This drug, Flibanserin, was supposed to be an antidepressant. It sucked at that but it's great at making women horny, and now clinical trials have proved it! But oh, no, stop, stop having your fun, everyone stop everything:

Some doctors are sceptical about the need for pills to boost female sex drive.
For some, reduced sexual interest or response may be "normal", says Professor Irwin Nazareth or University College London.
Others say relying on a pill could stop couples talking through underlying issues.

That is only the whole point. God.
[Pic of couple that could theoretically benefit from this drug via]

Last month, NASA slammed a satellite into the moon at a high speed so that they could study what sort of stuff came up in the impact. While those who watched the bombing live saw nothing, NASA says that they totally found water! On the moon! Water on the moon!

Moon water, guys! We were totally wrong about space. Obviously this means we should go back to the moon as soon as possible, in order to bottle its water and sell it to celebrities.

Ladies who've just had babies (they get all the luck, fitness-wise!) can simply attach their nipples to the mouths of said baby, and allow the child to extract hundreds upon hundreds of calories worth of breast milk every day, leading to slim, trim, pre-baby body in no time. So says a gross simplification of a NYT trend story today (with a priceless lead photo)! At last, science has discovered a use for babies. New mothers couldn't be happier:

"Nobody wants to admit they are doing it for themselves, or ‘I'm doing it to help myself look hot again,' " said Jesse Comer, from Portland, Ore., whose main motivation to breast-feed was her baby's health.

Ha, we'll take your word for it, Jesse! And for those of us not fortunate enough to have an attachable fat-remover, scientists have bad news: the bacteria in your very gut is conspiring with the food you eat to make you fatter. The simple takeaway is that, if you want to lose weight without being forced to reach inside your own intestines and engage in hand-to-hand combat with allegedly "friendly" bacteria, have a baby.
[Pic via]

BPA, a chemical found in like every plastic thing ever made and which you guzzle in your body every time you eat or drink from a plastic container, has been found to make men much exposed to high amounts of it much more likely to suffer erectile dysfunction.

So all those people with their fancy Sigg water bottles were right! Except Sigg water bottles were also full of BPA up until a year ago. Still, look for a dude driving a Volvo with an attached bike rack if you want a good, hard penis.
[Pic: Flickr]

The AP reports on the efforts of a group of British scientists to lay down some boundaries for the actually pretty established practice of splicing human DNA into animals' genetic code. (Earlier this year, for example, researchers added a human language gene to a mouse—and changed how it squeaked.) After controversy erupted last year in England over a plan to grow human embryos using cow and rabbit eggs, the scientists realized it might be a good idea to deal with these complex ethical issues BEFORE we inadvertently create a race of half-cow-half-man creatures who take over the Earth and, in a highly ironic but appropriate twist, begin humanely farming us.

It's the search for what bioethicists call the "yuck factor" (really!)—that point at which any reasonable person's stomach turns due to some deep-seated repugnance. And, though it dealt with a slightly different technology, I'm reminded of this awesome NYT Magazine piece from 2005, which showed just how bizarre the human-animal mixing game could get. In this passage, the writer James Shreeve describes an experiment wherein a scientist implants human stem cells into mice embryos:

If the experiment really works, the human cells should differentiate into all of the embryo's cell lineages, including the one that eventually forms the animal's reproductive cells. If the mouse were male, some of its sperm might thus be human, and if it were female, some of its eggs might be human eggs. If two such creatures were to mate, there would be a chance that a human embryo could be conceived and begin to grow in a mouse uterus — a sort of Stuart Little scenario, but in reverse and not so cute.

''Literally nobody wants to see an experiment where two mice that have eggs and sperm of human origin have the opportunity to mate and produce human offspring,'' says Dr. Norman Fost, professor of pediatrics and director of the bioethics program at the University of Wisconsin and a member of the National Academy of Sciences committee reviewing stem-cell research policies. ''That's beyond anybody's wildest nightmare.''

Yuck.

• Bread.
• Beer.
• Corn.
• Sushi.
• Wheat.
• Rice.
• Chicken.
• Sunflower seeds.
• Nuts and berries gathered in the forest.
• Wild game.
• Grass.
• Any other substance containing "calories," a measure of energy stored in food, which makes you fat. To ensure you don't get fat, avoid any food with "calories," or just kill yourself.

Local teen athletes were immediately skeptical.

Take that back before I smash your fucking face, science nerd. And bring me a beer.
RELATED: Fox News headline writers were high school jocks.

[Pic: Flickr]

Steven Levitt is probably a Very Good Economist, but he has proven again and again and again that this Using Economics To Explain The World thing is utter bullshit. And he and Dubner invented this pop-econ trend that is the most annoying application of make-believe science since pop-psychology. At least pop-psychology gave us Hitchcock movies! All we can hope for from these two is a shitty Soderbergh movie in which the twist is that becoming a gay serial killer was a rational consumer choice.

So. The first book, in its attempt to be interesting, was a series of Slate-y unexpected conclusions that seemed to have been reached before they went to the trouble of misapplying a bunch of research. Conventional wisdom wrong! Abortion good!

Their baby name chapter was not refuting "conventional wisdom" unless your idea of mainstream consensus is a racist talk radio joke—and their list of names that should be skyrocketing in popularity is about 50% correct, which is how well you'd do if you took a "throwing darts at the most popular baby names" list approach to predictions. The abortion chapter completely misrepresented research on the Romanian abortion ban. The bit on the KKK was based on the exaggerated, unscientific tall tales of beloved old activist Stetson Kennedy.

In other words, like most pop science, it was not very scientific. And furthermore, neoclassical microeconomics is just as flawed a method of examining individual behavior as Freudian psychology.

In the sequel book, they've taken the "conventional wisdom is wrong!!!!" thing too far. Drunk driving good! Curtailing carbon emissions bad!

Now, primarily because of the stupid climate change chapter, a bunch of people who formerly would've defended Levitt and Dubner are calling them irresponsible morons. Which is great! But the book will still sell a zillion copies and now a bunch of idiots will have all these completely wrong but controversial things to say about global warming at parties, which will be annoying.

On housework, wives spend an average of 42 hours per week, and husbands spend 23. But husbands spend 34 hours on "paid work," and wives spend 20. Plus, "paying bills" counts as housework, so who even knows what's what? Let's get to the sexxxy part!

Couples reported having sex 82.7 times a year on average, or 1.6 times a week, about the same as in other studies.

All that housework just to get laid once a week! Has anyone tried having sex instead of doing housework? Perhaps it is time we moved towards that model, for equality, and love?

Oh and also scientists proved that Viagra works. So.
[Pic via]

According to a survey from the University of Michigan that polled therapists on college campuses around the country, "over 90 percent" of college counseling services are "seeing an increase in the number and severity of students with mental health problems." With all of the bad performance art, binge drinking, and meaningless political "activism" that goes on at colleges these days, it wouldn't be surprising if students were going nuts, but the experts say they don't actually think today's collegians are crazier than previous generations.

Daniel Eisenberg, who directs the Healthy Minds Study, says the spike in mental health issues on college campuses may be due to "better screening and earlier diagnosis of mental illness in high school." All of this extra counseling might not be such a good thing though. Mental health professionals have a lot to do with the college ADD drug epidemic. Maybe so many students are rushing to the shrink and claiming to have serious mental health conditions because they all want to score Adderall.

Colleges See Rise In Mental Health Issues [NPR]

The science is clear: a new meta-study shows that in places where smoking's banned in public places, heart disease and cardiovascular problems drop off noticeably and rapidly. Which makes sense! More suckily, the smokers among us—and the obese—are about to screwed, by the law:

By more than doubling the maximum penalties that companies can apply to employees who flunk medical evaluations, the legislation could put workers under intense financial pressure to lose weight, stop smoking or even lower their cholesterol.

Being a fat unhealthy smoker already means that you're probably a poor miserable bastard who's going to die young. Must we penalize America's poor miserable bastards even more? If so, start with this guy.
[Pic via]

Is your daily consumption of 12-pack upon 12-pack of Coca-Cola holding you back from your fitness goals? For you, Coke is introducing eight-packs of new 7.5 ounce "mini cans." Only 90 empty calories each! As doctors and fitness professionals always say, "Consuming your corn syrup-laden swill in more frequent, smaller servings throughout the day as you sit motionless in a chair gazing at a computer screen and allowing your ever-deteriorating posture to further crumble is preferable to guzzling it all in one serving directly from a two-liter bottle, except by economic standards, or nutritional ones."

But Coca-Cola alone won't make you a champion. You also need a certain kind of perfume. And don't bother to cool down after your workout. That would require you to work out.

American soda abdominal dominance!
[Pic via]