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Subscribe to RSSFor scientists, an answer to a question, or solution to a problem, is not true until proven so. And sometimes that means revealing what mere mortals already knew, like, say the fact that getting to the hospital quicker can save heart-attack victims, or, the seemingly far-fetched idea that exercise is good for you.
Here are a few of the most obvious findings of 2012.
1. Good partners make good parents
Perhaps not the most shocking news in the world: Marry a good, secure partner, and you can expect them to become a good, secure parent.
The same skills that make people good in romantic relationships make them good at building relationships with their kids, researchers reported Dec. 6 in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Among the key traits are cooperation and communication. [10 Scientific Tips for Raising Happy Kids]
While this may seem self-evident, researchers say that empirically linking the same skills to the two types of relationships may translate to better self-help and therapy. Fix one relationship, and you may fix them both.
2. We all want to date a hottie
Sure, you may say you look for a good sense of humor and a sweet disposition, but deep down, you have to admit a pretty face wouldn't go amiss.
Both men and women unconsciously desire a sexually attractive partner, a study released in January found.
Using a high-speed word association test, the researchers found that people responded faster to words linked to sexiness, no matter how low they claimed to prioritize the physical. The mismatch between what we say we want and what we want may be why online dating meet-ups sometimes go astray, the researchers said.
3. Pre-gamers drink more
Do the math: If you drink before you go out and then drink while you go out, you end up drinking more than if you hadn't had anything to drink before you went out. In other words, those who "pre-game" get drunker than those who just belly up to the bar, according to research published online in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.
"Pre-drinking is a pernicious drinking pattern that is likely to lead people to cumulate two normal drinking occasions — one off-premise followed by one on-premise — and generally results in excessive alcohol consumption," study researcher Florian Labhart of Addiction Switzerland, where the study was conducted, said in a statement. "Excessive consumption and adverse consequences are not simply related to the type of people who pre-drink, but rather to the practice of pre-drinking itself."
4. People with more experience make better decisions
Okay, so pre-drinking is a bad decision — and thus, a choice the more experienced would automatically avoid, according to a study released in December in the journal Organizational Decision Making and Human Decision Processes. People with more experience in a field (in this case, basketball or designer goods), were better at making intuitive judgments about that field than newbies, the study found. But the experienced were no better at making decisions than amateurs when told to reason out their choices analytically. In other words, it’s okay to go with your gut — but only if you know what you're talking about.
5. Keeping guns out of the hands of troubled individuals saves lives
In a report that would tragically prove very timely this year, the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health found that keeping guns away from high-risk individuals prevents gun violence. These individuals include criminals, those with a history of domestic violence, the mentally ill, people under age 21 and substance abusers.
The report also found that the availability of high-capacity magazines increased deaths in mass shootings.
"Mass shootings bring public attention to the exceptionally high rate of gun violence in the U.S., but policy discussions rarely focus on preventing the daily gun violence that results in an average of 30 lives lost every day," said study author Daniel Webster, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research. "Addressing weaknesses in existing gun laws by expanding prohibitions for criminals, perpetrators of domestic violence, youth, and drug abusers, and closing the loopholes that allow prohibited persons to obtain guns can be effective strategies to reduce gun violence. It is important to note that making these changes to our gun laws would not disarm law-abiding adults."
6. Exercise is good for you
If you haven't heard by now that getting moving is good for you, you might want to get with the times. Perhaps also not new news to those who enjoy a good endorphin buzz: Exercise improves mental health as well as physical.
A study published in the journal Clinical Psychological Science in September found that both the improved body image that came with exercise and the social interaction inherent in organized sports made teens less likely to suffer from mental problems such as depression, anxiety or substance abuse. The study controlled for factors such as socioeconomic background, age and gender.
7. Calling an ambulance improves heart attack survival
Think you're having a heart attack? Dial 911. Believe it or not, paramedics really do save lives.
Research presented at the Acute Care Cardiac Congress in October found that only 29 percent of Turkish patients having heart attacks went to the hospital by ambulance, despite the fact that this service is free in Turkey. Taking a cab or driving one's own car was slower than an ambulance ride and delayed crucial treatment, the study found.
8. Guys are more into their girl friends than vice versa
Apparently some stereotypes about guys and sex are true. It turns out that college-age guys report more sexual interest in their platonic female friends than vice versa, though these crushes are usually described as more of a burden than a boon.
In post-college-age adults, about half of the participants in the study, which was released in May, spontaneously mentioned attraction as a burden to their cross-sex friendships. Nevertheless, study researchers said, male-female friendships can be successful.
9. Smoking a lot of pot can make your mind fuzzy
Yes, science has done it again: Heavy marijuana use can mess with a teen's brain. The study, detailed in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that of the 1,000 New Zealanders followed, those who started using pot as teenagers and used it for years afterward lost some of their smarts; more specifically, they had an average decline in IQ of 8 points, between age 13 and age 38.
"The simple message is that substance use is not healthy for kids," study researcher Avshalom Caspi, a psychologist at Duke University and the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London, said in a statement. "That's true for tobacco, alcohol, and apparently for cannabis."
10. Driving when drunk is unsafe
Drinking and driving really is dangerous. A study out this year showed that as a person's blood-alcohol level increased so did their risk of being killed or involved in a fatal crash, regardless of their age. For instance, compared with sober drivers of the same age, individuals who were ages 16 to 20 with a blood alcohol between 0.02 and 0.05 were nearly three times as likely to be involved in a fatal crash. The study, detailed in May in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, also found that more underage females who have been drinking alcohol are at risk for being in a fatal car crash compared with 2007. The researchers aren't sure what's behind the increase, but speculate girls are taking more risks nowadays.
11. High heels are bad for your feet
Cramming your feet into tight-fitting shoes with inches-long heels on the bottom can hurt your feet. The new finding out this year? High heel-wearing is linked to ingrown toenails. So who would've guessed that wearing tight-fitting shoes with a steep slope down is one of the most common causes a foot problem in which the toes get compressed so much that the big toenail grows into the skin? But seriously, while often an ingrown nail is just an annoyance, it can get infected and even require surgical removal of the entire nail.
To avoid the pesky podiatry problem, Rodney Stuck, a professor of podiatry at the Loyola University Health System, recommended buying less-tight-fitting heels (yes), and ditching the fashion statements on days when you plan to do a lot of walking and standing.
12. Screaming at your child is harmful to your child
Psychological child abuse, such as belittling, terrorizing, exploiting and neglecting emotionally, can damage a kid's health.
"We are talking about extremes and the likelihood of harm, or risk of harm, resulting from the kinds of behavior that make a child feel worthless, unloved or unwanted," Dr. Harriet MacMillan of McMaster University said in a statement. MacMillan added that examples would include a mother leaving her infant alone in a crib all day or a father pulling his teen into his own drug habit. Such abuse can be as harmful to children as physical harm, the researchers reported in August in the journal Pediatrics.
More from LiveScience:
- 50 Sultry Facts About Sex
- The 10 Weirdest Animal Discoveries of 2012
- Trippy Tales: The History of 8 Hallucinogens
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Reports of shattering cookware on the rise
Leave a Comment:
We all want to date a hottie
Actually, I look more at if someone is "cool" rather than "hot"..
I look for someone with Huge TITS. I like to put the bat in the ol' upper deck.
BWHAHAHA!!!
Thomas, are u gay?
"Increasing prohibitions for criminals" as gun control? The big "duh" here is that Criminals ignore prohibitions.
For smart guys, the Johns Hopkins group sure says dumb things
Ya got that right, jukkou. Then they also bring up the "gun show loop-hole" myth... Old Bloomersberg got his butt ripped by the USDOJ for his actions here in Ohio just a few years back.
Although to reduce the speed limit sounds laughable, what would your suggestion be, SPiddas? Raise it to 100 MPH? If it were just a matter of the 25MPH speed law being broken this would be different. But if the teenagers were causing accidents and people were dying wouldn't you want SOMTHING done to change the situation?
Most of these studies are measuring HOW much these things affect your performance. Also sometimes the most obvious things need to be tested to make sure that common sense actually has data behind it.
Just another hack article
And yet the politicians still wonder why the people have no confidence they will solve our budget problems.
I wonder how many stimulus dollars went to these mind boggling results? We must have put at least 12 persons to work unless one person figured out to get twelve grants to write the obvious. I'm sure no one in Congress can figure out that scam!
And yet I can think of at least two or more of these studies that people will not accept as being true. This is why we waste money, if at first you don't get the results you want, try, try, again!!
Studies like these are funded specifically because people demand 'facts' as in put it on paper by a credible source before they will do anything or allow anything to be done.
Children that are not good in sports get picked on more, or bullying is bad for your health. Are both such studies. Until it is in writing by someone with a Phd, no weight is given to mere common sense anymore.
How many stimulus dollars? I'm guessing few to none. Some of them are from foreign sources, and the others are unspecified. Meanwhile, not a highway around my city wasn't worked on with stimulus money, at a time when I know the state wasn't paying. Read a few comments down, like I just did...
Everyone has a different, personal definition of "hot," thus making the study even more pointless than the person who wrote this article seems to think it is.
What is truely sad is that most of these "studies" are paid for through government grants (i.e. taxpayer's dollars). No business or unversity would fund such nonsense with their own money.
yes, they do.
Remember the studies done by the tobacco industry - they claimed that cigarette smoking was "ok" for you. They even paid for studies that LIED to the public.
Gunner-1077900
You really shouldn't make up "facts".
I started to look at the studies and only found 1 that may have been funding using tax payers $ while others were conducted overseas.
Cameron Ford post #15 has verified the list.
Yet these idiots in Washington can't figure out how to reduce spending! Most of this is from government grants that should have provided one more study; sending money to politicians is a waste.
No, most of it is not from government grants. These kinds of studies are funded by universities and private donors.
As obvious as these findings are, they need to be taught in school and repeated to the public.
I read a few of the papers and there is more to these than is written in this puff piece. The focus is rather insulting on much of the research which goes deeper into the issue than is stated here!
Back in my high school days, I was smoking pot and had an IQ of 144. Today, I am studying the nuclear physics of room-temperature superconductivity, the effects of electron-orbitals on clathrates, performing organic and inorganic chemistry, and smart enough to be sorely disappointed by the Federal monetary system (including, basically, all other aspects of the Fed's stranglehold on our country and war crimes on others with constant exploitation of the third world while claiming to bring democracy when it's not even honored or followed in the "Homeland" - for shame).
It does not take a Nobel Laureate to discover that smoking pot will affect short term memory, but what your media does not tell you is that cannabis oil cures cancer (among the thousands of other uses for cannabis). Gee, I wonder why it's illegal.. Pharmaceutical, drug enforcement, and prison industry too profitable?
Yeah, duh.
I think Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle applies because brain's make-up cannot be measured on any one substance or event. There are too many factors.
Looks like you watch a lot of The Big Bang Theory while you smoke. I'd be willing to bet you are a toll taker by day and a fat, slovenly, lazy pothead by night.
Being a chemo nurse, it is not the fact of cannibis oil being able to cure cancer, but determining the exact amount needed to cure cancer without the occurrance of other known side effects. One day, it may be a drug of choice as studies are ongoing regarding its' side effects and appropriate dosing.
Cannabis and snake oils are the best cures.
mmmmmmmm....what will they teach us next ????? i can hardly contain myself ... oh , maybe its time to change my depends , or is there a study for that ? what ever happened to common sense ???
Hard working taxpayers supporting university junior faculty, all. Here's about how it goes. You get a doctoral degree (either a real one, as in MD or PhD, or one of the many wannabees). Unless you came close to winning the Nobel prize while still a student, you don't get a job working at one of the top 5% of our colleges and universities. These would be the Ivy League places, big name private institutions, and a fairly select group of state universities that do a ton of very well funded research and consulting. But you are lucky enough (read, often of the PC ethnic group) to get hired. There are other places to work, as in industry or government, but we'll focus for now on the professor gigs. Now, you don't get to keep your cushy job and shameless retirement benefits by merely being a great teacher. You typically get 5-10 years to prove that you really belong, by your track record. There are other jobs, Inshallah, if you don't make the cut. They say being a good teacher counts, but it really doesn't count for much. Remember this when you pay your kids' college costs. No, what counts is getting funding to conduct research, support graduate students, and above all, getting you name on various professional publications. Still with me? Also, unless you are the next Watson and Crick, you have to do administrative work, which basically involves departmental committee work. Fair enough, although it's many more times more difficult in the PC/liberal environment that has become our institutions of higher learning to do any of this if you don't tow the political line, at least until you make the cut. The cut involves advancing along the path of academic promotion, beginning with low dog assistant, then tenured associate, next full professor. There are other permutations here, such as adjunct or research positions, and the ones who last longest may become professors emeriti. So, why all this background? A huge literature exists for people to publish the results of their research, much of which only accepts work for publication if so called independent peer reviewers agree on its merit. So, to survive, college teachers typically select some tiny and esoteric research focus. This explains, in large part, the apparent uselessness of the research topics covered in this article. In many ways, it's kind of a big game, and often amounts to "if you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with BS". Sure, some useful stuff gets done, work with truly important practical value. But lots is just mediocre. Don't believe me? Visit a university library some time, and ask to be led to the sections holding master's theses, and doctoral dissertations, from the institution. Especially check out those works on education, religious studies, political science, English, ---just to name a few. You'll be glad you became a trades person. Aa. .
Your expose is not shocking, I hope you're not disappointed. Tradespeople and artists and tinkers and tailors and soldiers and spies also drudge their lives away, doing work that has been approved and re-approved and paid for and fits in with conventions. Why should intellectual endeavor be expected to be very different?
It's why true geniuses are so highly valued in human history.
The saddest part of all is that these ridiculous "studies" cost us all millions of dollars. Money we'll never see again but will be paying off for years thanks to the debt we're already in.
If I want to spend 10 grand on a research project, what business is it of you or anyone else?
If you wrote the check, Cameron, then you're perfectly within your rights to spend the money the way you want no matter what liberal is telling you how you should spend it. Same for the stars and 1% ers.
Cameron, I'm not referring to how you spend money. I could care less how you spend your money (but of course am willing to offer my opinion if you care to hear it). I'm referring to governments spending money on such things. Most private companies aren't dumb enough to waste money on such studies. The vast majority of these studies are funded by government grants or directly performed by government agencies. I used the term "us" to infer the American people but it can be used to refer to any citizen of any government wasting money on such studies.
Why is money spend on something that people with common sense already know........whoops I forgot politicians don't have any common sense!
Because a lot of people don't have any common sense. Take #5 on the list, for example. The NRA and other gun supporters would do well to take a long hard look at that one.
Because lulu, you would be surprised how often common sense is wrong. Here's part of the issue. In order to have your research be valid, the study has to be sufficiently controlled so that measured effects are due to the interaction of the variables being tested and not extraneous variables. What that means is that any single research study has to be fairly narrow in its scope. Also, before you can test "new" things, you often have to confirm that they things we hold as "common sense" are in fact true. These types of articles that pan multiple research studies as frivolous are generally the product of small minds and a lack of understanding regarding the research process.
Rob - any chance there's some sour grapes going on there?
My, everyone is so worried about "their" money getting spent. Let's review:
Nowhere does it say that the U.S. government or public tax dollars were used for any of these studies.
Please don't try to ruin my outrage with your "facts". It plays into my agenda much more neatly if I can rant and rave about how "my money" was wasted on knowledge.
It is painfully obvious here that people posting on this article screaming about "common sense" clearly lack any.
It does appear that many of the items you listed do receive Federal or State funding which then would imply tax money hence some peoples complaining about spending our money for common sense. Just another thought :)
Anyone want to bet on who paid for these studies??
Me donut tink weeed hurt bwarin alott!! LOL
Cameron if this site had saved my changes you would have read that no one spends their own money on something so foolish. You squander other peoples money on these kinds of studies. That usually comes in the form of government grants.
13. Reading MSN "news" stories corrodes your thinking processes.
The finding of this study underscores the need to be realistic about the likely impact of an assault weapons or LCM ban. Ammunition capacity of 10 or more rounds becomes relevant in only a small percentage of shootings.
I can selectively quote the same study too.
....and if I poke myself in the eye with a stick, it's going to hurt. Brilliant. I wish I could get paid for writing articles that state the obvious. I'd be wealthy by now.
Where can I get funding for my 2 studies: can fire burn, and is water wet?
There is no such thing as a wasted study. First, we don't make decisions based on our best thinking or common sense because (as studies have shown) it is often wrong. Our intuition tells us one thing but research does demonstrate that often we get ironic results (which will bring on more studies). In science common sense is often proven wrong. Second, we don't make major decisions based on one study. It is a process of peer review, repeating the studies exactly as they were and with modifications. On top of all that people still need to hear over & over again the results or they just won't believe them. We have a scientifically illiterate society and it takes a lot to reach the average American.
Studies reveal most of these "Studies" are worked on by lame asses that are too stupid to work on important studies.
Great to see that this bull**** story was just to promote gun control.....