Free Republic

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...