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Los Angeles (CNN) -- Cinco de Mayo -- the unofficial U.S. holiday long believed to have been imported, with celebratory beer, from Mexico -- isn't a Mexican holiday at all but rather an American one created by Latinos in the West during the Civil War, according to new research by a California professor. Conventional thinking has held that the holiday -- now a commercial juggernaut -- may have grown out of the mass migrations from the bloody Mexican Revolution of the 1910s or even during Chicano Power activism of the 1960s, University of California at Los Angeles Professor David Hayes-Bautista...

Homophobia is more pronounced in individuals with an unacknowledged attraction to the same sex and who grew up with authoritarian parents who forbade such desires, a series of psychology studies demonstrates.

You can’t argue with the research… Researchers have long known that people who have frequent sex are generally healthier Most health benefits seem to be linked to penile-vaginal intercourse Frequent sex may also bring longer life, fewer coronary events, lower blood pressure Researchers have long known that not only is sex fun (when done with the right person, of course), but that people who have frequent sex tend to live longer and have healthier hearts and lower rates of certain cancers. These studies also show that men with an active sex life have healthier sperm, and sexually active women have...

FRIDAY, May 20 (HealthDay News) -- For the average listener, the vowel sounds in an unfamiliar voice quickly give away the speaker's sexual orientation, a new study finds."I'm not sure what exactly the listeners are responding to in the vowel," study lead author Erik C. Tracy, a cognitive psychologist at Ohio State University, said in a news release from the American Institute of Physics. "Other researchers have done various acoustic analyses to understand why gay and heterosexual men produce vowels differently. Whatever this difference is, it seems that listeners are using it to make this sexual orientation decision." When hearing...

Christmas trees 'make non-Christians feel excluded' Christmas trees should be removed from public places to avoid making non-Christians feel “excluded”, scientists have suggested By Andy Bloxham 11:43AM GMT 20 Dec 2010 Researchers at Simon Fraser University in Canada, found non-Christians feel less self-assured and have fewer positive feelings if a Christmas tree was in the room. The scientists conducted the study using 77 Christians and 57 non-believers, including Buddhists and Sikhs. The participants did not know the survey was about Christmas, and were asked to fill in questions about themselves both when a 12-inch Christmas tree was in the room...

The signatures of a bubble collision: A collision (top left) induces a temperature modulation in the CMB temperature map (top right). The “blob” associated with the collision is identified by a large needlet response (bottom left), and the presence of an edge is determined by a large response from the edge detection algorithm (bottom right). Image credit: Feeney, et al.(PhysOrg.com) -- By looking far out into space and observing what’s going on there, scientists have been led to theorize that it all started with a Big Bang, immediately followed by a brief period of super-accelerated expansion called inflation. Perhaps this...

The very oldest men are still interested in sex but illness and a lack of opportunity may be holding them back, Australian researchers reported on Monday.

The Barry Hussein Soetoro administration is touting a DoD study it hopes will be the basis for Congress repealing DADT. The poll at the center of this study is not an accurate assessment of those who will be most affected by introducing the open aberrant behavior of homosexuality into U.S. armed forces. Proponents of the politically correct social engineering scheme of introducing open homosexuality into the military used a highly unrandomized sample, which is not credible, in hopes to affect public opinion and garner support for their cause. This study is pure propaganda meant to advance the homosexual agenda just...

PARIS (AFP) – Men whose index fingers are longer than their ring, or fourth, fingers run a significantly lower risk of prostate cancer, according to a study published Wednesday in the British Journal of Cancer. The chances of developing the disease drop by a third, and even more in younger men, the study found. "Our results show that relative finger length could be used as a simple test for prostate cancer risk, particularly in men aged under 60," said Ros Eeles, a professor at the Institute of Cancer Research in Britain and co-author of the study. Finger pattern could help...

WASHINGTON, Nov. 23 (UPI) -- The U.S. Department of Defense is funding research to discover how species of Asian snakes are able to glide long distances through the air, researchers say. Researchers at Virginia Tech are studying how snakes of the genus Chrysopelea, found in Southeast Asia, India and southern China, glide without the benefit of any wings or wing-like parts, The Washington Post reported Monday. The snakes undulate from side to side, almost as if slithering through the air, to glide from the tops of 200-foot tall trees to land almost 800 feet away. "Basically ... they become one...

Researchers working on the longest-running study of American lesbian families asked children of lesbian mothers if they had ever been physically or sexually abused by a parent and the answer was never in all cases. . . . Researchers interviewed only 78 children, and participants volunteered to be in the study. . . . The U.S. National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study (NLLFS) is in its 24th year at the the Williams Institute, a research center on sexual orientation law and public policy at UCLA School of Law.

WASHINGTON, DC, October 6, 2010 — Despite the popular, state-sponsored ideology that denies the existence of prejudice based on racial or skin color differences in Mexico, a new study from The University of Texas at Austin provides evidence of profound social inequality by skin color. According to the study, individuals with darker skin tones have less education, have lower status jobs, are more likely to live in poverty, and are less likely to be affluent. Andrés Villarreal, an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and the Population Research Center affiliate, published his findings in the October 2010 issue of...

Don't read Newsweek magazine while drinking a beverage. A spit take is the obvious first reaction to a column by Julia Baird headlined "The Shame of Family Films." On the Internet, this article is coded as "Why Family Films Are So Sexist." Baird's denunciation of Hollywood's fraction of decent entertainment began: "They have all been smash hits: 'Finding Nemo,' 'Madagascar,' 'Ice Age,' 'Toy Story.' Fish, penguins, rats, stuffed animals, talking toys. All good innocent family fun, right? Sure, except there are few female characters in those films. There are certainly few doing anything meaningful or heroic -- and no, Bo...

Study Claiming Abortion Not Linked With Teen Depression Full of Problems Washington, DC -- A new study bandied about by the mainstream media over the weekend claiming abortion is not linked with teen depression is full of problems, according to one of the world's leading researchers on abortion and the adverse mental health issues women face afterwards. http://LifeNews.com/nat6728.html

GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- Racism may be less of a factor in politics than other realms of life, according to a new University of Florida study, which found few white voters in Florida to be upset by the presidential candidacy of a black man, and many to be proud of it. To assess attitudes among white voters in a southern state about Barack Obama's historic election to the presidency, two UF political scientists analyzed results from four statewide telephone surveys -- each involving between 449 and 829 respondents – conducted in the fall of 2008 and spring of 2009. Their study...

Using Facebook is the online equivalent of staring at yourself in the mirror, according to a study. Those who spent more time updating their profile on the social networking site were more likely to be narcissists, said researchers. Facebook provides an ideal setting for narcissists to monitor their appearance and how many ‘friends’ they have, the study said, as it allows them to thrive on ‘shallow’ relationships while avoiding genuine warmth and empathy.

EAST LANSING, Mich. — There’s something beyond plain old ignorance that motivates Americans to believe President Obama is a Muslim, according to a first-of-its-kind study of smear campaigns led by a Michigan State University psychologist. The research by Spee Kosloff and colleagues suggests people are most likely to accept such falsehoods, both consciously and unconsciously, when subtle clues remind them of ways in which Obama is different from them, whether because of race, social class or other ideological differences. These judgments, Kosloff argues, are irrational. He also suggests they are fueled by an “irresponsible” media culture that allows political pundits...

Bacteria are well-known to be the cause of some of the most repugnant smells on earth, but now scientists have revealed this lowest of life forms actually has a sense of smell of its own. A team of marine microbiologists at Newcastle University have discovered for the first time that bacteria have a molecular "nose" that is able to detect airborne, smell-producing chemicals such as ammonia. Published today in Biotechnology Journal, their study shows how bacteria are capable of 'olfaction' – sensing volatile chemicals in the air such as ammonia produced by rival bacteria present in the environment. Led by...

Sometimes academic health research can look downright unhealthy, particularly if it is funded by the federal government. “The National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), a division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has awarded $126,000 over the past two years to a University of Washington study that established ‘web-based sex diaries’ for gay males as young as 16,” Matt Cover reported on CNS News today. “By the time the grants end in 2011, taxpayers will have spent more than $250,000 for the study.” Now there’s something in short supply in the private sector—gay porn websites. It’s not...

The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has so far awarded $1.44 million in federal funds to a project that, among other things, is estimating the size of the population and examining the “social milieu” of male prostitutes in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. “In Study 1, formative ethnography will be used to describe the settings, venues, and overall social milieu in which male sex work is being situated,” says the NIH abstract for the grant. “In Study 2, we will conduct a Capture-Recapture Survey to estimate the size...

Prof. Michael Lynn, marketing and tourism, surveyed 374 waitresses about their perceived “sexiness,” breast size and other physical characteristics and correlated these results with the amount of tips the waitresses received. His results indicate that evolutionary instinct trumps the ideals many patrons profess. Though most customers say they reward service, Lynn reports that quality of service has less than a 2-percent effect on the actual tip. Instead, he found that waitresses with larger bra sizes received higher tips — as did women with blonde hair and slender bodies..... Lynn explained that his study could be useful to a potential waitress...

Two law professors have waded deep into the minefields of the culture war and come up with a doozy of a hypothesis: We Americans are not just divided politically into red states and blue states, our very families are colored-coded red and blue. Oh, and the blue family is beating the red family, hands down. "Blue family champions celebrate the commitment to equality that makes companionate relationships possible and the sexual freedom that allows women to fully participate in society," say Naomi Cahn and June Carbone in their book "Blue Families v. Red Families." "Those who have embraced the blue...

Meeting a beautiful woman can be bad for your health, scientists have found.Just five minutes alone with an attractive female raise the levels of cortisol, the body's stress hormone, according to a study from the University of Valencia. The effects are heightened in men who believe that the woman in question is "out of their league". Cortisol is produced by the body under physical or psychological stress and has been linked to heart disease. Researchers tested 84 male students by asking each one to sit in a room and solve a Sudoku puzzle. Two strangers, one male and one female,...

If you’re running for office – and want to shore up support from young voters – you want Hollywood’s support, right? Wrong. Two new studies from North Carolina State University show that young voters are not swayed by celebrity endorsements of political candidates – and sometimes voters like the candidate less as a result of receiving a celebrity’s endorsement. “Celebrities have been involved in politics for a long time, but there is an increasing interest in the role celebrities play in presidential politics,” says Dr. Michael Cobb, associate professor of political science at NC State and co-author of a paper...

THURSDAY, April 15 (HealthDay News) -- Parents may want their girls to grow up to be astronauts and their boys to one day do their fair share of child care and housework duties, but a new study suggests certain stereotypical gender preferences take root even before most kids can crawl. When presented with seven different toys, boys as young as 9 months old went for the car, digger and soccer ball, while ignoring the teddy bears, doll and cooking set. And the girls? You guessed it. At the same age, they were most interested in the doll, teddy bear and...

The Laysan albatross is a downy seabird with a seven-foot wingspan and a notched, pale yellow beak. Every November, a small colony of albatrosses assembles at a place called Kaena Point, overlooking the Pacific at the foot of a volcanic range, on the northwestern tip of Oahu, Hawaii. Each bird has spent the past six months in solitude, ranging over open water as far north as Alaska, and has come back to the breeding ground to reunite with its mate. Albatrosses can live to be 60 or 70 years old and typically mate with the same bird every year, for...

Scientists have discovered a real-life 'moral compass' in the brain that controls how we judge other people's behaviour. The region, which lies just behind the right ear, becomes more active when we think about other people's misdemeanours or good works. In an extraordinary experiment, researchers were able to use powerful magnets to disrupt this area of the brain and make people temporarily less moral. The study highlights how our sense of right and wrong isn't just based on upbringing, religion or philosophy - but by the biology of our brains. Dr Liane Young, who led the study, said: 'You think...

Male mice drive females wild with ultrasonic love songs, suggests a new study. Since song quality varies, the mice world has its Justin Timberlake-like stars that impress females with their talents more than other willing, but not so able, males do.

A new study found that homosexual men may be predisposed to nurture their nieces and nephews as a way of helping to ensure their own genes get passed down to the next generation. Vasey said he suspects that the conditions just aren't right in modern Western societies for this genetic predisposition to express itself.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.,- A scientist at Massachusetts' Harvard University says there are three main reasons why researchers study issues with seemingly "obvious" conclusions. Marc Abrahams, a co-founder of the magazine Annals of Improbable Research, said "obvious" studies are often performed by researchers who are "oblivious to the obvious," attempting to prove an obvious conclusion wrong or seeking data to confirm a commonly held belief to obtain funding for programs, the Sacramento (Calif.) Bee reported Tuesday. "The first type is the most fun for everybody else," Abrahams said. "By everybody, I mean even the individuals who work with them. They usually find...

Frankfurt, Germany, December 6 -- A rather bizarre study carried out by German researchers suggests that staring at women's breasts is good for men's health and increases their life expectancy. According to Dr. Karen Weatherby, a gerontologist and author of the study, gawking at women’s breasts is a healthy practice, almost at par with an intense exercise regime, that prolongs the lifespan of a man by five years. She added, "Just 10 minutes of staring at the charms of a well-endowed female, is roughly equivalent to a 30-minute aerobics work-out." A five-year research on 500 men Researchers at three hospitals...

Teens who listen to music that mentions marijuana are significantly more likely to use the drug, a new study finds. The research was based on surveys with 959 ninth-graders. "Students who listen to music with the most references to marijuana are almost twice as likely to have used the drug than their peers whose musical tastes favor songs less focused on substance use,"... "Interestingly, we also found that exposure to marijuana in music was not associated with other high-risk behaviors, such as excessive alcohol consumption," Primack said. "This suggests that there is a real link between the marijuana lyrics and...

It's no secret to students that coed dorms are more fun than same-sex dorms. But they can also fuel very unhealthy behavior that might otherwise be moderated. A new study finds university students in coed housing are 2.5 times more likely to binge drink every week. And no surprise, they're also likely to have more sexual partners, the study found. Also, pornography use was higher among students in coed dorms. Some 90 percent of U.S. college dorms are now coed.

American squeamishness about talking about sex has helped keep common sexually transmitted infections far too common, especially among vulnerable teens, U.S. researchers reported Monday. Latest statistics on chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis show the three highly treatable infections continue to spread in the United States. "Chlamydia and gonorrhea are stable at unacceptably high levels and syphilis is resurgent after almost being eliminated," said John Douglas, director of the division of sexually transmitted diseases at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "We have among the highest rates of STDs of any developed country in the world," Douglas added in a...

SCIENTISTS have found that - just like some people - fiddler crabs will exchange favours for sex. Male crabs will protect a female neighbour but do so partly in exchange for sex. Australian National University researchers Richard Milner, Michael Jennions and Patricia Blackwell in a study published in Biology Letters looked at how female crabs - those without the large claw - go about protecting their territories, The Courier-Mail reports. They found sexual offerings lead to neighbourhood coalitions, where a male crab protected females from homeless males seeking territory. The males' giant claw is the largest weapon relative to body...

Rather remarkable ways in which millions of dollars were passed out. no wonder no jobs were created. I thought "shovel ready" meant something.

A panel of legal scholars has suggested that Congress remove sodomy as a crime punishable under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, a recommendation that could boost efforts to end a ban on gays serving openly in the U.S. military. The Commission on Military Justice recommended that Article 125, which deals with sodomy, be repealed, arguing that “most acts of consensual sodomy committed by consenting military personnel are not prosecuted, creating a perception that prosecution of this sexual behavior is arbitrary.” In its report — dated October 2009 — the commission suggested several changes be made to the UCMJ, including...

Halloween trends are telling. Just ask Robert Thompson, a pop-culture expert and the founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University. Here's an interesting trend: Halloween has fast become the second-most-decorated holiday. Jack-o-lanterns and goblins and lighted trees are all over the place now. Halloween spending has risen to nearly $5 billion annually -- not bad for a non-gift-giving, non-government-sanctioned holiday. And more adults than ever are dressing up. "The post-World War II years were the golden age of Halloween for kids," says Thompson, "a trend that continued into the 1980s. But in the...

The secret to sex appeal lies with the tampering of pheromones, creating a "sexual tsunami", according to new research. Scientists at the University of Toronto ... discovered that when the pheromone was removed, it created a "sexual tsunami" where the bugs proved attractive to one another, regardless of sex. The research found that male fruit flies with no history of homosexuality attempted to mate with their pheromone-free males ... Even flies of a different species were interested, according to the research team. "Lacking these chemical signals eliminated barriers to mating," Prof Levine said.

The global Muslim population stands at 1.57 billion, meaning that nearly 1 in 4 people in the world practise Islam, a landmark study has claimed. Britain has a total of 1,647,000 Muslims - just 2.7 per cent of the British population, and 0.1 per cent of the global Muslim population, the report claimed. The Pew Forum report also revealed that Germany has more Muslims than Lebanon - or North and South America combined. It claimed that about five per cent of Europe's population practises Islam - and that there are more Muslims living in Asia than in the Middle East....

An Italian scientist says he has reproduced the Shroud of Turin, a feat that he says proves definitively that the linen some Christians revere as Jesus Christ's burial cloth is a medieval fake. The shroud, measuring 14 feet, 4 inches by 3 feet, 7 inches bears the image, eerily reversed like a photographic negative, of a crucified man some believers say is Christ. "We have shown that is possible to reproduce something which has the same characteristics as the Shroud," Luigi Garlaschelli, who is due to illustrate the results at a conference on the para-normal this weekend in northern Italy,...

Millions of women drink alcohol before having sex because they lack confidence in their bodies, a study has found. Almost half of those questioned said they preferred sex while under the influence of alcohol because it helped them to lose their inhibitions and be more adventurous. Researchers, who surveyed 3,000 women aged between 18 and 50, found the average woman has slept with eight men, but was drunk with at least five of them. On two of these occasions they couldn't even remember the man's name the next day. Three quarters of women claimed they felt more able to let...

The power of the imagination is well-known: it's no surprise that scary music is scarier with your eyes closed. But now neuroscientist and psychiatrist Prof. Talma Hendler of Tel Aviv University's Functional Brain Center says that this phenomenon may open the door to a new way of treating people with Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and other neurological diseases. In her new study, Prof. Hendler found that the simple act of voluntarily closing one's eyes — instead of listening to music and sounds in the dark — can elicit more intense physical responses in the brain itself. This finding may have therapeutic value...

Civilisation would most likely be finished in the event of a zombie outbreak, claim Canadian mathematicians who have calculated the possible devastation caused by an attack by the fictional monsters. Using models developed to calculate the effects of more plausible pandemics, the team from the University of Ottawa have discovered that unless man struck back quickly and aggressively then they would be doomed. The scientific paper, which is published in a book “Infectious Diseases Modelling Research Progress”, looks at an attack by the undead creatures, who infect the living with a bite. In their study, titled When Zombies Attack!, the...

Researchers found that attractive women have more children than their less attractive counterparts and that a higher proportion of those children are female. Once those daughters become adult they tend to be good looking themselves and so the pattern is repeated as women over the generations become steadily more aesthetically pleasing. As attractive couples are less likely to have boy than a girl, men, in contrast, remain as aesthetically unappealing as their caveman ancestors, the scientists claim. The findings have emerged from a series of studies of physical attractiveness and its links to reproductive success in humans. In a study...

While many on the left are super-sensitive when it comes to any inference of voter disenfranchisement or coercion, their thin skins have emerged when it comes to the ongoing charge of liberal indoctrination in academia, demonstrated by the current rise of all things Obamanation. How else to debunk a conspiracy theory on liberal indoctrination in schools? Try a survey conducted by academics. According to the Associated Press, “The research, to be published later this year in the journal PS: Political Science and Politics, analyzes separate surveys on the attitudes of about 6,800 students at 38 universities and how they changed...

Humans have altered Earth so much that scientists say a new epoch in the planet's geologic history has begun. Say goodbye to the 10,000-year-old Holocene Epoch and hello to the Anthropocene. Among the major changes heralding this two-century-old man-made epoch: Vastly altered sediment erosion and deposition patterns. Major disturbances to the carbon cycle and global temperature. Wholesale changes in biology, from altered flowering times to new migration patterns. Acidification of the ocean, which threatens tiny marine life that forms the bottom of the food chain. The idea, first suggested in 2000 by Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen, has gained steam...

An individual's body motion and body type can offer subtle cues about their sexual orientation, but casual observers seem better able to read those cues in gay men than in lesbians, according to a new study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. "We already know that men and women are built differently and walk differently from each other and that casual observers use this information as clues in making a range of social judgments," said lead author Kerri Johnson, UCLA assistant professor of communication studies. "Now we've found that casual observers can use gait and body shape to...

Very young children who eat French fries frequently have a much higher risk of breast cancer as adults, U.S. researchers reported Wednesday. A study of American nurses found that one additional serving of fries per week at ages three to five increased breast cancer risk by 27 percent. "Researchers are finding more evidence that diet early in life could play a role in the development of diseases in women later in life," said Dr. Karin Michels, of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and Harvard Medical School, who led the study. "This study provides additional evidence that breast cancer may...

This paper was prepared by students from Northwestern University Law School and the University of Chicago Law School. We believe this paper will ultimately be faxed, mailed and e-mailed to several million Americans. For this reason, we have chosen to write in a style and format that is easily understood by readers at all levels. This paper has one aim: To show that ample evidence exists to issue an indictment against former President George Herbert Walker Bush (#41, father of George W. Bush) for the crime of murder in regard to the people who perished in terrorist attacks in the...