If you’re measuring by way of divorce, the myth of the seven year itch may not be a myth after all; according to the 2009 U.S. Census Bureau, the median duration of first marriages that end in divorce is 7.9 years.

Like the Oddee one, there are no naughty pictures, but it still might be something you won’t want to read at work.

Link

In the experiment, a group of men and women (on the younger side, with an average age of 21) were given the opportunity to donate money to a fund, knowing they would get nothing in return other than the pride of their selflessness. Whether they were watched or not, women donated at the same rate. But men, when watched by women, donated at higher rates. They didn’t donate at higher rates when men watched.

I don’t know about you guys, but I’m sure flabbergasted by this one. Who would have guessed?

Link Via The Jane Dough

Studies show over 80% of all sexually active adults will contract an STD at some point, although most won’t notice. That’s because 80% of all people who contract one of the 25 varieties of STDs don’t show any symptoms and most don’t even realize they have one. In fact, the American Social Health Association estimates that 80% of sexually active people contract the Human Papillomavirus (HPV) at one point in their life. While those statistics were taken before the HPV vaccine was released, the vaccine only prevents two of the most dangerous strains of the disease, meaning even those vaccinated can still catch one of the many other strains.

While the numbers sound scary, the upside is that most people who contract an STD won’t suffer any negative effects as a result.

That’s just one of a list of ten thing you probably didn’t know that you can learn about at Oddee. Be prepared that this list contains adults-only subject matter, but the images are SFW. Link

(YouTube Link)

These racy little public service announcement shorts from MTV aim to show the young folks that sex is no accident, in a style inspired by 80s cartoons.

Watch as young men and women unwittingly end up in sexual situations due to vehicle related accidents, complete with nearly NSFW moments that may make some viewers blush, and a sweet soundtrack reminiscent of those used during Miami Vice chase scenes.

Link

Neatorama presents

How straight-laced were the Pilgrims? They tried to be, but you know how it goes. A shoe gets unbuckled, a bonnet becomes unlaced, and suddenly your hormones go into overdrive. The next thing you know, your horn of plenty hath spilled forth with wicked abundance.

Pretty much everything we “know” about the Pilgrims is untrue. Our modern-day image of the stern, clean-living, God-fearing residents of Plymouth Colony is largely mythical. It’s an illusion that took shape in the nineteenth century, as some overzealous American attempted to construct an official, more respectable history of our growing nation.

Historians cannot even determine exactly how many of the approximately 100 passengers on the Mayflower were Puritans and how many were just leaving to find better lives away from the gripping poverty that plagued England at the time. It is generally believed there were more of the latter than the former.

First off, they never referred to themselves or thought of themselves as “the Pilgrims.” The term “pilgrim” was reserved for Muslims making the pilgrimage to Mecca. The Pilgrims referred to themselves as “the Saints” or “the Separatists.”

They also referred to themselves as “Old Planters” or “Old Comers.” Draw your own conclusions from that. The name “the Pilgrims,” as we call them today, caught on around the time of the American Revolution.

Yes, they were notorious beer drinkers. They weren’t even headed for Massachusetts; they aimed for Georgia or a place further south, because of the milder weather. One of the reasons they ended up in Massachusetts in the first place was the lack of beer. According to one of the diaries of a Mayflower passenger, “We could not take time for further search …our victuals being much spent, especially our beer.”

One of the first structures built when they landed was a common brewery for the colonists. Many of the Pilgrims were brewers, this being done primarily in the home at the time.

While we don’t have the details about their private lives, we do know that by 1636, the colonists had a published set of rules that listed capital offenses. Among them were sodomy, rape, buggery, and some cases of adultery. So they were certainly concerned with sex, if not necessarily always having it.

However, court records from the colony indicate that sex-related crimes were common transgressions. Fornication, which was defined as sex outside of marriage, was a frequently committed crime, one that often resulted in a fine. Sometimes the evidence of a conviction was solely of the birth of a child in the early months of a marriage.

The only recorded execution for a sex crime occurred in 1642, when 17-year-old Thomas Granger was convicted of buggery. The young man had engaged in unfortunate, intimate relations with some local sheep, and he paid the ultimate price for it.

Less severe penalties (relatively speaking), often consisted of whippings. And like Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, adulterers were sometimes required to wear the capital letters “AD” on their clothing.

No, the Pilgrims weren’t exactly saints. But they definitely took their sins seriously!

Figure 1. A page from the survey form that was given to male participants.

by Jennifer A. Zimmerman
Psychology Department
Marist College, Poughkeepsie, New York

This study investigates what effect, if any, watching television has on people’s sexual behavior.

The Population Problem

For populous countries such as China and India, population growth is seen as a major and vexing problem. The governments of these nations worry that soon there will be more people than the land can support.

The Chinese Crisis

Chinese officials are developing elaborate, expensive plans for more effective family planning, including the development and delivery of better birth-control services. The Chinese State Family Planning Commission recently announced a series of new scientific and technological projects for the Tenth Five-Year Plan (2001-2005). These include the production of 15 new contraceptives and abortificant medicines.

The technologies under consideration in China have serious drawbacks. They are costly, and are likely to be implemented inefficiently. It could take many years — perhaps decades — before their intended effects reached a satisfactory, or even noticeable level. Some different, better method is sorely wanted.

The Indian Innovation

This past year, an official in India proposed that televisions be given to the nation’s citizens, because televisions are an effective form of birth control.

The official explained that people would rather watch television than engage in sexual intercourse:

In a mark of frustration over India’s perennially stalled family planning efforts, the country’s health minister has come up with a somewhat Orwellian proposal: distribute telvisino sets to the masses to keep their minds off procreation…. Chandreshwar Prasad Thakur suggested last month to the Indian parliament that “entertainment is an important component of the population policy.” To drive down birth rates, he said, “we want people to watch television.” Population experts, meanwhile, say the minister’s proposal betrays the false assumption that India’s poor breed merely because they have nothing better to do. [Science, vol. 293, September 14, 2001, p. 1987.]

Perhaps for political reasons, the proposal was received with skepticism.

To Test the Television Theory

Is television-watching in fact an effective method for preventing sexual intercourse? If so, there are phenomenal implications for family planning.

Prior research strongly suggests that sexual intercourse is a cause of pregnancy. Therefore, if television prevents people from engaging in sexual intercourse, it might also prevent pregnancy. Furthermore, a decrease in the number of pregnancies might produce a lower birth rate. With that in mind, this study set out to determine whether television-watching is an effective form of birth control.

Methods

The study consists of two parts — a review of the literature on population, fertility rate, and television use; and a survey.

The study concentrates on North America, because that is the region in which television use is most widespread among a large population. If television-watching does prevent sexual intercourse, the effect should be most easily discerned in North America.

The survey consisted of eight questions. Each question involved a choice between two activities, where each activity was illustrated with a picture. Thus each question involved looking at a pair of photographs.

Figure 2. A page from the survey form that was given to female participants.

Female participants were shown photographs of males. Male participants were shown photographs of females.

For each pair of pictures, the participant was asked to choose between two options:
<> Engage in sexual intercourse with the individual in picture A; or
<> Watch individual B on television.

Figure 1 shows a page from the survey form that was given to female participants. Figure 2 shows a page from the survey form that was given to male participants.

Participants/Procedure

The subjects who took this study were college students in a physiological psychology course and a psychology-capping course at a liberal arts college in upstate New York. The sample group consisted of 35 individuals: 30 females and five males. Their ages ranged from 18 years to 22 years.

Beforehand, a prospectus for the study was submitted to the college’s Institutional Review Board (IRB), where it received approval.
The surveys were administered in a classroom setting. Subjects were asked to answer the questions honestly, and were told that all answers would remain anonymous. The surveys were collected after everyone was finished answering all of the questions.

Results, Part 1: Analysis of Historical Data

Figure 3. Number of television sets in use in North America

An analysis of several decades’ worth of statistical data concerning (a) the number of television sets in use in North America and (b) the birth rate in the United States reveals a simple relationship. As the number of television sets increases, the birth rate decreases. This is shown in Figures 3 and 4.

In the period since televisions were introduced into the American home, the average number of individuals per household has steadily decreased. In 1940, before television was available, 7.1 percent of households consisted of one person, and 9.3 percent consisted of seven persons. In 1940, these two types of households comprised nearly equal percentages of the total number of households. By 1950, 10.9 percent of households had one person, while only 4.9 percent had seven persons. By 1990, the percent of one-person households had increased to 24.5, while only 1.2 percent of households had seven persons living in them. This data is represented in Figure 5.

During the entire period, the national birth rate was decreasing.

Based on this information, one can conclude that as television-watching increases, the birth rate decreases.

Results, Part 2: The Survey Results

Figure 4. Birth rates in the United States.

The survey was designed to test a hypothesis — that individuals would rather watch members of the opposite sex on television than to engage in sexual intercourse with them.

The survey results were impressively clearcut.

All 35 subjects reported that they would rather watch the opposite sex on television than engage in sexual intercourse with them. In making an aggregate 240 choices, not one participant preferred sexual intercourse to watching television.

The test was re-administered four weeks later. This was done to investigate the re-test reliability for this instrument. There were 23 students in this new sample — 21 females and two males. Here too, all participants specified that they would prefer to watch members of the opposite sex on television than to engage in sexual intercourse with them.

Discussion

Figure 5. Percentage of all households that have 1 Person, 2 Persons, 3 Persons, etc.

As mentioned above, statistical analysis indicates that as the number of television sets increases, the birth rate decreases. In light of our survey results, this otherwise perplexing fact now makes sense. When people have access to a television set, they would rather watch television than engage in sexual intercourse.

Also as noted above, if individuals are not engaging in sexual intercourse, then they are less likely to get pregnant (this is especially true of females), and this in turn is likely to effect a decrease in the birth rate.

Conclusion

Television is an effective method of birth control. If the Chinese and Indian governments supplied televisions to every household, each country would see a dramatic drop in its birth rate.

References

“China to Make Population, Family Planning Law,” (article dated October, 2001). Available at http://www.cpirc.org.cn/e-policy5.htm

“Population, Top Challenge in China’s Western Development,” (article dated October, 2001). Available at http://www.cpirc.org.cn/enview1.htm

“SFPC Identifies Key Projects for Tenth Five-Year Plan (2001-2005),” (article dated October, 2001). Available at http://www.sfpc.gov.cn/en/enews20011017-3.htm

_____________________

This article is republished with permission from the March-April 2002 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!

Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.

The stereotype

Men have long been defended as the funnier sex; a sense of humor attracts women (just ask women) and the thinking was that an inherent funniness was a biological adaptation akin to a peacock’s tail or an elaborate preening ritual in animals come mating season. Christopher Hitchens argued this point in his 2007 Vanity Fair article, “Why Women Aren’t Funny.” In his words, men “had damn well better be” funnier. “Women have no corresponding need to appeal to men in this way. They already appeal to men,” he says with an unhumorous textual wink. In response, a 2008 article titled “Who Says Women Aren’t Funny?” contends that women are in fact quite funny, and that women–especially on television–are more responsible for their own writing than before. It makes no mention of women in typical social situations, however, which is precisely where Hitchens claims men excel.

The study: Round 1

The U of C study set out to determine whether this social bias (backed up by the results of the Stanford University School of Medicine study referenced in the Vanity Fair article) is legitimate, or if we’re thinking about this humor thing in the right way.

The study team ran two separate but related experiments. The first experiment had 16 undergraduate males and 16 undergraduate females writing captions alone in a quiet room for 20 New Yorker cartoons in 45 minutes, for a total of 640 captions. All were instructed to be as funny as they could be.

This was the level-playing-field portion of the show–without the pressure of social interaction, men and women could access the full depth of their humor, rewrite if necessary, and the resulting captions could be presented to test subjects without indicating the sex of their author. To test men against women, a cartoon was diplayed with one caption written by a man and the other by a woman, then subjects chose the funnier of the two.

The number of rounds, from zero to five, that captions survived before being knocked out determined the writers’ average scores.

True to the conventional wisdom, men did better than women, but not by much: Male writers earned an average 0.11 more points than female writers. But what’s even more interesting, the researchers say, and what runs contrary to the standard explanations of why men might be funnier, is that men did better with other men: Female raters allocated only an average 0.06 more points to the male writers, while the male raters gave them a significantly higher average of 0.16 more points.

Looks like the guys are preening for each other. Biology can’t explain that!

The study: Round 2

Are men’s jokes more memorable than women’s, and can the author of a funny caption be correctly perceived as male or female given the humorousness of its contents? Enter the memory bias portion of the program:

In a second, related experiment, the researchers tested memory and memory bias to see if men are credited with being funnier than they really are.

As expected, funny captions were remembered better than unfunny ones. The authors of funny captions were remembered better too. But humor was more often misremembered “as having sprung from men’s minds,” the researchers write. And, even more telling, Mickes said, when the study participants were guessing at authors’ gender, unfunny captions were more often misattributed to women and funny captions were more often misattributed to men.

So men do win in the analytic breakdown of perceived humor and the ability to be funny on command… but only very barely, and by margins “so small that they can’t account for the strength of the belief in the stereotype,” according to Laura Mickes, a postdoctoral researcher in the UC San Diego Department of Psychology.

Well?

Well. The conclusion seems to be that there is no conclusion. By and large, men may be funnier than women, and women may be funnier than men, but there’s no way to standardize humor in a real-life scenario (or, at least, not one which has been studied). So we’ll leave the question to you:

As a whole, do you think men really are funnier than women?

Sources:

• Men Win Humor Test (by a Hair)
• Why Women Aren’t Funny
• Who Says Women Aren’t Funny?

Don’t worry, this comic and the link are both still SFW. It just shows us what sex would be like for us if we had the same mating rituals as giraffes. Be sure to visit the link to see what it would be like if we were split gill fungi or leopard slugs.

Link

Strange Attractors is a joint effort between Encyclopedia Destructica and the federally funded Institute of Extraterrestrial Sexuality (which is a thing that exists) that intends to explore the variety of ways in which alien species might reproduce. The project is planned to be a series of short films, images and written descriptions that fall somewhere between speculative science, sexual thought-experiment, mockumentary and plain old weird-looking stuff. Where the idea behind this project originated I cannot claim to know, but the fact that it even exists makes me want to believe in aliens.

The median number of thoughts about sex by college-age men was 18 times a day to women’s 10 times a day, the study found. But the men also thought about food and sleep proportionately more.

"In other words, there was nothing special about sexual thoughts," study researcher Terri Fisher, a psychologist at The Ohio State University, Mansfield, told LiveScience. "Males thought more about any of the health-related thoughts compared to females, not just thoughts about sex."

Link

The old and busted way of scientific research: Long hours hunching over the lab bench. The new hotness: sex with wife, and then a round of beer with fellow scientist. (Bonus: wife is also a co-author on the paper)

Here’s the intriguing story of how a recent science paper came to be:

A U.S. vector biologist appears to have accidentally written virological history simply by having sex with his wife after returning from a field trip to Senegal. A study just released in Emerging Infectious Diseases suggests that the researcher, Brian Foy of Colorado State University in Fort Collins, passed to his wife the Zika virus, an obscure pathogen that causes joint pains and extreme fatigue. If so, it would be the first documented case of sexual transmission of an insect-borne disease.

Foy is the first author of the paper, which describes three anonymous patients. But in an interview with Science, he confirmed that he is the anonymous "patient 1"; his Ph.D. student Kevin Kobylinski, who accompanied him on the trip to Senegal and also got sick, is "patient 2." Foy’s wife, Joy Chilson Foy, a nurse at the Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, is "patient 3"; she is also a co-author of the paper.

Link

Figuring out how Stegosaurus even could have mated is a prickly subject. Females were just as well-armored as males, and it is unlikely that males mounted the females from the back. A different technique was necessary. Perhaps they angled so that they faced belly to belly, some have guessed, or maybe, as suggested by Timothy Isles in a recent paper, males faced away from standing females and backed up (a rather tricky maneuver!). The simplest technique yet proposed is that the female lay down on her side and the male approached standing up, thereby avoiding all those plates and spikes. However the Stegosaurus pair accomplished the feat, though, it was most likely brief—only as long as was needed for the exchange of genetic material. All that energy and effort, from growing ornaments to impressing a prospective mate, just for a few fleeting moments to continue the life of the species.

Smithsonian has the details on what we know, and how we came to know it, on the subject of dinosaur sex. Link -via Boing Boing

(Illustration by Luis Rey)

The Sex In Progress Light from the NeatoShop is the perfect Valentine’s day gift for someone who is :

A. feeling Frisky

B. perpetually optimistic

C. feels the need to announce to the world that he got lucky

D. all of the above.

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more Valentine’s Day foolishness.

Of course, with the upcoming, highly anticipated release of the sequel, TRON Legacy, the game grid is very much on many peoples’ minds these days. Perhaps none more so than the good folks over at WonderHowTo.com, who’ve just bestowed on us the greatest honor a blog can receive; yes, they’ve named a sexual position after us. It’s called the Neatorama (Difficulty Level 3!)and is actually SFW if you want to check out the fun video below. Thanks WHT! We’re deeply humbled.

Women’s and men’s washrooms: we encounter them nearly every time we venture into public space. To many people the separation of the two, and the signs used to distinguish them, may seem innocuous and necessary. Trans people know that this is not the case, and that public battles have been waged over who is allowed to use which washroom. The segregation of public washrooms is one of the most basic ways that the male-female binary is upheld and reinforced.

As such, washroom signs are very telling of the way societies construct gender. They identify the male as the universal and the female as the variation. They express expectations of gender performance. And they conflate gender with sex.

Link -via Metafilter

The authors here propose that humans prefer colors like blues and greens because those colors and ecologically healthy (blue skies, clean water, healthy vegetation), and do not prefer colors like brown because it’s associated with stuff that is ecologically unhealthy (like crap and things that are rotting).

Then they went about testing the theory by correlating color preference with objects that were judged favorable or unfavorable by the test subjects. Although the ecological theory incorporates parts of several other color theories, the data seems to support this idea more than previous theories. Link

Isabella Rossellini has a new video series called Seduce Me, in which she acts out the bizarre mating rituals of different animal species. Besides the cuttlefish shown, there are videos for bedbugs, salmon, snakes, and duck mating. Warning: adult themes. Link -Thanks, Jelena!

Previously at Neatorama: 30 Strangest Animal Mating Habits

While pockets of flab accumulated over the winter months may be a source of frustration for some, it can be a cause of joy for others …

The researchers fitted ten fat birds and ten lean birds on the Italian island of Ventotene with temporary adhesive radio transmitters. [...]

Monitoring their test subjects using the stick-on surveillance bugs, the German boffins found that the more rotund ones had sex sooner and generally slept only one night in any given location. Plumpness led to sexual success for the wobblebottomed group, while their spindly counterparts took longer to get any action – and tended to make longer stays of more than one night, too.

Link

Newsweek presents a pictorial history of birth control methods. We’ve come a long way since the Greek philosopher Aristotle recommended olive oil as a spermicide! Link -Thanks, Steadyburn!

The newfound ghostshark belongs to the “big black chimeras,” a group whose species number has exploded in recent years, thanks to improved diagnostic techniques, according to the new study, published in the September issue of the journal Zootaxa.

Chimeras display some unusual features not seen in other living animals, Long said.

Male chimeras, for example, have retractable sexual appendages sprouting from their foreheads. These organs, which resemble a spiked club at the end of a stalk, may be used to stimulate a female or to pull her closer—though these are still assumptions, Long said.

Link

(image credit: MBARI)

Female gorillas use sex as a tactic to thwart their rivals, new research suggests. Pregnant apes court their silverback male to stop other females conceiving.

"It seems to us that mating is another tactic that females use to compete with each other – in this case to gain favour with another male," says Diane Doran-Sheehy, a primatologist at Stony Brook University in New York.

Her team chronicled the sex lives of five female western lowland gorillas and one silverback almost every day for more than three years. "We wondered if, basically, [pregnant] females can mimic [ovulating] females and dupe the male into mating with them and distract him from what those other girls are doing," Doran-Sheehy says.

This kind of competitive behaviour may even help explain how humans evolved into a mostly monogamous species, she says.

Ewen Callaway of New Scientists has more: Link

Previously on Neatorama: 30 Strangest Animal Mating Habits

Statistical analysis of men rating women indicated that, even though both the body and face ratings were significant positive predictors of the ratings given to the combined images, the face ratings were stronger predictors of the combined ratings. It was also observed that the ratings for combined images was slightly higher for short term relationships as compared to long term relationships. One other significant observation – when the short term and long term relationship data were analyzed separately, the body ratings stood as more significant predictors to the combined ratings than face ratings, for short term relationships. In the case of females rating men, similar to men – the body and face ratings were both significant predictors with the face ratings being very strong predictors as compared to the body ratings. However, females ratings for men did not show any difference under the short term and long term decisions.

This only makes sense, as we tend to cover our bodies most of the time, but you have to look at that face a lot. Link -via Digg

They lost their way and were spotted blundering around in the dark by another motorist in a parking space who called police.

Officers who arrived a short while later managed to find the naked and shivering pair and help them into dry clothes and took them home.

Bet they won’t do that again. Link -via Buzzfeed

(image credit: Flickr user kainet)

He said that the turtles were perhaps attracted to the sand along one side of the runway, which juts into the water. “They tend to look for sand while they are mating,” he said. “Presumably, all these turtles were feeling amorous.” It is unclear whether the turtles pair off, or if the numbers indicated it was a group activity, he said.

Some of the delays lasted up to an hour and a half -but hey, at least the turtles got their sexy on, which is a much better excuse for a delayed flight than most of the ones we hear.

Link Via Consumerist

Men’s judgments of women’s attractiveness were based primarily around physical features and they rated highly those who looked thin and seductive. Most of the men in the study also rated photographs of women who looked confident as more attractive.

As a group, the women rating men showed some preference for thin, muscular subjects, but disagreed on how attractive many men in the study were. Some women gave high attractiveness ratings to the men other women said were not attractive at all.

Link -via Digg

(image credit: Flickr user mod as hell)

A short quiz that tests whether you could pass sex ed.  It’s trickier than I thought.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by MatthewInman.

Where exactly do babies come from? And how are they really made?

Mixing humorous animation and interviews, Jessica Yu poses these questions to a variety of adults and youngsters who explore their earliest understanding of sex, conception and how the two, uh, intersect.

Cute and funny, but probably NSFW unless you wear headphones. Link -via Metafilter

SPANKING is stressful at first, but it could bring consenting couples closer together. That’s the implication of two studies of hormonal changes associated with sadomasochistic (S&M) activities including spanking, bondage and flogging.

link

Sex, Drugs and Science

If this first group of studies show us anything, it’s that scientists are as drugged up and crazy as the junkies up the street from me.

Elephants on Acid:

If you were going to see the effects of LSD on an elephant, wouldn’t you start with smaller doses and progressively increase the dosage until there was a noticeable change in their behavior? I sure would. But the researchers on this one aren’t like you and me.

Instead the researchers working on this one started off by injecting the poor beast with 3000 times the dosage needed for an average human, despite the fact that elephants weigh around 50 times what the average human weighs. Within two hours, the animal died. The scientists defended their actions by saying they had used LSD plenty of times and were sure it was safe. They then concluded, “elephants are highly sensitive to LSD.”

Apparently another scientist found their results to be suspicious, so he gave elephants LSD in their water. In his study, the elephants acted a little funny, but were totally fine.

Source

Turkey Arousal:

We’ve all heard stories detailing how stupid turkeys are -like the one that says they’ll drown if you leave them in the rain. Well, some of those turkey stories may be bogus, but two Penn State researchers discovered that turkeys are so stupid they can be trained to be aroused by little more than sticks.

Their experiment consisted of creating a model female turkey that could be progressively deconstructed. The scientists would then gauge the turkey’s interest in the “female” and then remove some parts of her body and try again. They were expecting the birds would lose interest after is was stripped down enough. Surprisingly, the turkeys were aroused even when the model became little more than a stick with a head. I guess this not only shows how stupid turkeys are, but how perverse they are too.

Source | Photo Via Vicki’s Nature [Flickr]

Semen As an Anti-depressant?

I always thought scientists were supposed to be unbiased. I mean, if you’re hoping for certain results, might that affect your research? Obviously these researchers bypassed that concept, by attempting to prove that semen works as an antidepressant. They decided to study this theory by interviewing college women who were sexually active. Their conclusions proved that women who had sex without condoms were less depressed than women who used them.

Of course, their research was extremely preliminary and they didn’t even bother to take into account additional factors, like the fact that women not using condoms are more likely to be in serious

relationships. It doesn’t take a scientist to figure out that this might play into someone’s relative level of happiness. But like I said, this study was about as unbiased as all those tobacco company ones that couldn’t connect smoking with cancer.

Source | Photo Via Zen [Flickr]

Paging Dr. Obvious

The rest of these studies are amazing -in that someone actually bothered to research things so obvious:

Head Banging is Bad For You:

Who would have ever thought that aggressively and repeatedly throwing your head up and down would be bad for you? Gee, I never would have imagined that spinal damage and brain trauma could have resulted from head banging. Obviously, I’m being sarcastic. After years of dating a metal head, I can assure you that head banging can certainly make you retarded…or at least, it doesn’t help your intelligence at all.

The only good thing researchers found was that head banging is unlikely to leave you unconscious. What is really funny is the researcher’s suggestions for the metal genre. They suggest metal bands play more

mellow tunes and less “beat oriented” music. They also urged label to place anti-head banging warnings on their cds. Oh, and listeners were advised to start listening to “adult-oriented rock” instead of heavy metal. Yeah, that’s gonna happen real soon.

Source | Photo Via Cayusa [Flickr]

Male science nerds likely to be virgins:

Hmmm, who is most likely to be a virgin, a party-girl, a jock, or a nerd? Think about it. No surprise here; male science nerds between 16 and 25 are the most likely to not have had sex.

At least the study provided some legitimate reasons for this statistic, rather than the typical “nerds are pimply and boring” theories of popular media. The study reasoned that these nerds were the population segment least likely to be in situations where they would meet potential lovers. Apparently, doing homework and going to the library doesn’t help you meet chicks. Hey, at least they’re being productive. Interestingly, female art students were the most sexually active.

Source | Photo Via Miss604 [Flickr]

Bullies Like Seeing Pain:

If bullies were compassionate they would sit around crying whenever they picked on people. The fact that they don’t do so might just indicate that they are mean. Why did anyone need to set up a study to confirm that bullies enjoy seeing other people in pain?

An interesting thing about this study is that it was the first time anyone used fMRI to evaluate how respondents reacted to different emotions. Instead of being empathetic like the brain of a normal person, bullies mind’s activate their reward centers when they see videos of other people being picked on.

Source | Photo Via ZZClef [Flickr]

Television Viewers Are Unhappy:

It’s common knowledge that television and other forms of entertainment are a way for people to escape their problems. If you run home to watch tv instead rather than hanging out with friends, you might be unhappy. Did we really need a scientist to tell us that people who socialize are generally more happy than people who sit at home watching tv all day? What’s more crazy is that they needed over 30 years of data to back up their claims. The only unique thing the study discovered was that many viewers are actually addicted. (Marx was right about television, is this evidence that the scientists are commies?):

“Addictive activities produce momentary pleasure and long-term misery and regret,” said Steven Martin, co-author of the study. “People most vulnerable to addiction tend to be socially or personally disadvantaged. For this kind of person, TV can become a kind of opiate in a way. It’s habitual, and tuning in can be an easy way of tuning out.”

Funny, I’ve was using the audio/visual equivalent of heroin the whole time I was researching this. I swear I could quit any time.

Source

Now that I’ve written this, I think I’ve got a couple of ideas I could get funded. For example, are people happier when they’re warm at home or cold in the middle of nowhere? Or maybe I could find out if donkeys really die when they take a bunch of cocaine and other drugs at a bachelor party. Do you guys have any ideas for awesome studies?

Update: The original post has been deleted, but I found another copy. Link