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What should you do when you really, REALLY have to "go"? Make important life decisions, maybe. Controlling your bladder makes you better at controlling yourself when making decisions about your future, too, according to a study to be published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Sexual excitement, hunger, thirst -- psychological scientists have found that activation of just one of these bodily desires can actually make people want other, seemingly unrelated, rewards more. Take, for example, a man who finds himself searching for a bag of potato chips after looking at sexy photos of women....

WASHINGTON—Republican officials say former House Speaker Newt Gingrich intends to take a formal step in the next two weeks toward a run for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. He would be the first of many potential contenders to make the move to challenge President Barack Obama. The former Georgia congressman has been travelling to key primary and caucus states in recent months in the run-up to a campaign for the White House. The officials say an announcement is likely in the first half of March. It is not clear what type of declaration he intends to make. Some White House...

Genghis Khan's Mongol invasion in the 13th and 14th centuries was so vast that it may have been the first instance in history of a single culture causing man-made climate change, according to new research out of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology, reports Mongabay.com. Earn Points What's this? Comments (21) Email Facebook Twitter Stumble Digg Share Unlike modern day climate change, however, the Mongol invasion actually cooled the planet, effectively scrubbing around 700 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere. So how exactly did Genghis Khan, one of history's cruelest conquerors, earn such a glowing environmental report card?...

Moments before he was to stand trial for bilking The Meadows Racetrack and Casino out of nearly a half-million dollars in fraudulent jackpots, a Swissvale man was arrested Monday by federal authorities, who say he actually may have stolen as much as $1.4 million from casinos in the U.S. and abroad. "I wasn't there, but I heard that he was fairly surprised," Washington County District Attorney Steven Toprani said about the reaction of Andre Nestor, 39, who was arrested by FBI agents as he prepared to enter the courtroom of Common Pleas Court Judge Janet Moschetta Bell. Federal agents acted...

Archaeologists on the island of Crete have discovered what may be evidence of one of the world's first sea voyages by human ancestors, the Greek Culture Ministry said Monday A ministry statement said experts from Greece and the U.S. have found rough axes and other tools thought to be between 130,000 and 700,000 years old close to shelters on the island's south coast. Crete has been separated from the mainland for about five million years, so whoever made the tools must have traveled there by sea (a distance of at least 40 miles). That would upset the current view that...

[SNIP] In 1968, I was a philosophy graduate student at the University of Hawaii uninterested in politics. I just wanted to study Aristotle. But all these Marxist Hate America student protests kept getting in the way. They were led by this wild-haired, wild-eyed hippie rabble rouser whose rhetoric straight from the Communist Manifesto brought crowds of hippie-lefties into deliriums of detestation for their country. His protests ticked me off so much I formed my own student group, Students for Laissez Faire, radicals for capitalism. We made the lefties go apoplectic. The hippie Marxist leader was Neil Abercrombie. He got elected...

Santa brought us a new Sunspot prediction to be added to NASA’s incredibly high series of at least five ill-fated predictions starting in 2006. NASA’s latest peak Sunspot Number for Solar Cycle #24 (SC24) is down 60% from their original, but it still seems a bit too high, judging by David Archibald’s recent WUWT posting that analogizes SC24 and SC25 to SC5 and SC6 which peaked around 50, during the cold period (Dalton minimum) of the early 1800′s. According to Yogi Berra “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Team leader Dr. Mausumi Dikpati of NASA’s National Center...

A Lesson In Venn Diagrams... And Who Gets Paid To Touch Your Junk from the deconstructing-a-joke dept Recently on Reddit, a link to a "Venn diagram" about "people paid to touch your junk" got pretty popular (even though it was apparently a repeat post of one that didn't get nearly as popular. You can see it here: The image then got plenty of attention with links from a variety of much bigger sites that I'm not going to mention, and it seemed to get a good chuckle out of folks who have been following the whole TSA/junk touching situation. Well,...

(CHICAGO ) - The Paiutes, a Native-American tribe indigenous to parts of Nevada, Utah and Arizona, told early white settlers about their ancestors' battles with a ferocious race of white, red-haired giants. According to the Paiutes, the giants were already living in the area. Roaming, man-eating giants The Paiutes named the giants Si-Te-Cah that literally means “tule-eaters.” The tule is a fibrous water plant the giants wove into rafts to escape the Paiutes continuous attacks. They used the rafts to navigate across what remained of Lake Lahontan. Giants roamed the Earth According to the Paiutes, the red-haired giants stood as...

Carol Anne Riddell, the former TV reporter and one-half of the newlyweds who have been widely criticized for participating in a Sunday New York Times wedding feature that detailed how the couple had broken up their previous marriages in order to be together, said she regrets nothing. Riddell told Forbes on Tuesday: "We did this because we just wanted one honest account of how this happened for our sakes and for our kids' sakes. ... There was nothing in the story we were ashamed of." But now it seems like her groom, advertising executive John Partilla, has some misgivings --...

Across the country this week, productions of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" are warming hearts. In this city, one version poses this question: What if Charles Dickens were a Trekkie? The answer runs an hour and 20 minutes and includes three fight scenes, 17 actors with latex ridges glued to their foreheads and a performance delivered entirely in Klingon—a language made up for a Star Trek movie. "It's like an opera," says Christopher O. Kidder, the director and co-writer. "You know what's happening because you already know the story." For those not fluent in Klingon, English translations are projected above...

Cuba banned Michael Moore's 2007 documentary, Sicko, because it painted such a "mythically" favourable picture of Cuba's healthcare system that the authorities feared it could lead to a "popular backlash", according to US diplomats in Havana. The revelation, contained in a confidential US embassy cable released by WikiLeaks , is surprising, given that the film attempted to discredit the US healthcare system by highlighting what it claimed was the excellence of the Cuban system. But the memo reveals that when the film was shown to a group of Cuban doctors, some became so "disturbed at the blatant misrepresentation of healthcare...

The CMS experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has completed a search for microscopic black holes produced in high-energy proton-proton collisions. No evidence for their production was found and their production has been excluded up to a black hole mass of 3.5-4.5 TeV (1012 electron volts) in a variety of theoretical models. Microscopic black holes are predicted to exist in some theoretical models that attempt to unify General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics by postulating the existence of extra “curled-up” dimensions, in addition to the three familiar spatial dimensions. At the high energies of the Large Hadron Collider, such theories...

Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old U.S. Army Private accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, has never been convicted of that crime, nor of any other crime. Despite that, he has been detained at the U.S. Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia for five months -- and for two months before that in a military jail in Kuwait -- under conditions that constitute cruel and inhumane treatment and, by the standards of many nations, even torture. Interviews with several people directly familiar with the conditions of Manning's detention, ultimately including a Quantico brig official (Lt. Brian Villiard) who confirmed much of what...

ON DECEMBER 15th, in a small courtroom in central Moscow, Viktor Danilkin, a softly spoken judge, is due to start delivering a verdict. Its symbolism will go far beyond the fate of the two defendants, Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, former principal shareholders in the Yukos oil company. Both men have been in jail since 2003 on charges of tax evasion. Their sentences expire next year. In order to keep them in prison, the government has absurdly charged them with stealing all the company’s oil. Neither the first nor the second trial had much to do with the rule of...

Takeru Kobayashi – arguably the greatest competitive hot dog eater in the history of mankind – is celebrating his first Thanksgiving in America this year…by eating an ENTIRE TURKEY by himself!!!! A rep for Kobayashi tells us .... the Kobester is set to chow down at a close friend's home -- where he will get his own turkey with all the trimmings ... including corn on the cob, beets, okra and pumpkin pie. The rep tells us Kobayashi is “excited to gobble up." We're guessing he's also excited for that mega-nap after the feast.

IT'S crawling with life down there. A remote expedition to the deepest layer of the Earth's oceanic crust has revealed a new ecosystem living over a kilometre beneath our feet. It is the first time that life has been found in the crust's deepest layer, and an analysis of the new biosphere suggests life could exist lower still. On a hypothetical journey to the centre of the Earth starting at the sea floor, you would travel through sediment, a layer of basalt, and then hit the gabbroic layer, which lies directly above the mantle. Drilling expeditions have reached this layer...

Here come the robo sports journalists. While people in the media biz worry about content mills like Demand Media and Associated Content spitting out endless SEO-targeted articles written by low-paid Internet writers, at least those articles are still written by humans. We may no longer need the humans, at least for data-driven stories. A startup in North Carolina, StatSheet, today is launching a remarkable network of 345 sports sites, one dedicated to each Division 1 college basketball tam in the U.S. For instance, there is a site for the Michigan State Spartans, North Carolina Tar Heels, and Ohio Buckeyes. Every...

You could call it the surprise du jour: A popular food on Vietnamese menus has turned out to be a lizard previously unknown to science, scientists say. What's more, the newfound Leiolepis ngovantrii is no run-of-the-mill reptile—the all-female species reproduces via cloning, without the need for male lizards. Single-gender lizards aren't that much of an oddity: About one percent of lizards can reproduce by parthenogenesis, meaning the females spontaneously ovulate and clone themselves to produce offspring with the same genetic blueprint. (Related: "Virgin Birth Expected at Christmas—By Komodo Dragon.") "The Vietnamese have been eating these for time on end," said...

Scientists have discovered significant amounts of water on the moon—about twice the quantity seen in the Sahara Desert—a finding that may bolster the case for establishing a manned base on the lunar surface. In an audacious experiment last year, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration slammed a spent-fuel rocket into a lunar crater at 5,600 miles an hour, and then used a pair of orbiting satellites to analyze the debris thrown off by the impact. They discovered that the crater contained water in the form of ice, plus a host of other resources, including hydrogen, ammonia, methane, mercury, sodium and...