Well-educated woman seeks man of high social status for mutually life-extending relationship

Old age is often blamed for causing us to misplace car keys, forget a word or lose our train of thought. But new research shows that many well-known effects of ageing may start decades before our twilight years. According to scientists, our mental abilities begin to decline from the age of 27 after reaching a peak at 22.

Women have better noses
Women appreciate beauty better
Women have better immune systems
Women are better liars
Women are better drivers
Women cooperate better
Women handle stress better

Men are better at suppressing their appetites
Men are more truthful
Men handle pain better
Men are happier
Men pay less for health insurance
Men have more free ( Read more... )

The above is a quote by George Vaillant, director of a longitudinal research study profiled in this article from The Atlantic, which you should all read. The study followed 268 men from their sophomore year at Harvard in 1937 to the present, submitting them to batteries of physical and psychological tests to try to find out the answer to one of the ( Read more... )

I'd like to bring your attention to the little link at the bottom left-hand corner of this post (and indeed every post) that says "Leave a Comment". Those of you reading this in Google Reader will probably have to click through to see it, but it really is there. Lately I have noticed that the majority of comments come from the same four or five ( Read more... )

A few days ago the NYT published an article on dream interpretation. A research team discovered, perhaps unsurprisingly, that people are more likely to believe in dreams that conform to the way they want to think about the world - good things happening for them and their friends, and bad things happening to their enemies. There's a survey you can ( Read more... )

I'm reading this book called Proust Was a Neuroscientist, about ways that artists foresaw things about the way people's minds and bodies work that took science decades or centuries to discover. I really enjoyed the chapter on Middlemarch, which dealt with the issue of how much of human existence is preordained by genes and how much is open to ( Read more... )

Like food? You may have lesions on your brain.
Smart guys have more sperm.
Attention men: if you don't think I'm sexy your children are more likely to have autism.
Almost-but-not-quite-life created in lab.

The escalator at my metro stop is very, very long. If I stand I get bored. If I climb I get winded. However, my climbing has improved of late, both because I've gotten some practice and I have figured out two simple tricks. Number one: don't look up! Number two: escalator climbing is ideally done to the beat of "Five Hundred Miles" by the ( Read more... )

I asked for book recommendations a while back, and y'all did not disappoint. I just started Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation, recommended by the incomparable lynore. It is so, so funny. I love quality edutainment. The first section is all about the debunking of an oft-quoted 1948 study of fruit flies that established that females benefited most ( Read more... )