Free Republic

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...

Gov. Eliot Spitzer signed a bill Monday moving New York's presidential primary to February 5 -- a change that could benefit the Democratic and Republican front-runners, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Rudy Giuliani, both New Yorkers. Nearly a dozen other states, including California and New Jersey, have already moved their primaries or caucuses to February 5 or are about to do so. About a dozen more are considering such moves, setting the stage for what is quickly becoming known as "Super-Duper Tuesday" just 22 days after the leadoff Iowa caucuses. "Moving the primary date to February, we will help secure New...

The White House press corps has cut U.S. presidents few breaks for the past 48 years on the topic of the economy during news conferences, but journalists tend to be creampuffs when it comes to foreign affairs, a new study shows. Statistical analysis of White House transcripts from four randomly selected White House news conferences for every year beginning with the Eisenhower administration and through President Clinton's showed that journalists' questions become more aggressive when the economy turns south, said sociologist Steven E. Clayman of UCLA, who headed up the study. For every 1 percent increase in the unemployment rate,...

BANGALORE, 18 November 2006 — Is it time to say goodbye to CDs, DVDs, Zip drives? A Kerala student has developed a technique for portable data whereby the data can now be stored on ordinary paper. And to boot, larger amounts of data can be had on lesser space. The immediate question that pops into the mind is how to retrieve the data. Will it be as easy as feeding a floppy disc or CD into the drive and having it on the monitor? Perhaps it will be much easier than that. The piece of paper or even plastic sheet...

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,...

Boosting breast size with plastic surgery has been linked to a significantly higher suicide rate among women in a new 15-year study. While overall risk of health problems did not change, the suicide rate was much higher for women with breast implants compared with the general population, scientists announced today. Jacques Brisson and Louis Latulippe of Laval University in Quebec, Canada, and their colleagues from the Canadian Public Health Agency and Cancer Care Ontario collected information on 24,600 women who had received breast implants for cosmetic purposes. The women, who underwent the implant surgery at an average age of 32,...

Men may have developed a psychology that makes them particularly able to engage in wars, a scientist said on Friday. New research has shown that men bond together and cooperate well in the face of adversity to protect their interests more than women, which could explain why war is almost exclusively a male business, according to Professor Mark van Vugt of the University of Kent in southern England. "Men respond more strongly to outward threats, we've labeled that the 'man warrior effect'," he told the British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting. "Men are more likely to support a...

In case anyone needed proof, a new study supports the widely held perception: Celebrities are more in love with themselves than the average person. That's the conclusion drawn by Drew Pinsky and S. Mark Young of the University of Southern California, whose study of 200 celebrities will appear in the Journal of Research in Personality. It's not the entertainment industry that turns stars into narcissists, the study found. Rather, it suggests, the self-adoring seek jobs in show business. The study, whose subjects were all guests on Pinsky's sex-advice radio show — not a place for shrinking violets — found that...

Adventure sports enthusiast Ajit Bajaj became the first Indian to ski to the North Pole. ADVERTISEMENT Bajaj, 40, completed his nine-day expedition from the Russian side of the Arctic with four skiers from the United States and one from Britain, his wife Shirley said. "He left India April 14 for Norway from where the team went to a Russian training camp and then they set off for the North Pole on skis," she said. "They would ski for 10 to 11 hours a day and finally at 4:15 am Indian time my husband called me on satellite telephone to announce...

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Feb. 4 — Iraqi and American officials say they are seeing a troubling pattern of government corruption enabling the flow of oil money and other funds to the insurgency and threatening to undermine Iraq's struggling economy. In Iraq, which depends almost exclusively on oil for its revenues, the officials say that any diversion of money to an insurgency that is killing its citizens and tearing apart its infrastructure adds a new and menacing element to the challenge of holding the country together. In one example, a sitting member of the Iraqi National Assembly has been indicted in the...

TORONTO, Nov. 21 /CNW/ - TIME Magazine has chosen SpaceShipOne - the first private manned spacecraft to fly to the edge of space and back - their 2004 Coolest Invention of the Year. The story can be found inside TIME's annual Coolest Inventions of the Year issue (dated November 29th, 2004, on newsstands tomorrow). TIME's Chris Taylor writes, "This year, more than four decades after Shepard's flight, only two Americans have made the jump into space from U.S. soil - both launched not by NASA but by Rutan's tiny company, known for build-your-own-airplane kits. Thanks to the backing of two...

Hey, guess what? Bush won Ohio. Betcha' didn't know. It's now 274-252 on CNN.

LOS ANGELES - An Egyptian immigrant's deadly attack on an Israeli airline ticket counter last year has been ruled a terrorist attack related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, an FBI spokesman said Friday. "Given his political views and the fact that El Al is an Israeli government-owned airline, that met the criteria for a terrorist attack," said Matthew McLaughlin, a spokesman for the Los Angeles field office of the FBI. Hesham Mohamed Hadayet, 41, opened fire at Los Angeles International Airport's El Al ticket counter on July 4 last year, killing two people before being shot dead by an airline security...