered that those who are left-handed, like Obama, tend to use that hand to gesture when they’re talking about things they feel positive about, and their right hand for things that are negative. For right-handed people, it’s the opposite.

In a study published this month in PloS ONE, researchers examined tapes from the final presidential debates from 2004 and 2008 to see if they could spot a right/left bias in the hand gestures of the candidates. As it turns out, both candidates in 2004 were righties, while in 2008 they were both lefties.

Sure enough, the politicians unwittingly communicated their feelings about a topic by the hand with which they gestured while speaking. So, when Obama launching into an enthusiastic discussion about the benefits of his health insurance plans he would use his left hand. If the topic was the war in Iraq, he’d gesture with his right hand.

The opposite was true of right-handed George Bush – positive words were emphasized with right handed gestures, negative ones with left handed movements.

Associating good things with the side of your dominant hand extends beyond just gestures. Researchers found that if you’re right-handed you’re more inclined to think that in general things on the right are good, while left oriented stuff – people, images, whatever – is bad. (The converse is true for you lefties out there.)

In one experiment, study volunteers were shown a drawing that depicted a group of space aliens sitting side by side. On average, righties concluded that the aliens on the right end of the picture were smarter, happier, more honest and more attractive than those on the left. Lefties liked the extraterrestrials on the left better.

“Overall, the data support the idea that people associate good things with the side of the body they can use most fluently – dominant is fluent, and fluent is good,” says the study’s lead author Daniel Casasanto of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, Netherlands.

It’s a good example of how our bodies influence the way we think without our ever knowing anything about it, says Diane Halpern, a professor of psychology at Claremont McKenna College.

We’re thinking this right/left thing could be a quick and dirty lie detector. Let’s say your boss is about to evaluate your work -- you might want to pay close attention to which hand is moving as she talks.

What body language do you think reveals the most? Tell us in the comments.

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Linda Carroll writes: Men who want to be more magnetic need only don an article of red clothing, scientists now say.

Researchers from the University of Rochester and other institutions around the globe have discovered that the color red makes a man more attractive and sexually desirable to women, according to a report published this month in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

For the new study, researchers showed young women a series of photos of men. In some pictures, men wore shirts or other pieces of clothing or stood against a red background. In others there was no red. Consistently women were more attracted to men associated with red. What made the results especially believable was that they were the same, whether the women came from England, Germany, China or the United States.

The color’s charm can be traced to its ability to make men appear more powerful, says the study’s lead author Andrew Elliot, professor of psychology at the University of Rochester. “We found that women view men in red as higher in status, more likely to make money and more likely to climb the social ladder,” he explains. “And it’s this high-status judgment that leads to the attraction.”

As far as Helen Fisher is concerned, the call of crimson goes a lot deeper than that. These kinds of signals are wound tightly into our DNA, says Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University and author of “Why Him? Why Her?”

In the animal kingdom, red is attractive because it’s a sign of high testosterone, Fisher says. Certain monkeys develop a redder rump – and higher levels of testosterone - as they climb the social ladder. Male robins with the reddest breasts, caused by high levels of the hormone, are the most attractive to females of the species because these males are the most dominant and the most likely to be able to protect the nest and secure food for those hungry hatchlings.

Modern women may not want the man with the most testosterone. But we’re still unconsciously wired to be attracted to the outward sign of it – red color.

“I’d say we’re soft-wired, rather than hard-wired, to find males wearing red attractive,” Fisher says. “What I mean is, we have a huge cerebral cortex. So, if a man walks into a bar wearing a red sweater and has messy jeans, bad teeth and a bad haircut, we’re not going to be fooled by the sweater.”

But it works the other way around, too -- men are more attracted to women in red, a 2008 study shows.

Is there a color you find hot on the opposite sex? Tell us about it in the comments.

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Hey, summer beachgoers: You might think twice about packing those swim fins and snorkels.

A new study by Florida scientists trying to account for pollution suggests that staying out of the water might keep you healthier than going for a dip.

Even in waters with no known impurities, swimmers were more likely to get sick than sunbathers who stayed on the shore, said Jay M. Fleisher, an associate professor of public health at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale-Davie.

"We know that waters that have been contaminated with sewage will cause illness," said Fleisher. "We wanted to see whether people were actually getting sick from a beach that had no pollution."

The answer, it turned out, was yes. Fleisher and his crew sent 1,303 adults to Hobie Beach near Miami, a site known for its pristine waters. Half were told to stay dry and other half were sent to swim.

Within a week, it was clear that going in the water took a toll on the bathers. Swimmers were 1.76 times as likely to report stomach troubles; 4.46 times times more likely to report illnesses with fevers, sniffles and sore throats; and 5.91 times more likely to report itching, rashes and other skin woes.

The culprit? Scientists aren't certain, but they suspect enterococcus bacteria, nasty critters normally found in the feces of people and many animals. Health officials typically detect the bacteria in waters sullied by sewage spills, but they were surprised to find it – sometimes in high concentrations – in a beach area without known contamination.

The findings raise troubling questions about public beach water monitoring in the absence of known sewage spills and about whether – and when – it's necessary to warn people about potential health problems. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is grappling with the question now, trying to decide whether there's a better way to identify markers of risk, Fleisher said.

In the meantime, Fleisher notes that although swimmers were more likely to become ill than non-swimmers, the number of actual illnesses among people who went in the water was small.

Only about 1 in 100 people developed respiratory illness with fever, and only about 2 in 100 came down with gastrointestinal illness. About 6 in 100 developed skin ailments.

"The individual risk to the bather is fairly low," Fleisher said. "But when you multiply that by the number of people who go on the beach, you could start having a public health problem."

If Fleisher had his way, every beach would be posted with a stoplight-type sign that signals green, yellow or red conditions for healthy water quality.

Barring that, summer swimmers shouldn't be afraid to go in the water, he said. But they might stay healthier if they stick to the shore.

Do you worry about swimming in public waters? Tell us in the comments.

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Could a quick spritz from a spray bottle make a man a better lover by treating his Quick Draw McGraw syndrome? Maybe.

At the annual meeting of the American Urological Association in San Francisco last week, a company called Shionogi Pharma briefed urologists and sexual medicine experts on test results for a drug called PSD502. “PSD502” may sound like some super-secret breakthrough, but men have been buying similar things from sex shops and the back of skin magazines for decades.

Does “Prolong” sound familiar? How about “Play Longer?” “Mandelay?” (Get it? Man Delay?) “Gibraltar?” As in rock of? Or my personal favorite, “Stud 100”? They’re all some form of cream, spray or wipe designed to numb your penis, which may not sound like something you would pay good money to do, but then maybe you -- or your lover -- do not suffer from premature ejaculation, or P.E.

Up to an estimated 30 percent of men do and P.E. is a real problem. It’s been defined as “ejaculation which is always or nearly always occurs prior to or within one minute of vaginal penetration,” which, as you can imagine, has “negative personal consequences.”

Men have tried everything from rubber bands, to masturbation endurance training (yes, really), to taking anti-depressants (because those drugs have a usually unwanted side effect of delayed ejaculation) to prolong their “latency.” Yet for years sexual medicine for males has been focused on another problem, erectile dysfunction. “It’s been all E.D. all the time,” Dr. Irwin Goldstein, a urologist, founder of San Diego Sexual Medicine and the editor of the Journal of Sexual Medicine, who attended the company’s briefing, told me. “So I’m pretty excited by the whole concept,” of PSD502.

He’s not excited because the concept is new; the drug is just a combination of two common topical painkillers, lidocaine and prilocaine. He’s excited because, finally, such a drug is being rigorously tested in real P.E. sufferers using metered doses rather than Stud 100 users trading anecdotes. And it seems to work. The men in the drug trials were pretty bad off. Before using the spray they lasted about 30 seconds. After spraying the stuff on their glans, and waiting five minutes, the men extended that time to a mean of 3.3 minutes, which may not win any stamina awards but represents a big improvement.

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Just when you thought sunless tanning spray was good only for hiding pale skin, flabby flesh and varicose veins, scientists have come up with a new use for a compound in the body bronzer.

Turns out the sugar-based molecules that turn you brown and stick to your skin can be combined with a chemical goo to create a sticky gel bandage to help medical wounds heal better.

Plastic surgeons at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York have come up with what’s been described as an “internal Band-Aid” that can seal the gaps and holes that surgery leaves behind.

For instance, procedures to remove cancerous tissue or surgeries to reconstruct body parts often result in hollow spaces that fill with fluid, called seromas, that must be drained, either manually or with implanted shunts. By all accounts, it’s an unpleasant undertaking with the potential for pain and infection.

Using the new gel, however, doctors could simply fill the hole and let it heal, said Dr. Jason Spector, a plastic surgeon and co-author of a new study about the product published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“The new substance would act to glue together the hole left behind to prevent seroma build-up,” he explained in a statement.

The gel, composed of polyethylene glycol and a polycarbonate of dihydroxyacetone – the stuff that turns you brown – is durable enough to stick to tissue, but also biodegradable and water soluble, so it won’t hang around forever.

The scientists have studied the gel in rats, where it reduced the chance of seromas and fluid build-up. Now they’d like to try it in bigger critters, and, finally, on clinical trials in humans.

That’s good news for surgery patients. Next, maybe the scientists can do something about the orange palms and streaky ankles that regular tanning spray leaves behind.

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