Scientists on vacation! Sickos on the internet! Studies on sex! Studies on babies! Smelling on Gladiators! Beets on drugs! Science on artichokes! It's your Monday Health Watch, where we watch your health—five senses at a time!
- Five neuroscientists got to go take a vacation in Utah out in the wilderness and write it off as a study of how your brain works when you're not always on a computer and shit, which goes to show that neuroscientists are the ones with big brains.
- Wouldn't you know it: while more people than ever are getting drunk and then going on WebMD and convincing themselves they have lupus, the people who actually have chronic health conditions are less likely than average to have internet access. If you don't immediately go out and install broadband in the home of some poor person with lupus, it's almost as if you gave them lupus (of the mind).
- Study! The average couple has sex 104 times before getting pregnant. Unless they're a couple of stupid teenagers who don't even really like each other, in which case it's one time, for a lifetime.
- Sorry, fellas: when you become a new dad, you too get a surge of hormones, which makes you "temporarily rewired to feel more empathy." How will our babies learn to be hardcore in this environment?
- A new book explores what it's like to lose your sense of smell. One description: "Imagine you go to a movie like Gladiator. (It's) full of all sorts of smelly activities, but you can't smell them. Now imagine you are sitting in that coliseum and smelling the men, the sweat and the blood. It's much harder to be distanced from it." Sounds like you have more on your mind than smell! Namely sex with Gladiators! Amirite?
- A judge has banned genetically modified sugar beets, and thank god for that. We don't need that artificial crap in our bodies. We'll just go back to Splenda.
- Eat an artichoke. Then drink some water. The water tastes sweet. Why? It's because of the cholorgenic acid and cynarin in the artichoke. Uh, thanks, science. Now back to curing cancer. You know?