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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...

Uninsured patients with traumatic injuries, such as car crashes, falls and gunshot wounds, were almost twice as likely to die in the hospital as similarly injured patients with health insurance, according to a troubling new study. The findings by Harvard University researchers surprised doctors and health experts who have believed emergency room care was equitable. "This is another drop in a sea of evidence that the uninsured fare much worse in their health in the United States," said senior author Dr. Atul Gawande, a Harvard surgeon and medical journalist. The study, appearing in the November issue of Archives of Surgery,...

Submitted by LiveScience Staff This video (scroll down) is making the rounds the past week on respected science sites like New Scientist as well as geek blogs and YouTube. It's based on not-brand-new research that involved a video that is said to be of interest to scientists who study these things and, perhaps, to anyone in the general public interested in sexual anatomy. Dr. Pek Van Andel and colleagues, in 1999, made the first MRI images of male and female sex organs while couples were having sex under, as it was put, cloistered conditions. MRI machines are said by some...

Australians pride themselves on drinking beer just about anywhere and for any occasion - but what about in space? A Queensland astrochemist believes beer and the cosmos are more closely linked than we would have first thought. James Cook University's Centre for Astronomy director, Dr Andrew Walsh, combines his two passions - beer brewing and space study - to bring his science "down to earth". His research involves identifying different substances, molecules and chemicals in space and in doing that has he discovered many of the chemical ingredients in beer are out there.

Money dulls physical pain and eases the sting of social rejection, new research shows. Through six experiments, psychologists and a marketing professor probed the power of money as a proxy for social acceptance. Among their results, they found that merely touching bills or thinking about expenses paid affected the participants both physically and emotionally. Because it affects pain, money may be a clue to how the brain evolved to process social interactions, the researchers wrote in a paper published in the June edition of the journal Psychological Science. In one experiment, 84 undergraduate student volunteers were divided into two groups...

The human body literally glows, emitting a visible light in extremely small quantities at levels that rise and fall with the day, scientists now reveal. Past research has shown that the body emits visible light, 1,000 times less intense than the levels to which our naked eyes are sensitive. In fact, virtually all living creatures emit very weak light, which is thought to be a byproduct of biochemical reactions involving free radicals. (This visible light differs from the infrared radiation - an invisible form of light - that comes from body heat.) To learn more about this faint visible light,...

Humans caught pubic lice, aka "the crabs," from gorillas roughly three million years ago, scientists now report. ADVERTISEMENT Rather than close encounters of the intimate kind, researchers explained humans most likely got the lice, which most commonly live in pubic hair, from sleeping in gorilla nests or eating the apes. "It certainly wouldn't have to be what many people are going to immediately assume it might have been, and that is sexual intercourse occurring between humans and gorillas," explained researcher David Reed of the Florida Museum of Natural History. "Instead of something sordid, it could easily have stemmed from an...

Wife studies why husband ignores nagging DURHAM, N.C., Feb. 13 (UPI) -- A U.S. researcher says some people just can't help ignoring their nagging spouses. The research, which appears online in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, found that people do not necessarily oppose others' wishes intentionally. Duke University researchers found that "some people will act in ways that are not to their own benefit simply because they wish to avoid doing what other people want them" to do. Psychologists describe the behavior at "reactance" -- a person's tendency to resist social influences that they perceive as threats to their...

The melting of Greenland's glaciers can slow as rapidly as it can accelerate, making the ice's effect on rising sea levels tough to forecast, a study says.

Two private advocacy groups told a congressional hearing Tuesday that climate scientists at seven government agencies say they have been subjected to political pressure aimed at downplaying the threat of global warming. The groups presented a survey that shows two in five of the 279 climate scientists who responded to a questionnaire complained that some of their scientific papers had been edited in a way that changed their meaning. Nearly half of the 279 said in response to another question that at some point they had been told to delete reference to "global warming" or "climate change" from a report....

About a quarter of babies born in vaginal deliveries had a small amount of bleeding in their brains, while none delivered by Caesarean section did, according to a study published on Tuesday. But the researchers at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in Chapel Hill said it was premature to view their surprising findings as an endorsement of C-sections. They said the findings suggest brain bleeding in some newborns has been commonplace in vaginal deliveries throughout history, but is being detected now only because of highly sophisticated imaging technology. "There's no evidence that these bleeds are associated with...

Later this week in Paris, climate scientists will issue a dire forecast for the planet that warns of slowly rising sea levels and higher temperatures. But that may be the sugarcoated version. Early and changeable drafts of their upcoming authoritative report on climate change foresee smaller sea level rises than were projected in 2001 in the last report. Many top U.S. scientists reject these rosier numbers. Those calculations don't include the recent, and dramatic, melt-off of big ice sheets in two crucial locations: They "don't take into account the gorillas — Greenland and Antarctica," said Ohio State University earth sciences...

Scientists in the eastern German city of Jena said Wednesday they have finally given up after three years of failed attempts to entice a sloth into budging as part of an experiment in animal movement. The sloth, named Mats, was remanded to a zoo after consistently refusing to climb up and then back down a pole, as part of an experiment conducted by scientists at the University of Jena's Institute of Systematic Zoology and Evolutionary Biology. Neither pounds of cucumbers nor plates of homemade spaghetti were appetizing enough to make Mats move. "Mats obviously wanted absolutely nothing to do with...

Researchers at the University of Washington say all that holiday baking and eating has an environmental impact — Puget Sound is being flavored by cinnamon and vanilla. "Even something as fun as baking for the holiday season has an environmental effect," said Rick Keil, an associate professor of chemical oceanography. "When we bake and change the way we eat, it has an impact on what the environment sees. To me it shows the connectedness." Keil and UW researcher Jacquelyn Neibauer's weekly tests of treated sewage sent into the sound from the West Point treatment plant in Magnolia showed cinnamon, vanilla...

A rise in the Earth’s temperature could lead to an increase in the number of insects worldwide, with potentially dire consequences for humans, a new study suggests. New research shows that insect species living in warmer areas are more likely to undergo rapid population growth because they have higher metabolic rates and reproduce more frequently. The finding has scientists concerned that global warming could give rise to more fast-growing insect populations and that we could see a spike in the number of six-legged critters. The consequences could be more serious than just a few extra bug bites each summer. “If...

The use of scantily clad models in ads for everything from underwear to ice cream attest to the persuasive power of sex, but a surprising new study finds that our actions can be swayed by erotic images even when they don't consciously register in our awareness. In an experiment, 40 men and women were shown erotic images that had been manipulated to bypass conscious detection. The participants consisted of both heterosexual and homosexual individuals. Subjects were then shown a small "probe" pattern and asked to determine its orientation—clockwise or counterclockwise. The researchers found that subjects identified the probe pattern more...

Horror stories may be the place for vampires, ghosts and zombies. Just remember, they are not real, warns physicist Costas Efthimiou. Obviously, you might say. But Efthimiou, a professor at the University of Central Florida, points to surveys that show American gullibility for the supernatural. Using science and math, Efthimiou explains why it is that ghosts cannot walk among us while also gliding through walls, like Patrick Swayze in the movie "Ghost." That violates Newton's law of action and reaction. If ghosts walk, their feet apply force to the floor, but if they go through walls they are without substance,...

Young female rats afraid of new environments developed cancer tumors sooner than their more adventuresome sisters, a new study finds. The researchers called the difference "striking." The apprehensive rodents died sooner than others in the study because they got cancer earlier in life, on average. Importantly, however, the study found no difference in the length of time between onset of cancer and death in the two sets of rats. Implications for humans? The findings suggest research is needed into the possibility that human personality could predict cancer risk, the researchers write in the current issue of the journal Hormones and...

HUMANS could evolve into two sub-species within 100,000 years as social divisions produce a genetic underclass. The mating preferences of the rich, highly educated and well-nourished could ultimately drive their separation into a genetically distinct group that no longer interbreeds with less fortunate human beings, according to British scientist Oliver Curry. Dr Curry, a research associate in the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science of the London School of Economics, speculated that privileged humans might over tens of thousands of years evolve into a "gracile" subspecies, tall, thin, symmetrical, intelligent and creative. The rest would be shorter and...

The United States could be rife with Internet addicts as clinically ill as alcoholics, a study suggested. Researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine in Stanford, California, said their telephone survey indicated more than one in eight US residents showed at least one sign of "problematic Internet use." The findings backed those of previous, less rigorous studies, according to the Stanford researchers. Most disturbing was the discovery that some people hid their Internet surfing, or went online to cure foul moods in ways that mirrored the way alcoholics use booze, according to the study's lead author, Elias Aboujaoude. "In a...