Getting comfortable with communicating about sex may translate to benefits in the bedroom — especially if the lines of communication are open during the act.  

New research finds that comfort with sexual communication is directly linked to sexual satisfaction. People who are more comfortable talking about sex are also more likely to do so while having sex, the researchers found. Nonetheless, that difference doesn't fully explain why the sexually chatty are happier with their erotic lives.

"Even if you just have a little bit of anxiety about the communication, that affects whether you're communicating or not, but it also directly affected their satisfaction," said study researcher Elizabeth Babin, an expert on health communication at Cleveland State University in Ohio.

The anxiety "might be kind of taking them out of the moment and therefore reducing the overall satisfaction they experience during their encounters," Babin told LiveScience. [6 (Other) Great Things Sex Can Do For You]

Talking about sex

How people talk about sex is an important topic for public health researchers. After all, people who are uncomfortable asking their partners to wear a condom may be at higher risk of having unprotected sex and exposing themselves to sexually transmitted infections. Communication is also key to having enjoyable sexual encounters, Babin said.

But little research has delved into what keeps people from talking about their likes and dislikes while in bed, she said.

"In order to increase communication quality, we need to figure out why people are communicating and why they're not communicating," Babin said.

To do so, Babin recruited 207 people, 88 from undergraduate classes and 119 from online sites, to complete surveys about their apprehension about sexual communication, their sexual satisfaction and the amount of non-verbal and verbal communication they felt they enacted during sex. For example, participants were asked how much they agreed with statements such as, "I feel nervous when I think about talking with my partner about the sexual aspects of our relationship," and "I feel anxious when I think about telling my partner what I dislike during sex."

The participants, whose average age was 29, also responded to questions about their sexual self-esteem, such as how good a partner they felt they were and how confident they were in their sexual skills.

Communication without words

The surveys revealed that apprehension in talking about sex can spoil one's sexual enjoyment, with that anxiety linked both to less communication in bed and less satisfaction overall. Unsurprisingly, less sexual communication apprehension and higher sexual self-esteem were both associated with more communication during sex.

Communication during sex, in turn, was linked to more sexual satisfaction. Nonverbal communication was more closely linked to satisfaction than verbal communication, Babin reported online in August in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. Nonverbal cues may seem safer, Babin said.

"It could be perceived as being less threatening, so it might be easier to moan or to move in a certain way to communicate that I'm enjoying the sexual encounter than to say, 'Hey, this feels really good, I like that,'" Babin said. "That might seem too direct for some people."

Babin next plans to research couples to get both sides of the story and to find out how couples' communication styles mesh with their sexual satisfaction. The end goal, she said, is to give therapists and sex educators tools to help them teach people how to talk about sex more openly with their partners.

Sexual communication "is a skill," Babin said. "And we're not all well-trained in that skill."

Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter @sipappas or LiveScience @livescience. We're also on Facebook & Google+.

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NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft, which launched 35 years ago today (Sept. 5), surprisingly may have far more to travel before it leaves the solar system, researchers say.

How much more is up for debate. The scientists say their new finding suggests much about the outer reaches of the solar system remains unknown.

Voyager 1, which left Earth on Sept. 5, 1977, is about 11.3 billion miles (18.2 billion kilometers) from the sun. Meanwhile, Voyager 2, which launched 16 days earlier on a longer trajectory, is approximately 9.3 billion miles (14.9 billion km) from the sun. 

NASA launched the twin Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft to explore the outer planets in our solar system. Researchers had thought the probes, which are still occasionally beaming back data, might be exiting the solar system by now  –  but the direction of the solar wind is telling them otherwise.

One way to think about the edge of the solar system is to measure it in terms of the solar wind, the stream of energetic particles pouring from the sun. The area dominated by the solar wind is known as the heliosphere.

The distant region where the solar wind slows as it begins to run into interstellar gas and dust is known as the heliosheath. The mysterious boundary where the solar wind finally ends and the interstellar medium begins is called the heliopause.

Past research suggested the Voyager probes were entering an unknown part of the heliosheath (dubbed the "transition zone" or the "stagnation region") where the flow of solar wind had apparently calmed down. Scientists thought that by now Voyager 1 would start to see the solar wind deflected from its straight outward path into a more northward or southward manner as it curved to form the heliopause. [Photos from NASA's Far-Flung Voyager Probes]

Now researchers using data from the Voyager 1 spacecraft find the probe is not yet close to the heliopause.

"The implication is that the flow of solar wind plasma in the heliosheath is more complex that we had expected," study lead author Robert Decker, a space physicist at Johns Hopkins University, told SPACE.com.

Decker and his colleagues requested that the Voyager project team rotate Voyager 1 periodically to see if the solar wind was in fact getting deflected in a northward or southward manner. They found no evidence of deflection in the zone the probe was zipping through.

It remains uncertain how much farther outward the transition region extends, researchers say. As to when Voyager 1 might actually leave the heliopause, "opinions vary on this," Decker said. "Based on the changes we have seen in the Voyager 1 data during the past year, I would expect that Voyager 1 will cross the heliopause within one year."

Decker and his colleagues detail their findings in the Sept. 6 issue of the journal Nature.

NASA's Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft amazed astronomers with close-up views of the gas giant planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune during their tag-team mission. Voyager 2, which launched Aug. 20, 1977, is currently NASA's longest running mission ever.

Each Voyager probe carries a golden record with a collection of sights and sounds from Earth, just in case the spacecraft are discovered by intelligent beings in interstellar space.

The recordings include 117 images of Earth, animals and humans, as well as greetings in 54 languages, with a variety of natural and human-made sounds like storms, volcanoes, rocket launches, airplanes and animals. The collection was chosen by a committee chaired by Cornell University astronomer Carl Sagan.

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• How the Voyager Space Probes Work (Infographic)
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The tobacco industry has spent millions in pursuit of its Holy Grail – the cancer-free cigarette. But even if they succeed, smokers might not like it.

There exists, in some lawyer’s vault, somewhere in the United States, a secret memo that was authored by a tobacco company executive back in 1955. Written in the exclamatory patois of the time, it says, “Boy! Wouldn’t it be wonderful if our company was first to produce a cancer-free cigarette. What we could do to the competition.”

Just imagine it: a safe cigarette. One that doesn’t kill by causing cancer, or the diseases of the heart and lungs. One that can be consumed with pleasure to the smoker, benefit to the treasury and profit to the tobacco giants. To all the interested parties, this would indeed be the most tremendous invention. Ever since the most serious perils of smoking became suspected by scientists, back in the early Fifties, many hundreds of millions of pounds have been spent pursuing the impossible dream.

The early years of the quest were notable, chiefly, for the fact that they were rarely admitted publicly. The companies feared that public acknowledgement of a link between smoking, addiction and health would cause governments to regulate, sales to collapse and ruinous lawsuits to be brought. Now, a brave new era is upon us. All of the major tobacco companies are openly pursuing safer, “reduced toxicant” products. Large teams of scientists in labs across the world are working on finding new and fascinating ways of lessening the harm of the most fatal habit of all, even if they’re not entirely sure they’ll succeed.

It’s hard to imagine that the research and development laboratories of British American Tobacco (BAT) were once a secret. When approaching it on foot, through the Southampton suburb that surrounds it, the enormous, glinting complex looms into view at the end of a narrow street. In its vast concrete spaces, great machines manufacture experimental cigarettes and strange nicotine products. In laboratories, researchers in white coats work among corridors of pristine equipment, pouring liquids into test tubes and inserting cigarettes into robotic smokers.

“Whilst we have a fiduciary responsibility to make money for our shareholders, we also need to behave responsibly,” says chief scientific officer, Dr Chris Proctor, who sits in a conference room beneath a large perspex sign that reads “we welcome your comments”. “We’ve got consumers getting sick because they use our products.”

It’s a statement that previous BAT executives wouldn’t have dreamt of making. Incredibly, tobacco companies in the US were still denying the link between smoking, addiction and disease as recently as 2000 (in Britain, they began conceding the truth in the early Nineties). Just outside the room is a portrait of Proctor’s predecessor, Sir Charles Ellis, who surely would have been startled to hear what he’s been saying.

In 1962, the tobacco industry’s nightmare became real. A study by the Royal College of Physicians concluded that smoking causes lung cancer and urged the government to take “decisive steps” to combat the problem. In a speech to his colleagues that year, Sir Charles struggled to concede the devastating science, insisting that those who saw a link had “reached an emotional conclusion in which they believed passionately and sincerely… We know only too well that there are no conclusive proofs; that there are few, if any, cold scientific facts.” But, he added, if a link was ultimately proven, scientists would surely find a way to solve the problem. Cigarettes would be made safe.

The health risks were not to be admitted publicly, however. To protect themselves, special code words were used in internal documents, such as those that were zooming about BAT’s famous Southampton labs in 1957, which used “zephyr” for lung cancer and “borstal” for carcinogens.

One early answer was the filter. When Kent introduced its new filtered cigarettes, sales increased by more than $20 billion in a year. But there was a problem. “It was made out of asbestos,” says Mitch Zeller, a former associate commissioner of America’s Food and Drug Administration. “Sadly, all the people that were sucking down on those filters were sucking down asbestos fibres as well.”

In the early Seventies, the industry came up with another clever scheme: “light” or “low-tar” cigarettes that had tiny, laser-cut holes in their paper and would, in theory, dilute the smoke with fresh air, and thus reduce its harmful toxins. Once again, there was a problem: “Filter ventilation is probably the greatest fraud that has ever been perpetrated on consumers,” Zeller says. “All of the patents for this technology said that the holes were put 12mm from the mouth end of the cigarette. Why? Because when you place that cigarette in a smoking machine, which is used to measure tar and nicotine delivery, the ventilation holes are left open and that has a dilution effect. But when a human being smokes that cigarette, 12mm is where your lips and fingers go. So they block the holes.” A 1980 study found that when these holes are blocked, the toxic load of a “low tar” or “light” cigarette can be increased by up to 300 per cent.

It wasn’t until 1988 that the industry announced its next major advance, with the launch by US firm R J Reynolds of the ingenious “Premier” cigarette. Having cost $325 million to develop, the Premier helped solve the primary source of danger to any smoker: combustion.

It’s the act of burning, according to Robert West, professor of health psychology at University College, London, that triggers the release of hundreds of toxic substances. “Carbon monoxide is a poisonous gas that is produced whenever you burn any organic compound, whether it’s petrol, paper or tobacco leaf,” he says. “When you inhale it, it gets into the bloodstream, and that has a number of effects, one of which is to increase the hardening of the arteries. That contributes to heart disease. Then you’ve got the ‘tar’, which is just the name for a very large number of chemicals, many of which are known to be highly carcinogenic.”

The revolutionary idea behind the Premier was that it didn’t burn tobacco, but heated it instead. “You still got a lot of carbon monoxide, but you didn’t get anything like the tar exposure,” says West. But, yet again, there was a problem. The taste. The primary flavours of the Premier were sulphur and charcoal. Despite the company’s scientists attempting to mask it with hints of raspberry and chocolate, it didn’t stop test subjects describing the taste as being redolent of “burning plastic” and “s---”.

What they couldn’t know, back in the Eighties, was that their mission had been impossible from the start. Today, neuroscientists know cigarettes to be addictive in several different ways. One of its mechanisms involves nicotine triggering the release of dopamine in a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens, where it acts as a teaching signal. “It tells the brain, ‘Pay attention to what you were just doing and the situation in which you were just doing it and the next time that situation comes along, do it again,’ ” explains West. The smoker remembers the act, ritual and experience of enjoying a cigarette, and develops a powerful urge to recreate it.

One major problem with genuinely low-tar cigarettes, such as the Premier, is that the tar is where most of the flavour lives. To the smoker’s addicted brain, it is simply delicious. “Nicotine trains you to smoke cigarettes with the kind of flavour that you’re used to,” says West. “And so even switching brands for smokers can be a bit of a thing, because it tastes different.” The Premier, then, was too different an experience ever to stand a chance. It lasted just a few months before it was withdrawn.

Deep in the smoking archives hides an altogether more curious tale. Early in the Sixties, a team of scientists led by the chemist James Mold announced to their bosses at the Liggett & Myers Tobacco Company that they had developed a truly “cancer-free” cigarette. Mold, now deceased, told a reporter in 1992, “We were the only ones in the whole damned world able to solve this problem.” After studying his data, the company apparently agreed. They stockpiled ingredients for Mold’s creation (it was to be coated with the metal palladium), and developed an advertising campaign for what they’d called “Tame” cigarettes. And then, it was killed. “I think they were concerned that they’d have everybody suing them because they’d be admitting they’d been making a hazardous cigarette,” said Mold.

Did the tobacco industry really conspire to destroy what it believed to be a truly cancer-free cigarette? “It wouldn’t surprise me,” says Zeller, who tussled with US tobacco companies for seven years in his time at the FDA. “Back then, when they were denying causality and addiction, I can see why that kind of decision would be made, for commercial and legal reasons. But I wonder how good the science was that showed it reduced the risk of cancer. I wonder what kind of evidence they had.”

Back at BAT, one of Proctor’s proposed solutions comes as a surprise. Not a cigarette at all, but a form of tobacco that you put into your mouth, where the nicotine kind of oozes out. It’s called “snus” and BAT has its own manufacturing plant just downstairs from where we’re sitting.

According to West, “Snus is a special form of tobacco that’s got practically no carcinogens in it. There are some questions about whether it might have a slight increased risk of heart disease, but it’s near enough safe.” Unfortunately, though, snus is illegal in Britain. “Which doesn’t make any sense at all,” says West. “There have already been two legal challenges in the European court that didn’t go anywhere, so I don’t see it changing any time soon.”

Even if the law could be overturned, Proctor’s experience promoting snus in markets where it is permitted suggests the task may be formidable. “We thought we’d have a go at snus,” he begins, brightly. “So we bought a small company in Sweden, which is now part of the group, and started trials in Japan, South Africa and Canada. In Japan it flopped. In South Africa, we tried for three or four years to get people to adopt the habit, but it was hard. And in Canada, I flew to Ottawa in 1998 to give a press conference about snus. There was me and our press officer sat in front of all these Canadian flags. No one turned up.”

One problem with snus is the perhaps insurmountable one: the dopamine in the nucleus accumbens, which teaches people to smoke exactly what they’ve always smoked, and not suck on a tea bag full of dead leaves.

Much of BAT’s research millions have been spent on developing a more traditional cigarette, which is known internally as the “RTP”, or “reduced toxicant prototype”. Using a combination of technologies – resins that absorb toxicants; tobacco that’s been specially washed and treated, then bulked out with a papery equivalent; chalk and seaweed added to the paper – they hoped to create a brand new product. Initial testing, though, has caused BAT to temper their ambitions. They’re now hoping to introduce some of their innovations into their standard smokes.

But even if they do manage to prove that their new creations lessen exposure to various toxicants, it’s another thing entirely to show that this reduction will lead to any significant health benefit. “How do you evaluate if any of this is going to be of useful effect?” asks Proctor. “That’s the story of a lot of our research effort for the last five or six years. It’s one of the most challenging things, figuring out if what you’ve done to the product actually reduces the risk.”

Zeller makes much the same point, although rather less optimistically. “At the end of the day, you’re still burning tobacco leaves and inhaling the smoke into your lungs. These products might make the difference between falling out of a 14-storey window and a 10-storey window.”

True to the spirit of Sir Charles, Proctor will press on. “It’s hugely challenging, but we’re going to continue on this journey of trying to reduce the toxicants in smoke and seeing whether they are beneficial,” he says. And does he believe that the ultimate prize, a cigarette that is both smokable and safe, will eventually be won? “No.”

This article also appeared in SEVEN magazine, free with the Sunday Telegraph. Follow SEVEN on Twitter @TelegraphSeven

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Five thousand years ago, the Egyptians used reef knots to fasten their belts. In the first century, Greek physicians employed both reef knots and clove hitches to tie surgical nooses. Today, these ancient knots are coming in handy on Mars.

On the decks of NASA's Curiosity rover, some of the most advanced pieces of equipment ever developed are being held together by some of the oldest forms of human technology: cleverly looped ropes. Apparently, when you're sending a robot millions of miles out of reach, time-tested tying methods win out over newfangled epoxies or ratchet zip ties.

Knot enthusiasts at the International Guild of Knot Tyers (IGKT) Forum have analyzed color photos that the Martian rover recently took of the equipment on its decks. As PopSci.com reports, the photos reveal some intricate knot work.

According to knot aficionado David Fred, NASA engineers appear to have primarily employed the "spot tie" on the Curiosity rover — a combination of a clove hitch and a reef knot that works both to bind cables and affix cable bundles to tie-down points. The spot tie is a knot of choice in space missions, Fred explained, because it applies even pressure on bound material without getting overly tight.

"The inner profile of the clove hitch is smooth," Fred wrote on the IGKT Forum. "Both turns bear on the bound object evenly throughout their contact.  The contact area is increased by having two turns.  When the reef knot is added, the ends are pulled up and away from the object.  There is some extra pressure exerted by the reef knot on the riding turn, but this is distributed onto the two underlying turns." [The Mysterious Physics of 7 Everyday Things]

Furthermore, the knot remains secure without constricting cables or wearing them down over time, as zip ties are prone to do. 

Fred noted that knots have almost always had a place in interplanetary missions. "If human civilization ends tomorrow, interplanetary landers, orbiters and deep space probes will preserve evidence of both the oldest and newest of human technologies for millions of years," Fred wrote.

 The ongoing use of this proven technology, he continued, "is a testament to the effectiveness of properly chosen knots tied by skilled craftspeople."  

Follow Natalie Wolchover on Twitter @nattyover or Life's Little Mysteries @llmysteries. We're also on Facebook & Google+.

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BP has suffered a further blow after it was revealed that Hurricane Isaac has uncovered oil that wasn't cleaned up after the Gulf of Mexico spill in 2010.

Since Isaac made landfall more than a week ago, the water the storm has receded and tar balls and oil have been reported on shores in Alabama and Louisiana, where officials closed a 13-mile stretch of beach on Tuesday.

BP said some of that oil was from the spill, but said some of the crude may be from other sources, too, AP reported.

"If there's something good about this storm it made it visible where we can clean it up," BP spokesman Ray Melick said.

BP still has hundreds of cleanup workers on the Gulf Coast after the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded, killing 11 workers and leading to the nation's largest offshore spill.

Melick said the company was working with the Coast Guard, state officials and land managers to clean up the oil on the Fourchon beach in Louisiana. He said crews would be there on Thursday.

Isaac made landfall near Fourchon on August 28 as a Category 1 storm, pummeling the coast with waves, wind and rain. Seven people were killed in Louisiana and Mississippi.

Ed Overton, a chemist and oil spill expert at Louisiana State University, said the exposed oil was weathered and less toxic, though it could still harm animals - such as crabs, crawfish and bait fish.

He said the storm helped speed up natural processes that break down oil and it might take several more storms to stir up the rest of the oil buried along the coast.

"We don't like to say it, but hurricanes are Mother Nature's way of taking a bath," he said.

The reappearance of oil frustrated state officials.

Garret Graves, a top coastal aide to Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, accused BP of not being aggressive enough with its initial cleanup.

"If they would put just a fraction of the dollars they're putting into their PR campaign into cleanup, we'd certainly be much farther ahead than we are now," he said.

BP has spent millions of dollars on its public relations campaign, but the company has not said exactly how much it has invested. Its cleanup and response costs over the past two years were more than $14bn (£8.8bn) and more than 66m man-hours have gone to protect and treat the Gulf shoreline, the company has said.

BP also gave $1m to the American Red Cross and The Salvation Army to help victims of Isaac.

On Wednesday the US government reiterated that it would seek to prove that the oil major’s “gross negligence” caused the Gulf of Mexico disaster – stoking fears that it will become embroiled in a lengthy trial.

The group, which has always denied the charge, saw its shares fall 2.9pc to 423.85p, wiping £2.7bn off its value amid concerns that the dispute will prevent it reaching a settlement with US authorities.

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Organic food is no healthier than food grown through conventional methods, according to a group of scientists at Stanford University. After examining the results of 237 past studies on the subject, they concluded that fruits, vegetables and meat labeled organic had, on average, the same nutritional value as their cheaper, nonorganic counterparts.

The surprising finding may have some people reassessing which shelf to shop from at the supermarket, but supporters of the organic movement say there are still many reasons to shell out extra cash for organic groceries. If so, what are they?

Pesticide avoidance

Some consumers shy away from conventionally grown produce to avoid residues of the synthetic chemicals that get sprayed onto crops to kill pests on conventional farms. Organic farms are generally pesticide-free, relying on natural pest-control methods to keep bugs at bay. Indeed, the Stanford research found that 38 percent of conventionally grown food samples contained traces of pesticides.

These pesticide residues can have hidden health consequences. According to the New York Times, three studies published last year found that pregnant women who are exposed to higher amounts of pesticides known as organophosphates end up having children with IQs that are several points lower, on average, than those of their peers.

However, there's a twist. The Stanford scientists found that 7 percent of the organic food samples in the studies they examined contained traces of pesticides as well, despite the fact that organic farms should be pesticide-free. "This may be due to pesticide drift, persistent pesticides in the soil from previous conventional farming, storage or harvesting practices resulting in contamination, or mislabeling," study co-author Dr. Crystal Smith-Spangler wrote in an email. The possibility of pesticide contamination of food across the board suggests people should wash both organic and nonorganic produce before eating it. And washing the food erases the difference between the pesticide levels that existed, said Dr. Dena Bravata, lead researcher and a health policy affiliate at Stanford School of Medicine.

But the argument for less contamination is stronger when it comes to organic animal products, she said. Whereas animals raised on conventional factory farms are typically treated with antibiotics to prevent the infections that would otherwise plague livestock living in such close quarters, organic meat and dairy are antibiotic-free. Similarly, some conventional dairy farms inject cows with artificial growth hormones, while organic dairy farms do not. This means consumers of organic animal products can avoid contributing to the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and they can steer clear of any potentially adverse effects of consuming hormones (although such effects have not been clearly identified). [Will People Really Be Forced to Stop Eating Meat?]

Good taste

In surveys, people who buy organic food report doing so in part because they prefer the taste. However, Bravata said taste differences between organic and conventional food have not been substantiated in the lab. Are taste advantages just another widely held misconception? Perhaps, but taste advantages could also result from the fact that many organic farms tend to get food to consumers more quickly than conventional farms, a factor that strongly affects taste.

Studies show fresh, ripe fruit and vegetables taste better. "That has nothing to do with whether it was grown organically or not, but everything to do with harvest, storage, and how long it takes to get the food from farm to table," Bravata said. Some of the places one tends to find organic produce, such as farmers' markets and farm-to-table restaurants, will use local, and thus more recently harvested, produce, and so it tastes better, she said. [Organic vs. Local: Which Food Is Best?]

Sustainability

For many consumers, the choice to go organic stems from environmental concerns. Not only do the chemical fertilizers and pesticides applied to conventional farms require fossil fuels to produce, scientists say they also have negative consequences for the Earth. But what are these consequences?

On conventional farms, the nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium plants need to grow are added to the soil in chemical form each season, and, according to David Pimentel, an emeritus professor of ecology and agriculture at Cornell University, each season, excess fertilizers leach into the water.

"The runoff of unutilized synthetic nitrogen fertilizer from conventional agriculture into both ground and surface waters and the atmosphere — where, as nitric oxides, it contributes to global climate change as a greenhouse gas – is a major problem in the U.S. and elsewhere," Pimentel told Life's Little Mysteries. "The 'dead zones' in the Gulf of Mexico are due to nitrogen fertilizer runoff from fields in the Corn Belt and elsewhere that stimulate phytoplankton blooms and die-offs, which then decay and deplete the water column of oxygen."

Organic farms, by comparison, provide the nutrients needed for crop growth by enriching the soil with compost, manure and by planting "cover crops" in fields between each growing season, Pimentel explained. Cover crops, which often include legumes, not only physically protect fields from erosion, they also are associated with bacteria that can convert atmospheric nitrogen into a form plants can use, and they increase the soil's content of organic matter, which functions to increase its water- and nutrient-holding capacity.

"Preventing soil erosion eliminates much of the need for synthetic fertilizers," Pimentel said, "since eroded soil includes a disproportionate amount of soil organic matter to which nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium tend to be adsorbed onto, and the soil left with less soil organic matter is even more erodible. Conventional continuous monoculture of crops simply is not sustainable."

Farm efficiency

For those who argue that conventional farming is simply a necessary evil for feeding the outsized human population — and so, the question is often asked, why spend more at the supermarket to prop up a doomed agricultural model? — this belief appears to be outdated.

According to Pimentel, farms wildly overuse chemicals. In a long-term study that culminated in a paper published in 2005 in the journal Bioscience, he and colleagues were able to grow corn and soybean crops over a 22-year period "without using a drop of pesticide," he said, and the crops achieved equivalent yields to those of a conventional farm used as a control, while requiring the input of about 30 percent less fossil fuel energy.

"Commercial fertilizers for the conventional system were produced employing fossil energy, whereas the nitrogen nutrients for the organic systems were obtained from legumes or cattle manure, or both. The intensive reliance on fossil fuel energy in the conventional corn production system is why that system requires more overall energy inputs than do organic production systems," the researchers wrote.

Many countries have drastically lessened their reliance on pesticides. "Sweden has been able to reduce pesticide use over a 10-year period by 68 percent and still get the same crop yields and the same cosmetic standards," Pimentel said. The U.S. lags behind.

So, should you go organic? On the con side, organic food costs more. According to the Stanford scientists, it has roughly the same nutritional value as conventional produce, and, at least in supermarkets, isn't guaranteed to taste much better than the food on the next shelf over. On the pro side, organic food is less contaminated by hormones and pesticides, and it engenders far less unnecessary contamination of the planet with those chemicals. Ultimately, it's your call.

Follow Natalie Wolchover on Twitter @nattyover or Life's Little Mysteries @llmysteries. We're also on Facebook & Google+.

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The dream of modifying a person's dreams has just gotten a step closer, as MIT scientists were able to manipulate what lab rats "saw" in their sleep using audio cues.

Scientists have known that during sleep, a part of the brain called the hippocampus "replays" the day's events in a process that might help solidify a person's memories. The same has been shown in rats that dream about running through mazes after a day's work in a lab at MIT.

In the new MIT study, researchers Matthew Wilson and Daniel Bendor trained rats to run through a maze using audio cues, with one sound directing the animals to a reward on the right side of the track, and another sound leading the rats to a reward on left.

The rat brains showed specific patterns of activation of certain sets of neurons in the hippocampus depending on whether they ran to the right or the left side of the maze. These neurons, so-called place cells, tell the rats where they are spatially and are known to fire in certain patterns when a rat is in a particular location.

When the animals went to sleep, the researchers re-analyzed the neural activity in the hippocampus; during non-REM sleep, the researchers played about once every five to 10 seconds a random sound, including the two sounds associated with the two sides of the maze. "When the sound associated with the left side of the maze was played, the dream content switched to memories of running down the left side of the maze," Wilson told LiveScience. "When the sound associated with the right side was played, the dream content switched to the right side of the maze."

Even though the sounds were played for less than a second, the influence on dream content persisted, Wilson said, for five to 10 seconds. "[S]o the sounds were not simply driving the dream content, but seemed to be biasing or selecting the memories that would be subsequently replayed," he said.

This same phenomenon didn't show up when the rats were awake and not in the maze.

"When we played the sounds while the animals were just sitting quietly and 'thinking' but not sleeping, we were not able to influence replayed memory content," Wilson said.

The study, detailed online Sept. 2 in the journal Nature Neuroscience, suggest memories could be modified during sleep. "This could be thought of as a simple form of dream engineering and opens up the possibility of more extensive control of memory processing during sleep to enhance selected memories and to block or modify unwanted memories," Wilson and Bendor write.

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What’s this world coming to?

A friend I’ll call Peter shook his head in disbelief when his German girlfriend decided to “train” him to sit while urinating.

Things were going quite well between the couple, until the day she saw his upright silhouette through the semi-see-through door to the bathroom and freaked out: “Oh, no! Peter, please sit while using the toilet. Where do you think you are? In the woods?”

He was devastated.

“The urinal is the last remaining bastion of proper machismo. The one place where women haven’t been trying to get equal,” he argued. “And now we don’t even have that.”

Peter, an American man who had just turned 30, was so shocked by the idea that German women expect men to sit down while peeing, he had to move back to the US.

Well, there were other things standing between them — besides himself urinating — to be honest.

But the emasculation process definitely started there, with his upright silhouette looming carelessly behind the bathroom door. He probably didn’t put the toilet seat down, either, but that’s a whole other conversation.

Since then, I have heard quite a few men complain about being forced to sit while urinating. Granted, the complains typically come from American men traveling to countries where it‘s the norm, but still. Since Americans are typically the ones feeling superior about their hygiene habits — constantly pestering Europeans for not showering enough — chances are the sitting-while-peeing-because-it’s-more-hygienic habit might cross the Atlantic very soon.

Hopefully, though, it won’t become a political issue, like it is in Sweden these days.

The Left Party in Sörmland is taking a stand to ensure men take a seat when emptying their bladders. Viggo Hansen, a substitute member of the county council and the man responsible for the proposal, wants to start by having the council’s office toilets to be genderless and is pushing for the "sit-down only" requirement, The Local reports.

According to the article, the party claims there are two very important reasons why men sit when they urinate:

1. Hygiene. The party wants to ensure that “no one who uses the toilets at the county council's offices will be required to walk through puddles or residue left by stray urine which happens to splash out of the bowl and onto the floor when male employees pee standing up.”
2. Health. The party also cites medical research showing men empty their bladders more efficiently when they are seated. That, in turn, apparently reduces the risk for prostate problems, but also helps men who sit rather than stand achieve longer and healthier sex lives.

The Left Party proposes making the change gradually. They want to first label toilets which are designated for men who absolutely want to remain standing when they pee.

One can only wonder what the labels will say. Die-hard standers? The upright brigade? Perhaps they should just go with pictorials.

Now enter Taiwan.

Stephen Shen, the country's Environmental Protection Administration minister, has said that sitting on the creates a cleaner environment.

Apparently, some of Taiwan's estimated 100,000 public toilets — regularly graded for cleanliness — are still smelly due to urine spatter. He is suggesting that men sit at all toilets, public and private.

Sweden, it appears, is the poster child for peeing seated globally.

Here's how the BBC reported the story:

"We want to learn from Japan and Sweden," said Yuan Shaw-jing, the director general of environmental sanitation and toxic substance maintenance at the environment ministry. "In Japan, we heard 30 percent of the men sit," he told BBC.

So Taiwan just joined a growing list of countries where men standing while peeing are becoming a thing of the uncivilized past.

Remember when children rode bicycles without helmets? When women didn’t wax their pubic hair? When people got their news from newspapers? When men used to stand while urinating? That kind of thing.

Although, arguably, sitting while peeing has little to do with modernity.

Islam, for example, has always endorsed taking a seat. To be precise, it is not haraam (sinful) for a man to urinate standing up, but it is Sunnah (the way Prophet Muhammad would do it) for him to urinate sitting down, at least according to the very informative Islam QA Web site:

“Aa’ishah (may Allaah be pleased with her) said: ‘Whoever tells you that the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) used to urinate standing up, do not believe him. He only ever used to urinate sitting down.’ And because this is more concealing, and it reduces the risk of any drops of urine splashing up onto him.”

Is it clear now or are you still not convinced about the sinfulness of urinating in the upright position?

Watch this detailed explanation on Dawah Kid TV:

I wonder how long it would take to get the entire global male population potty trained?

And, more importantly, should we even go there?

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NASA spacecraft watching the sun have captured jaw-dropping pictures and video of a giant filament of super-hot plasma reaching up from the star's surface and erupting into space.

The filament was made of solar material that was ejected from the sun during an intense solar storm on Aug. 31. Flares are caused by increased magnetic activity on the surface of our star, and are becoming more common as the sun approaches a phase of peak activity in 2013.

The filament was spotted by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, was likely gigantic, scientists say. The spacecraft and other sun-watching observatories recorded an amazing video of the giant solar filament and the solar eruption, called a coronal mass ejection (or CME), that followed.

"It is hard to easily judge the size of this 3D event with a 2D image at this angle, but this filament is probably on the order of 30 Earths across, 300,000 kilometers or 186,000 miles," said C. Alex Young, a solar physicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "When the filament expanded into space it quickly became more extended leaving the sun as a CME many solar diameters across, many millions of kilometers or miles." [Sun Erupts With Spectacular Prominence (Photos)]

The filament erupted out into space on Aug. 31 at 4:36 p.m. EDT, releasing a coronal mass ejection that traveled at more than 900 miles (1,450 km) per second.

Coronal mass ejections are made of charged particles, and when they collide with Earth, they can disrupt satellite and radio communications and damage power grids. A more benevolent effect of CMEs is that auroras, also known as the Northern and Southern Lights, can put on especially beautiful shows as these charged particles hit Earth's magnetic field.

Indeed, some skywatchers on Earth managed to catch views of these auroras in the days after the Aug. 31 solar storm. 

"The CME did not travel directly toward Earth, but did connect with Earth's magnetic environment, or magnetosphere, with a glancing blow, causing aurora to appear on the night of Monday, September 3," NASA scientists wrote in a statement.

The filament itself was photographed by the Solar Dynamics Observatory in four different wavelengths of light, corresponding to solar material at different temperatures. By comparing these images, scientists aim to better map out how this solar plasma moves during an eruption.

Solar filaments are also known as solar prominences (they are filaments when we can see them against the face of the sun). They are anchored to the sun's lower atmosphere layer called the photosphere, and extend outward through its shot outer atmosphere, called the corona.

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Global warming may fuel stronger hurricanes whose winds whip up faster, new research suggests.

Hurricanes and other tropical cyclones across the globe reach Category 3 wind speeds nearly nine hours earlier than they did 25 years ago, the study found. In the North Atlantic, the storms have shaved almost a day (20 hours) off their spin-up to Category 3, the researchers report. (Category 3 hurricanes have winds between 111 and 129 mph, or 178 and 208 kph.)

"Storms are intensifying at a much more rapid pace than they used to 25 years back," said climatologist Dev Niyogi, a professor at Purdue University in Indiana and senior author of the study.

The work helps support the theory that rising ocean temperatures have shifted the intensity of tropical cyclones, which include hurricanes and typhoons, to higher levels. In the past century, sea surface temperatures have risen 0.9 degree Fahrenheit (0.5 degree Celsius) globally. Scientists continue to debate whether this increase in temperature will boost the intensity or the number of storms, or both. Globally, about 90 tropical cyclones, on average, occur every year.

Storms getting stronger

Tropical cyclones form when warm, moist air over the ocean surface fuels convection. The storms act like heat engines: The warmer the ocean surface, the more energy there is to power a storm's fierce winds. As such, scientists have hypothesized global warming and the associated rising heat of sea surfaces would fuel intense hurricanes.

Most of the initial strengthening of storms, from Category 1 to Category 3, happens on the open ocean, not as a storm is approaching land. So even if storms are intensifying more quickly, it may not result in higher peak wind speeds and more rainfall when hurricanes make landfall. (Category 1 storms have wind speeds of at least 74 mph, or 119 kph.) [5 Hurricane Categories: Historical Examples]

But Niyogi and his colleagues found an overall shift toward more intense storms in all ocean basins except the East Pacific. "They are getting stronger more quickly, and also higher category. The intensity as well as the rate of intensity is increasing," said Niyogi. And that makes it a simple numbers game – with more strong storms forming in the oceans, the chance of having powerful hurricanes hit the coast rises.

"If storms in general are intensifying faster, then these storms making landfall could have a greater probability of being stronger storms," Niyogi told LiveScience.

The researchers also report that storms in the North Atlantic now typically mature from a Category 1 to a Category 3 in 40 hours instead of the 60 hours that transition took 25 years ago. (Hurricane Michael, currently swirling far out over the Atlantic went from a Category 1 hurricane to a Category 3 in about 6 hours, according to reports from the National Hurricane Center.)

The North Atlantic basin also shows the strongest warming trends during the study period. In the past 30 years, sea surface temperatures in Hurricane Alley – the main Atlantic hurricane development region – increased nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius).

The research is detailed in the May 26 issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Debating climate change

Scientists don't see eye-to-eye over global warming's effects on hurricanes. There are many environmental factors that could strengthen hurricanes or increase their frequency, including natural climate cycles. Researchers are actively investigating whether natural climatic variability is responsible for observed changes, such as an increase in hurricane frequency and strength in the Atlantic, while others are testing if climate change is the culprit. [10 Climate Change Myths Busted]

"There is legitimate uncertainty about a large number of issues about climate change and hurricanes. There are still pieces missing from the puzzle," said Michael Mann, a climate researcher and director of Pennsylvania State University's Earth System Science Center, who was not involved in the study.

Common criticisms of research connecting global warming and hurricanes include the fact that it often relies on data of different quality and collected with different techniques, or whose historical record is spotty. In addition, environmental variables beyond climate change are known to strengthen and weaken hurricanes.

To address these concerns, Niyogi and his co-authors studied wind-speed data from a uniform 25-year satellite record of storms across the planet. They also looked at only the primary intensification period – while the storms were still in open ocean water. During this first build-up, wind speeds change primarily due to oceanic feedback. This avoids the complicating influence of complex atmospheric processes such as wind shear (winds flowing in opposite directions at different heights in the atmosphere) and interaction with other storms, as well as travel over land, Niyogi explained.

"This study adds another piece to [the] puzzle and makes clear this picture that is emerging, that there will be an influence of climate change when it comes to the rate of intensification of storms and maximum intensity that storms can reach," Mann said. "There's this whole body of work that does seem to be pointing in the same direction of increasingly fast intensification and increasing intensity in the Atlantic."

Preventing Losses

Damage from hurricanes is a major issue in the United States. Losses from Hurricane Isaac, which flooded Louisiana and Mississippi in August and September, are estimated at $1.2 billion. And Isaac was a Category 1 hurricane.

But the risk of damage from stronger storms is outweighed by the expected financial hit from people putting themselves in harm's way, according to a study published in the Aug. 28 issue of Geophysical Research Letters.

Changes in exposure – more people living on the coast, more expensive real estate – are much more important than an increase in wind speeds when considering future financial losses, said study coauthor Rick Murnane, an expert in natural hazards at the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences in Garrett Park, Md.

But improving building codes can make a significant impact in reducing the economic impact of storms, Murnane added.

"If you build properly for wind speeds, these losses aren't going to matter," he said. "In Bermuda, houses are built to withstand 150 mph [240 kph] winds, so unless you have very strong hurricanes, relatively little damage is done to buildings. You can still have people living along the coast and be able to withstand these events with relatively small amounts of damage."

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Nobody ever claimed a visit to the doctor was a pleasant way to pass the time.

But if you’re timid about diving onto a psychiatrist’s couch or paranoid about popping pills, remember: It could be worse.

Like getting-a-hole-drilled-into-your-skull worse.

In 1927, a Viennese doctor used insulin overdoses to put patients in a coma and "cure" their drug addictions.

The coma-therapy trend began in 1927. Viennese physician Manfred Sakel accidentally gave one of his diabetic patients an insulin overdose, and it sent her into a coma. But what could have been a major medical faux pas turned into a triumph. The woman, a drug addict, woke up and declared her morphine craving gone. Then Sakel (who really isn’t earning our trust here) made the same mistake with another patient, who also woke up claiming to be cured.

Before long, Sakel was intentionally testing the therapy with other patients and reporting a 90 percent recovery rate, particularly among schizophrenics. Strangely, however, Sakel’s treatment successes remain a mystery. Presumably, a big dose of insulin causes blood sugar levels to plummet, which starves the brain of food and sends the patient into a coma. But why this unconscious state would help psychiatric patients is anyone’s guess.

Regardless, the popularity of insulin therapy faded, mainly because it was dangerous. Slipping into a coma is no walk in the park, and between one and two percent of treated patients died as a result.

Ancient cultures used to drill holes in peoples' skulls to get rid of "demons lurking inside." Some people still use this therapy today.

Ancient life was not without its hazards. Between wars, drunken duels, and the occasional run-in with an inadequately domesticated pig, it’s no surprise that archaic skulls tend to have big holes in them.

But not all holes are created with equal abandon. Through the years, archaeologists have uncovered skulls marked by a carefully cut circular gap, which shows signs of being made long before the owner of the head passed away. These fractures were no accident; they were the result of one of the earliest forms of psychiatric treatment called trepanation. The basic theory behind this “therapy” holds that insanity is caused by demons lurking inside the skull. Boring a hole in the patient’s head creates a door through which the demons can escape, and—voila—out goes the crazy.

Despite the peculiarity of the theory and lack of major-league anesthetics, trepanation was by no means a limited phenomenon. From the Neolithic era to the early 20th century, cultures all over the world used it as a way to cure patients of their ills. Doctors eventually phased out the practice as less, er, invasive procedures were developed. Average Joes, on the other hand, didn’t all follow suit. Trepanation patrons still exist. In fact, they even have their very own organizations … and Web sites! Check out the International Trepanation Advocacy Group at www.trepan.com if you’re still curious.

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Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin's grandfather, tried to spin the crazy out of his patients using "rotational therapy."

Charles Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin was a physician, philosopher, and scientist, but he wasn’t particularly adept at any of the three. Consequently, his ideas weren’t always taken seriously. Of course, this could be because he liked to record them in bad poetic verse (sample: “By immutable immortal laws / Impress’d in Nature by the great first cause, / Say, Muse! How rose from elemental strife / Organic forms, and kindled into life”).

It could also be because his theories were a bit far-fetched, such as his spinning-couch treatment. Darwin’s logic was that sleep could cure disease and that spinning around really fast was a great way to induce the slumber.

Nobody paid much attention to it at first, but later, American physician Benjamin Rush adapted the treatment for psychiatric purposes. He believed that spinning would reduce brain congestion and, in turn, cure mental illness. He was wrong. Instead, Rush just ended up with dizzy patients who were still crazy. These days, rotating chairs are limited to the study of vertigo and space sickness.

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A human skeleton with a cleaved skull discovered beneath a parking lot in England may belong to King Richard III, researchers announced today (Sept. 12), though they have a long way to go in analyzing the bones to determine the identity.

The researchers note they are not saying they have found King Richard III's remains, but that they are moving into the next phase of their search, from the field to the laboratory.

"[W]e are clearly very excited, but the University now must subject the findings to rigorous analysis. DNA analysis will take up to 12 weeks," Richard Taylor, the director of corporate affairs at the University of Leicester, told reporters this morning, as recorded in a tweet. 

The remains were hidden within the choir of a medieval church known as Greyfriars, where the English monarch was thought to be buried. Though the location of this church had been lost, historical records suggested Richard III was buried there upon his death in battle in 1485.

Two skeletons were discovered: a female skeleton that was broken apart at the joints was discovered in what is believed to be the Presbytery of the lost Church; the other skeleton, which appears to be an adult male, was found in the church choir and shows signs of trauma to the skull and back before death, which would be consistent with a battle injury, the researchers said. [See images of the Richard III discoveries]

"A bladed implement appears to have cleaved part of the rear of the skull," according to a University of Leicester statement.

In addition, a barbed metal arrowhead was lodged between the vertebrae of the male skeleton's upper back, Taylor said, adding that the spinal abnormalities suggest the individual had severe scoliosis, though was not a hunchback, as he was portrayed by Shakespeare in the play of the king's name.

Even so, the scoliosis seen in the skeleton would've made the man's right shoulder appear visibly higher than the left one. "This is consistent with contemporary accounts of Richard’s appearance," according to the university statement.

University of Leicester archaeologists began excavating the parking lot of the Leicester City Council building on Aug. 25, in search of the church and the king's remains. Since then, they have turned up the Franciscan friary, a 17th-century garden thought to hold a memorial to the king and various other artifacts.

On Aug. 31, the dig team applied to the Ministry of Justice for permission to begin exhuming the two skeletons, a process that began on Sept. 4.

"We are hopeful that we will recover DNA from the skeleton," University of Leicester geneticist Turi King said at the briefing, as recorded in a tweet by the university.

The king's tales

King Richard III ruled for England two years, from 1483 to 1485, before dying in the Battle of Bosworth Field, part of the War of the Roses, an English civil war between the House of Lancaster and the House of York.

A century later, William Shakespeare penned "Richard III," a play about the tragic king — the last English king to die in battle.

The king seemed to have his own following. "Richard III is a charismatic figure who attracts tremendous interest, partly because he has been so much maligned in past centuries, and partly because he occupies a pivotal place in English history," Philippa Langley, a representative of the Richard III society, said in a statement.

"The continuing interest in Richard means that many fables have grown up around his grave," Langley added. For instance, one far-fetched tale described his bones being thrown into the Soar River. [The Science of Death: 10 Tales from the Crypt]

"Other fables, equally discredited, claimed that his coffin was used as a horse-trough," Langley said.

On Sept. 7, the archaeologists announced they had found medieval paving stones that may belong to a garden built in tribute to the king by Robert Herrick, a mayor of Leicester. The garden, and a mansion, was supposedly built over the church where Richard III was buried. In 1612, Christopher Wren, father of the famous architect, recorded seeing a 3-foot (1-meter) stone pillar in Herrick's garden memorializing the king. The pillar held the inscription: "Here lies the body of Richard III sometime King of England."

The bones will now undergo laboratory analyses, including DNA tests, which will be led by University of Leicester geneticist Turi King. The results could then be compared to those of a direct descendant of Richard's sister, who was uncovered by John Ashdown-Hill, author of "The Last Days of Richard III." From those remains, scientists have mitochondrial DNA, or the DNA inside the cell's energy-making structures, which gets passed down only by mothers.

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Two Long Island families with mysterious holes in their roofs think plummeting frozen waste from overhead airplanes might be the cause of their troubles.

Lois Farella awoke to a thunderous crash at 3:30 a.m. on Sunday morning (Sept. 9) and found that her roof had a hole the size of a basketball leading straight through the shingles, plywood and insulation, according to CBS New York. At the same time, the roof of Farella's next-door neighbor's house got a similar makeover. And when her roofer, Bryan Lanzello, investigated the damage, he reportedly found a brown, wet stain in the attic where the offending object would have landed.

“That’s a lot of blunt force that did that [and it] was coming from a distance. It blew through an inch and a half of shingles and those shingles are tough,” Lanzello said.

Convinced that the holes could only have been caused by something falling from an airplane, the two households called the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to investigate whether they'd been the victims of a shower of "blue ice."

Blue ice is a euphemism for the industrial-deodorizer-hued chunks of frozen human waste that can occasionally fall from airplanes with faulty waste tanks.

Though waste should never be released from an airplane during flight, and in fact can't be released intentionally since the valve to open the tank is on the exterior of the plane, sometimes a leak will allow some waste to freeze to the outside of an airplane at high altitude.

As the plane makes its descent, the frozen mass will begin to warm and can decouple from the craft.

According to a fact sheet on the FAA’s website, any such blue ice “would melt long before it hit the ground, dissipating into minuscule droplets that are nearly invisible."

But Arlene Salac, a spokesperson for the FAA's eastern region office, told Life's Little Mysteries, "If it's a large enough chunk of it, it falls off down to the ground. It does definitely occur." She added that in the past, people have frozen specimens of blue ice that landed in their yards or homes to be back-matched to the namesake lavatory chemical and hopefully linked to the airline responsible.

Salac said blue ice did not cause the mysterious Long Island roof holes, however.

"Inspectors went out there today and it doesn't appear from the information we have at this point to be a case of blue ice," she said. "Whenever we have these cases we pull the radar tracks over the residents and there weren't any aircraft going over that house at that time. The closest one was 3 miles away, so it's not a case of blue ice, but we don't know what happened to the house."

Asked whether frozen waste might drift 3 miles on a collision course with a Long Island rooftop, Salac said no.

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Do you "like" voting? Saying so on Facebook could influence your friends to hit the polls.

A single get-out-the-vote message sent to 61 million Facebook users on Election Day 2010 influenced 340,000 people to cast ballots when they otherwise would not have, according to the findings of a massive social experiment. The results, appearing tomorrow (Sept. 13) in the journal Nature, are the first to show that online actions can influence specific real-world behaviors, said study leader James Fowler, who researches social networks at the University of California, San Diego.

"A single message directly mobilized millions of acts of online political communication and information-seeking," Fowler said in a media briefing about the findings. "But even more important, people who saw the message were more likely to show up at the polls."   

Not only that, Fowler said, but having a friend who saw the message — bringing it to your attention either through Facebook or in the real world — increased your chances of voting, too. For every one person directly affected by receiving the Facebook message, four were indirectly influenced to vote.

"If we had only measured the direct effect on recipients [of the message], we would have missed the whole story," Fowler said. "The network is key." [Top 10 Major Political Protests]

Getting out the vote

Voter turnout efforts usually manage to bring an extra 1 percent to 8 percent of people to the polls, according to previous studies, Fowler said. Electronic communication is usually the least effective way to encourage people to vote.

But voting behavior is correlated in social networks: If your good friends vote, it's more likely you will, too. What's difficult for researchers is teasing out whether that's the result of you and your friends being very alike, or whether their behavior truly influences your own.

To find out, the researchers collaborated with Facebook to send 61 million users an Election Day reminder on Nov. 2, 2010. These users saw a social message with the heading "Today is Election Day" and a link to find their polling place alongside pictures of up to six of their friends who had clicked an "I voted" button in the message. The user had the option to click this button as well.

An additional 611,000 people saw the same message, but without the faces of their voting friends. And 613,000 users who logged on that day saw no voting reminder at all.

Facebook protected user privacy by ensuring that the voting data was not linked to individuals in the study analysis, said Cameron Marlow, who works on the data science team at Facebook.

"The individuals who were being studied were being studied in such a way that their individual identifies were not being observed," Marlow said.

Socially contagious voting

The results revealed that a social message makes for a stronger influence than a purely informational one does. Users who saw the get-out-the-vote reminder emblazoned with the faces of their friends were 2.08 percent more likely to click "I voted," and 0.26 percent more likely to use the poll-finding link, than those who saw the reminder without their friends' faces. The social message group was also 0.39 percent more likely to actually go out and vote than the informational message group was, according to an analysis of publicly available voting records.

In fact, getting an informational message without the social component didn't influence real-world behavior at all, the researchers found. People who got the informational message were no more likely to vote than people who got no message at all.

To study indirect effects of the message, the researchers classified users' close friends on Facebook. Those people in the 80th percentile of on-site interactions were labeled as "close." These pairs are likely to have in-person relationships as well as online ones, Fowler said.

"Only the 10 closest friends mattered for the spread of real-world voting," Fowler said. People with a close friend who was sent the social voting message were 0.224 percent more likely to vote than someone whose friends had not seen the message.

It's not clear exactly how the voting behavior spread, Fowler said. Clicking "I voted" was recorded on users' news feeds and walls, where friends could see it. Or the message could have spurred a real-world conversation about voting that influenced the friends.

In the end, the researchers calculated, the message directly influenced 60,000 people to vote and indirectly influenced 280,000 more to cast a vote.

The get-out-the-vote message had an equally strong effect on liberals and conservatives, Fowler said. [Life's Extremes: Democrat vs. Republican]

Spreading social networks

Fowler said voting behavior is only one way in which Facebook and other social networks might change the real world.

"In the future, I think it would be really interesting to do something similar not just for promoting an election, but for promoting better health, for example, or promoting better mental health," he said. "I think we could see the same kinds of spillover effects."

Marlow wouldn't say whether Facebook has any get-out-the-vote messages planned for the 2012 election. Still, the results of the experiment are bound to catch the eye of the political campaigns.

"What we have shown here is that those two worlds are not separate," Fowler said. "The online world and the real world affect one another. In this case, we find that this message that started online, that spread online, actually affected real-world behavior. It got a third of a million people to the polls."

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A telescope in Chile has snapped a stunning new image of a speedy nebula that is named after a writing tool, but has a closer resemblance to a witch's broom, scientists say.

Astronomers with the European Southern Observatory took the new view of the Pencil nebula using the La Silla Observatory in Chile's high Atacama Desert. The nebula contains the remains of a colossal supernova explosion centuries ago that blasted gas and dust into interstellar space.

"These glowing filaments were created by the violent death of a star that took place about 11 000 years ago," ESO officials said in an image announcement today (Sept. 12). "The brightest part resembles a pencil; hence the name, but the whole structure looks rather more like a traditional witch's broom."

The Pencil nebula, also known as NGC 2736, is about 800 light-years from Earth and moving at a clip of about 403,891 mph (650,000 kph). It is the brightest part of a vast expanding shell of gas in the constellation Vela (The Sails) that is known as the Vela supernova remnant. The remnant was originally hurtling through space at millions of miles an hour and much brighter, but it has cooled and slowed over time, ESO officials said.

In the new ESO photo, the Pencil nebula's wispy gas filaments appear as ripples of light dotted with brighter knots. The nebula gets its brightness from dense pockets of gas that were struck by the supernova shockwave, ESO officials said. Bright blue colors in the image are hot regions of ionized oxygen, while the duller red portions highlight warm hydrogen, they added.

By studying the different hues of the Pencil nebula, astronomers are able to map the object's temperature ranges. The nebula itself measures about 0.75 light-years across.

One light-year is the distance light travels in a single year, about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers).

The Pencil nebula was first discovered in 1835 by astronomer John Herschel, who described the nebula as "an extraordinary long narrow ray of excessively feeble light," ESO officials said. Because of that, it was sometimes referred to as "Herschel's Ray," they added.

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Dr. Manfred Spitzer knows that people find his arguments provocative.

In his first book, he warned parents of the very real dangers of letting their children spend too much time in front of the TV.

Now, in a second book called Digitale Demenz [Digital Dementia], he’s telling them that teaching young kids finger-counting games is much better for them than letting them explore on a laptop.

Spitzer, 54, may be a member of the slide-rule generation that learned multiplication tables by heart, but his work as a neuropsychiatrist has shown him that when young children spend too much time using a computer, their brain development suffers and that the deficits are irreversible and cannot be made up for later in life.

South Korean doctors were the first to describe this phenomenon, and dubbed it digital dementia – whence the title of Spitzer’s book. Simplistically, the message can be summed up this way: the Internet makes you dumb. And it is of course a message that outrages all those who feel utterly comfortable in the digital world. In the aftermath of the publication of Spitzer’s book, they have lost no time venting their wrath across Germany.

And yet Spitzer has accumulated a wealth of scientific information that gives his thesis solid underpinnings, and the studies and data he draws on offer more than enough room for consternation.

Keep reading at WorldCrunch >

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Studies have shown that there are much higher instances of mental disorder in political leaders and creative geniuses than in the general population.

And while it’s impossible to be completely sure of a correct diagnosis of a historical figure, that hasn’t stopped researchers from making educated guesses.

Here’s a speculative look at the mental health of 11 of history’s big thinkers.

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Abraham Lincoln – Depression?

The Great Emancipator managed to lead the country through one of its more trying times, despite suffering from severe depression most of his life. According to one Lincoln biographer, letters left by the president’s friends referred to him as “the most depressed person they’ve ever seen.”

On at least one occasion, he was so overcome with “melancholy” that he collapsed. Both his mother and numerous members of his father’s family exhibited similar symptoms of severe depression, indicating he was probably biologically susceptible to the illness. Lincoln is even assumed to be the author of a poem published in 1838, “The Suicide’s Soliloquy,” which contains the lines:

Hell! What is hell to one like me
Who pleasures never knew;
By friends consigned to misery,
By hope deserted too?

Ludwig von Beethoven – Bipolar Disorder?

When the composer died of liver failure in 1827, he had been self-medicating his many health problems with alcohol for decades. Sadly, much of what he may have suffered from probably could have been managed with today’s medications, including a serious case of bipolar disorder.

Beethoven’s fits of mania were well known in his circle of friends, and when he was on a high he could compose numerous works at once. It was during his down periods that many of his most celebrated works were written. Sadly, that was also when he contemplated suicide, as he told his brothers in letters throughout his life.

During the early part of 1813 he went through such a depressive period that he stopped caring about his appearance, and would fly into rages during dinner parties. He also stopped composing almost completely during that time.

Edvard Munch – Panic Attacks?

The world’s most famous panic attack occurred in Olso during January 1892. Munch recorded the episode in his diary:

“One evening I was walking along a path, the city was on one side and the fjord below. I felt tired and ill. I stopped and looked out over the fjord — the sun was setting, and the clouds turning blood red. I sensed a scream passing through nature.”

This experience affected the artist so deeply he returned to the moment again and again, eventually making two paintings, two pastels, and a lithograph based on his experience, as well as penning a poem derived from the diary entry.

While it isn’t known if Munch had any more panic attacks, mental illness did run in his family; at the time of his episode, his bipolar sister was in an asylum.

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Supplements of fish oil may not prevent heart attacks says a new study out today.

Omega 3 pills are taken by millions of people on a daily basis for a number of ailments but the new research suggests that there is no evidence that they protect the heart.

ABC News reported that previous clinical trials regarding the effectiveness of omega 3s and heart health has been mixed.

Some trials have shown that the supplements prevent strokes, heart attacks and sudden death, while others have shown little to no benefits.

The new meta-analysis reviewed findings from 20 previous studies dating back 24 years, which included about 70,000 volunteers.

Those involved in most of the studies were of European descent and took about 1.5 grams of omega 3 supplements per day for approximately two years.

According to Bloomberg, the team of researchers from the University of Ioannina in Greece used statistical analysis to show that in most studies the pills did not work in preventing heart attacks.

"Overall, omega-3...supplementation was not associated with a lower risk of all-cause mortality, cardiac death, sudden death, myocardial infarction, or stroke," wrote study author Mosef Elisaf, said CTV News.

Omega 3 supplements are big business in the US and around the world.

Bloomberg said that fish oil supplement sales in the US may reach three quarters of a billion dollars with omega 3 fortified foods accounting for about four billion.

The findings were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

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Why do we play? We play in order to learn:

Via Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul:

Play creates new neural connections and tests them. It creates an arena for social interaction and learning. It creates a low-risk format for finding and developing innate skills and talents.

How does this work? When something is fun, it commands our full attention and provides an emotional reward, two things that are key to strengthening memory:

Learning and memory also seem to be fixed more strongly and last longer when learned in play. While this can be objectified in animal tests, it is also a reasonable hypothesis for humans based on performance and outcome results in a variety of educational settings. The link between adequate recess time and later higher performance is one finding that appears to support these benefits. This may be because of the total involvement that play often requires. The state of play is one in which attention is focused exclusively on the pleasurable play activity, and memory fixation has been shown to be closely related to heightened attention and emotional rewards. 

Most animals stop playing and learning once they reach adulthood. Humans are unique in that they have the capacity to play all their lives. Why? Nature designed us to be lifelong learners:

The brain can keep developing long after we leave adolesence and play promotes that growth. We are designed to be lifelong players, built to benefit from play at any age. The human animal is shaped by evolution to be the most flexible of all animals: as we play we continue to change and adapt into old age.

And it might be one of the secrets to our success as a species:

Along with our opposable thumbs and massive prefrontal cortex, a singular characteristic of humans is that we stretch our juvenile period out longer than any other creature. Since one of the primary hallmarks of being juvenile is the desire and capacity to play, what would happen if our brains really keep juvenile elements such as growth and adaptability long past the period of our obvious prolonged chldhoods? What if the maintenance of very useful juvenile qualities in the brain is the secret to success in many species—especially ours?

It's likely that play makes our brains work better:

From the same play histories, I believe that we have anecdotal evidence that with enough play, the brain works better. We feel more optimisitic and more creative. We revel in novelties—a new fashion, new car, a new joke. And through our embrace of the new we are attracted to situations that test skills we do not need now, but may need in the future.

Some of this is speculative but other research points in the same direction. Students who are playful do better in school:

Playfulness was associated with better academic performance (i.e., better grades in an exam). Also, students who described themselves as playful were more likely to do the extra reading that went beyond what was needed to pass the exam. This can be seen as first evidence of a positive relation between playfulness in adults and academic achievement.

Playing video games has been shown to increase creativity, reaction time and even help reduce nightmares.

Playing music has been shown repeatedly to increase intelligence:

After only 20 days of training, only children in the music group exhibited enhanced performance on a measure of verbal intelligence, with 90% of the sample showing this improvement. These improvements in verbal intelligence were positively correlated with changes in functional brain plasticity during an executive-function task.

It may even increase empathy in children:

While not definitive, researchers note that the findings provide “more than tentative support” to their theory that intelligently structured group music-making can promote “day-to-day emotional empathy.”

What's interesting—and something we often forget as adults—is it seems we all may need play in our lives:

Via Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul:

But when play is denied over the long term, our mood darkens. We lose our sense of optimism and we become anhedonic, or incapable of feeling sustained pleasure.

There is laboratory evidence that there is a play deficit much like the well-documented sleep deficit. And just as sleep deficit generates a need for extra "rebound" sleep to catch up, laboratory research shows that animals that are deprived of play will engage in "rebound" play when allowed to do so again. While we don't have statistical evidence that the same happens in humans, anecdotal evidence from parents and teachers, as well as data gathered in many adult play histories I've conducted, indicate that humans also feel a much more intense desire to play when when they have gone a long time without it.

Enough reading. If you want to learn more, go play.

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