We are often told to fake it until we make it, and this is useful in all manner of endeavors: acting confident and sexy, starting a new job for which you are under-qualified, etc. But we are not usually advised to do this in matters of the heart—because, after all, love cannot be faked. Or can it? Dun, dun, dunnnn. Some new research is showing that in fact you can trick yourself into finding someone attractive, which is interesting in theory but gets pretty darn creepy when you put it into practice.

The research was done by psychology professor Richard Wiseman, who wanted to test the theory that behavior can shape emotions instead of the other way around. He had about 100 volunteers in Edinburgh take part in a speed dating experiment. He had some of them interact using "normal speed dating behavior," which we can only assume meant having short, stilted conversations while trying to not openly scope out all the other people in the room. But the other group was asked to engage in a series of psychological games designed to encourage them to act like they were attracted to each other and in love. For example, they were asked to look into each other's eyes, touch hands, share secrets, and even make small gifts for each other. Gee, that doesn't sound awkward AT ALL.

After all of this pretend intimacy was over, the two groups were questioned about how many people they met that they felt close to and that they'd like to see again. Of those who'd done the "normal" speed dating thing, about 20 percent of them said they'd be interested in seeing each other again. But in the group that had pretended to already be in love, 45 percent said they wanted to see each other again. When asked to rate how close they felt on a scale of one to ten, those who'd faked intimacy were an entire point higher on the scale than those who had not. While pretending to have the hots for a stranger sounds to me like a nightmare version of one of those "getting to know you" games they make you do at orientations, the games were a hit with the daters, according to Wiseman,

People love this new form of speed-dating because it helps them interact in a more interesting way and, more importantly, encourages them to behave as if they find each other attractive. We actually had a problem stopping people. We had to go around pulling couples apart.

Huh, well, I suppose it would feel sort of flattering to have a complete stranger want to make you a gift, even if you knew in your heart they might be faking it. Anyway, naturally, Professor Wiseman thinks his findings are "remarkable." He says,

Just as people feel happier when they force their face into a smile, so pairs of people behaving as if they find one another attractive became emotionally close. The assumption was that the emotion leads to the action or behaviour but this shows it can happen the other way around, action can lead to emotions. Behaving like you are in love can lead to actually falling in love. People are always going about positive thinking when this suggest positive action is just as valid.

Well, let's gently stroke that paragraph's hand and see if we can get it to whisper its secrets in our ear, even though we've only just met it. First of all, while these findings are sort of interesting, this was a very small sample of people, and it seems hard to draw any definitive conclusion about these couples since we don't know if they actually stayed "in love" after the speed dating event was over.

But even if you can fake attraction until it becomes real, what is the point? Wiseman suggests this "positive action" business could be used speed things up in new relationships, but is that our problem, that we're falling in love too slowly? If anything, aren't we often powerfully attracted to people before we know whether they'd actually be a good long-term partner for us? Is it really wise to convince ourselves to fall for someone we've just met, even if a "natural" attraction isn't there?

The one arena in which this kind of action might really be useful is in existing committed relationships. Say you've been married for 13 years and are bored out of your mind and no longer hot and heavy for your partner. What if you just pretended you were really into them and then before you knew it you actually were? That seems like it might actually be useful—though presumably the spell would be broken after they ate all those onion rings and then farted on you in the middle of the night. But in principle, It's not that far off from a scenario where you're stuck at work and you know you have to be there, you might as well enjoy yourself; so you plaster on a smile and soon you actually are in a brighter mood.

Watch out lotharios: Faking romantic feelings can actually lead to the real thing [Telegraph]

Image via Yuri Arcurs/Shutterstock.

It's so hard to know whether becoming a parent will ruin your life or be the only thing that makes it worth living. We may not get a grand verdict anytime soon, but new research has at least figured out one thing: moms who believe they are the most important person in their baby's life and that they should always put the kid's needs first are way more likely to be unhappy. Perhaps feeding them like a bird or hovering over them like helicopter is the key to their lasting happiness, but is it the key to yours?

This research, which was conducted by psychologist Miriam Liss, focused on "intensive" parenting, which is loosely guided by three main principles. The first is that mothers are the best people to care for their kids. Second, that parenting should be centered around the child's needs rather than your own, and finally that kids should be thought of as "delightful and wholly fulfilling for parents." Whoa, that's intense indeed. And it resembles plenty of other parenting styles that seems to be happening everywhere these days: attachment parenting, helicopter parenting, and all sorts of other "my child is God" approaches. Liss says of this trend,

There's something very appealing about these intensive parenting ideologies. [These attitudes] seem like they are how we should be feeling toward our children. But they may be more problematic than we think.

Despite evidence that this method is subscribed to by many parents, Liss found a lack of data about the mental impact of living it. So she set out to explore what happens when you go "intensive." They had 181 mothers with kids under five fill out a series of online questionnaires in which they were asked about their "parenting attitudes, family support, life satisfaction and mental health." They were asked to rate how strongly they agreed with these five beliefs involved in intensive parenting:

That moms are primary, that kids are entirely fulfilling, that children need lots of stimulation, that parenting is very challenging and that parents' lives should revolve around their children.

What they found was that three of those five tenets were associated with unpleasant mental side effects for the mothers. It turned out that not that many women actually believed that they were more important than anybody else—even the father—in their kids' life. But the women who did believe they were tops also reported being less satisfied with life, under more stress, and they also felt less family support than the other mothers. It makes sense that nominating yourself Commander-in-Chief of your child's life would add some stress to your existence, and if that's all you're ever thinking about it's easy to understand how you'd feel less satisfied too—since kids aren't known for pulling you aside to offer heartfelt thanks for doing such a stellar job of caring for them.

Believing that parenting is a huge challenge also resulted in feeling less satisfied and more stressed and depressed. Liss says of this finding, "That one is a strongly held belief. Parenting being really, really hard is a commonly held belief that seems to be really bad for women." If you think about it, going into something with a negative attitude doesn't usually result it being hugely enjoyable; so it'd make sense if the same principle applies here. Finally, the researchers found that women practiced child-centered parenting also had lower life satisfaction. Interestingly, however, that correlation went away when they controlled for family support.

When taken together, these conclusions could help explain why other research has had such a hard time decided whether parenting makes people happier or makes them less happy. Liss explains,

Maybe it's not having a child versus not having a child. Maybe there are certain ways of parenting, like this intensive style of parenting, that is more negative for parents' mental health.

It's impossible to say for sure that intensive parenting leads to depression and stress and being dissatisfied, but the links don't really make sense if you flip them around. It's also not clear whether intensive parenting has any great impact on the children, but Liss concludes that anything that makes moms depressed probably doesn't benefit children in the long run. Plus, anecdotally some of us have observed that making your child the center of the universe tends to result in rather obnoxious offspring.

So if it's not helping kids, and it's making moms miserable, why are we doing it? Good question. Has the Supernanny taught us nothing? Have the French and their perfectly stylish and well-behaved bebes not made an impression? Still, even if we could figure out a way to stop turning our children into tiny black holes of need, there's really no guarantee they're still not going to make us miserable—intensive parenting or not. If only there was some kind of equation—involving complex factors like weather patterns, your score on the purity test, the stock market, and your shoe size—that could be used to determine what kind of effect having kids will have on you. And while we're at it, maybe they could come with some kind of money back guarantee?

Moms Whose Lives Revolve Around Baby Suffer [LiveScience]

Image via Jim Cooke.

Looks like humans aren't the only ones who like to pop on camera and make themselves known during news broadcasts—though at least when people are going for their 15 seconds of fame, they don't usually sink their claws into the reporter's back.

[Via Tastefully Offensive]

There are already so many reasons for Arizona to be beaming with pride. They hardly needed another feather in their cap, but it looks like they've got one anyway: a mother in Phoenix was arrested earlier this week after she put beer in her son's sippy cup while they were eating at a local pizza place.

First of all, never do that. But if you are going to do it, certainly do not do it in a restaurant in full view of everyone, and then especially do not get up and leave the child alone at the table with his cup of beer—which she did, beeteedubs. Valerie Marie Topete, 36, said she gave her two-year-old the beer because he "kept reaching" for the pitcher of it on the table. Sure, okay, kids reach for the steering wheel of the car, but that DOES NOT MEAN YOU LET THEM DRIVE.

There were conflicting accounts of whether the boy actually consumed any of the beer, but he was taken to the hospital as a precaution. His mother was charged with one count of child abuse, and the boy is now in the custody of his father—though he was also at the pizza place with the boy's two siblings when all of this happened. But he's hopefully aware by now that alcohol + sippy cup = parenting disaster.

Mom accused of giving child beer at Phoenix restaurant {AZ Central]

Image via Arvind Balaraman/Shutterstock.

Some of you might have thought that President Obama has been campaigning by trying to tell people what he wants to do with this country, but if you believe what Ann Romney has to say about his strategy, it turns out he's actually secretly been trying to convince us to not vote for Mitt Romney. Bananas!

Ann elaborated on this during a friendly chat with CBS. She referred to a report from last year that had Obama saying they "will have to kill Romney" to win the election. Obama's advisor David Axelrod called the story "garbage" and he also, hilariously, pledged to fire anyone who called Romney "weird." But Ann is convinced Obama still has it out for her hubster:

I feel like all he's doing is saying, "Let's kill this guy," And I feel like that's not really a very good campaign policy. I feel like Mitt's got the answers to turn this country around. He's the one that's got to bring back hope for this country, which is what they ran on last time. But the truth is, this is the one that has the hope for the - for America.

Ann may have a lot of feelings on this matter, but she's no wimp. When talking about Obama's "plan" to kill Romney, she gets tough and threatens, "Not when I'm next to him, you better not." OH, SNAP! Meanwhile, she does realize that there are members of her own party who really literally do talk about killing Obama, right?

Either way, even if it were true that Barack was on the hunt, Mitt would have nothing to worry about because he can just build himself a shield—or an ark! or a missile! or an SUV to strap Obama to!—out of all the cash he's raising. He reportedly raked in more than 100 million dollars in June, which is probably like pocket lint to him. He's about to get even more from his new best friend David Koch, one half of the notorious Koch brothers who secretly dictate elections in this country using puppet strings spun from gold. Romney has made nice with the gazillionaire in hopes that he will sprinkle some of his pixie money on him, and lo and behold it's finally happening: David and his wife are throwing a $50,000 a head fundraiser for Mittens in Southampton this weekend. David and his bro Charles previously supported Herman Cain's candidacy, if that tells you anything about their judgment. Anyway, the point is that Mitt has money coming out of his eyeballs, and if Barack tries to hurt him by calling him "weird" or otherwise, he can just blind people in a shower of hundred dollar bills until they forget what they were even talking about and remember that Mitt is a wacky guy who loves to prank the common people by pretending he's one of them and then totally fucking them over with his policies. See? Fun, not weird. FUN NOT WEIRD.

Ann Romney: Obama's strategy is ‘let's kill this guy' [Washington Post]

If your heart bleeds because you love Abraham Lincoln so much but you can't be with him because he's dead, then you're in luck: get these fancy Honest Abe band-aids and wear them close to your heart, or really on any wound. As the handsome Abe-adorned tin they come in promises, "I will heal your wound like I healed a nation!" Hmm, is it weird to give yourself a paper cut just so you'd have an excuse to wear a picture of Lincoln on your finger?

[Via Laughing Squid]

PARIS, FRANCE - JULY 04: Kim Kardashian and Kanye West leave the Valentino Haute-Couture Show as part of Paris Fashion Week Fall / Winter 2012/2013 at Hotel Salomon de Rothschild on July 4, 2012 in Paris, France. (Photo by Julien M. Hekimian/Getty Images)

It's not many of us who were organized enough to tape ourselves at age 12 talking to the future us, but thank goodness Jeremiah McDonald was. Now that it's 20 years later, he's having a little conversation with his past self. The results are pretty amazing, though the exchange between the two (er, one) is more contentious than you'd think. It seems you annoy yourself just as much in the future as you did in the past.

[Via VVV]

Good news for those of you who are dying to know how you ended up with the breasts you did: A new study has found seven genetic markers that are linked with breast size in women. It has long been known that breast size was in part passed down through families, but this research is the first to locate the specific genetic factors that are associated with variations in lady bumps.

While this is sort of interesting by itself because, hey, boobs! What is really relevant is that two of the factors that are associated with breast size have also previously been tied to an increased risk for breast cancer. This suggests, according to Nicholas Eriksson who led the research (which was done by genetics testing company 23andMe), that some of the same pathways that govern breast growth are also involved in breast cancer development.

Previous research has found a connection between breast density and cancer risk, and there have also been a few studies that have found a link between larger breasts in lean women and breast cancer. This new study doesn't by itself prove that there is a link between breast size and cancer, but it will likely help scientists figure out what role breast structure plays in increasing risk of breast cancer. So far, this knowledge doesn't seem to be leading down the road to monkeying around with our DNA to give our offspring the best possible cleavage, but you know that at some point in the future, when we are all baking in 9,000 degree weather, this will very definitely be a thing.

Genes for Breast Size Found [MyHealthNewsDaily]

Image via OtnaYdur/Shutterstock.

Today we discussed the possibility of being able to turn off our biological clocks and have babies forever, which inspired msfriendly to beat everyone to the punch by leaving all the classic child-having comments in a giant flurry of genius:

Why can't they just adopt?!
They shouldn't put off having babies!
Who needs a career? Motherhood is so much better than working!
People who have babies are selfish!
People who don't have babies are selfish!
People who have babies by artificial means are selfish!
All women are selfish; they should be pregnant all the time!
We should stop having babies because they kill the environment!
If we don't have lots of babies, who will pay for our Social Security?!

YOU get a comment, and YOU get a COMMENT. EVERYBODY gets a comment!

Submit nominations to the Comment of the Day tag page. Click on the comment's time stamp, and post the comment's URL to the forum. (Replying to a comment with "#cotd" does not work; you need to go to the forum.) For meetups, use the meetup forum!

Remember those innocent days back before sexting was even a word? When ruffled collars covered us up to our chins, courting was the norm, and no one under the age of 21 even touched each other? Yeah, well, the good old days are over now that technology has turned our young people into a bunch of sexty beasts. Yes, a new study has found that not only are a lot of teens sexting, those who are tend to be far more likely to be having actual sex—you know, old-fashioned skin-on-skin, no-data-network-involved sexual intercourse. Pearls = clutched.

The study, which was led by Jeff R. Temple of the University of Texas in Galveston, polled nearly 1,000 15- and 16-year-olds who attended public high school. It turned out that 28 percent of teens admitted to having beamed out a naked picture of themselves into the ether. Thirty-one percent of the kids said they'd asked someone to send them a naked picture, but 57 percent said they'd been asked to send a naked picture. It wasn't always a welcome request: Of the kids who'd been asked to send a photo, most of them said they were bothered by the invitation to reveal their private parts in a potentially very public way. Yet many of them did it anyway. While boys and girls were both equally likely to send a sext, the boys were more likely to ask for one. Temple found that almost 70 percent of the girls had been asked to send a sext. And they say chivalry is dead...

What's interesting is that there seems to be some correlation between who's willing to engage in virtual sexual activity and who will engage in it IRL. Of the girls who'd never sent a sext, 42 percent had engaged in actual sex; Though of the girls who'd admitted to sexting, more than 77 percent of them had had sex. The boys who'd sexted were even more likely to have had sex than the girls. Almost 82 percent of the sexter boys said they'd had real sex, whereas only 45 percent of the non-sexters had. Jeeze, there's a whole lot of sexy sexting sex happening these days.

What's a little worrisome, however, is that the girls who sexted were found to have a higher chance of engaging in risky sexual behavior—including using drugs and alcohol before sex or sleeping with multiple partners. The male sexters did not exhibit the same tendency toward risky behaviors. The risks of exposure via sexting are probably higher for girls, since society tends to judge girls who get naked far more harshly than it does boys who do the same thing. Thus, it makes a certain amount of sense that those who'd be willing to risk sexting might also be prone to take other sexual risks.

Overall, Temple concludes that sexting "may be a reliable indicator of actual sexual behavior." And, yes, if you're willing to expose yourself sexually through one channel, you might be more open to doing it in other ways. Though it doesn't seem likely that it's the ability to sext that's driving teens to have sex. Rather it's just another mode through which they can express their already sex-obsessed minds. So what are we supposed to do with this information—other than forbid teens from going anywhere near phones or their fellow human teens? Well, not much, really. At this point, the risks of sexting are well established, but it keeps happening anyway. Why? Because it's thrilling, and teenagers have terrible judgement—and a thousand other reasons. So probably we should just be glad we didn't come of age in a time when this was an option for us. And what's the point in even worrying because soon teens will be able to beam naked images of themselves directly into each other's minds and all hell will break loose.

'Sexting' teens found to be up tos 82% more likely to be having sex compared to the non-sexting teens [NYDN]

Images by Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock.

Two-year-old Wren Bowell has some crazy luck. The girl, who is from England, had the misfortune to trip and land so that a pencil she was carrying jammed into her eye socket and went through her skull. Yeowch! But it turned out luck was on her side after all, because while the pencil penetrated nearly four centimeters into her head, it didn't damage her eyeball and stopped just one millimeter away from a major blood vessel. Had it pierced the vessel, she almost certainly would have had terrible brain damage or died.

Wren had been drawing in her room, when she ran to show her parents her creation. She tripped and the pencil in her hand ended up lodged into her eye socket. Her mother, a nurse, had the presence of mind not to try to remove it. Instead, Wren was taken to the hospital where she underwent a four-hour surgery that involved removing a piece of her skull to extricate the pencil. It was only later that her parents found out just how close a call their daughter had had. Her dad Martyn says,

The pencil missed her eye completely. We only found out afterwards that the pencil missed two major blood vessels and if it had gone a millimetre either way it could have been a lot worse if it had hit a third.

Fortunately, her vision is intact, her skull has been put back together with some plates and screws, and after three weeks recovery, she's gone back home and is totally fine. Thank goodness she escaped relatively unharmed. Hopefully she won't be put off art for good, but perhaps it's best if she sticks to finger painting from now on.

Toddler makes full recovery after pencil pierced eye socket [Guardian]

Image via Julia Ivantsova/Shutterstock.

If your first period signals the official "start" of your usefulness as a baby vessel, then menopause is the long, slow death wail of your fertility. No matter how much money you throw at your uterus, if your ovaries go menopausal it's all systems no on mission pregnancy. Or, at least, it used to be. Everything might be about to change, thanks to new research that's found that by harvesting your ovarian tissue before it goes kaput, freezing it, and then grafting it back onto your ovaries years later it's possible to undo menopause and keep your fertility going for far longer than nature would have allowed. Obviously, that's pretty cool, but it could also change life as we know it. Are visions of 80-year-olds clutching their newborn babies already crowding your head?

These futuristic sounding findings were delivered at a conference held by the European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology in Istanbul this week. Doctors made the case that this ovarian tissue transplant should be moved from being an experimental treatment to being a mainstream option for all kinds of patients. Thus far, 28 babies have been born to mothers who received transplanted ovarian tissue and would otherwise have been infertile. Most of the pregnancies occurred naturally, with no IVF involved. While other researchers have been working on hatching eggs from ovarian stem cells in the lab, this kind of direct tissue transplant is a simpler alternative that has the power to extend a woman's own fertile period.

This transplant technique was first reported on eight years ago, yet it has remained experimental and has only been done by a few specialists. But evidence is growing that this is a practice worth expanding. One piece of proof was presented at the conference by Dr. Gianluca Gennarelli from Clinica Universitaria Sant'Anna in Turin, Italy. The case involved a 21-year-old woman who in 2003 was diagnosed with cancer and was set to receive fertility-destroying chemotherapy. Some of her ovarian tissue was collected using laparoscopic surgery. It was then frozen and stored in liquid nitrogen. She underwent the chemo and, as predicted, became infertile. In 2010, she was ready to have children, and so they sewed 32 fragments of her thawed tissue back onto her ovaries. After two months, some of her ovarian function returned. Then she began having menstrual cycles and ovulating. Fifteen months after the transplant, she became pregnant without any additional medical intervention. She gave birth to a healthy baby in March of 2012. That is pretty amazing.

According to Dr. Sherman Silber, a surgeon at St Luke's Hospital in St Louis, Missouri, who has been involved in 11 of these transplants, this technique is "robust"—since in some cases transplants done eight years ago are still working—and should no longer be considered experimental. He says, "It's really fantastic, we didn't expect a little piece of ovarian tissue to last this long." Fantastic and a little freaky, since this is kind of like a little tiny ovarian fountain of youth.

The most obvious use for this procedure is to allow women who are undergoing cancer treatments to be fertile again after they achieve remission—and, indeed, most of the transplants done so far have been on cancer patients. It's particularly well suited to them since the harvesting can be done right away, and it doesn't require prolonged hormonal treatments like existing egg harvesting procedures do. As far as what the promise of control over their fertility offers to cancer patients, the researchers gave this whackadoo explanation:

All modern women are concerned about what is commonly referred to as their "biological clock" as they worry about the chances of conceiving by the time they have established their career and/or their marriage and their financial stability.

Most of our cured cancer patients, who have young ovarian tissue frozen, feel almost grateful they had cancer, because otherwise they would share this same fear all modern, liberated women have about their "biological clock."

Ha, wow. Let's unpack that a little bit before our heads explode and render our ovaries useless. First of all, while it is no doubt nice to know that your fertility is not rapidly expiring while you fart around trying to figure out what you're doing with your life, it seems HIGHLY unlikely that anyone is really like, I'm totally psyched I got this cancer, Doc. It's really taken a load off of my lady mind. BUT that gross overstatement aside, the idea of an eternal biological clock is definitely intriguing to all of us "career women," as the Telegraph calls us in their article about this research.

Obviously, not all modern women are concerned about their loudly ticking biological clocks, but a large percentage of us definitely are at some point—at least if New York Times trend pieces and romantic comedies are to be believed. So what if this treatment could be extended to everyone, as these doctors are arguing it should be? They say that if we had our ovarian tissue harvested while we were still in our fertile period and saved it for later, it would effectively be a way of putting menopause "on ice." Basically, the only thing stopping women from giving birth in their older age would be their "physical ability to carry a pregnancy." Dr. Silber lays out how this might work:

A woman born today has a 50 per cent chance of living to 100. That means they are going to be spending half of their lives post-menopause. But you could have grafts removed as a young woman and then have the first replaced as you approach menopausal age. You could then put a slice back every decade.

In theory, this is awesome; though anyone who's ever watched TLC's Pregnant at 70 will know there are limits to just how appealing this is. For one thing, even if your ovaries can go on living forever, it doesn't mean the rest of you will. Having children when you're truly old means a much higher chance you'll die when your kid is still young, and there are also serious practical downsides like having less energy to chase them around, etc. But what about for people who aren't elderly but aren't in their mid-30s anymore either. This certainly does seem like an appealing option for that demographic, and in some ways this is a simpler solution than undergoing multiple rounds of IVF or other fertility treatments.

In the broader sense, this kind of option would also level the workplace playing field to a certain extent. If women were no longer running headlong into the concrete wall of menopause, it would free us up to make career decisions and child-bearing decisions based entirely on what we wanted to do, not on what nature might be planning for us. We could FINALLY "have it all." (Gaaaahhh.) Granted, we'd have to pay for a likely expensive procedure to work around nature; whereas men don't have to do anything to stay fertile. But at least this option would remove some of the time pressure we're under at the moment.

Of course, as with anything that radically messes with one's body, there are probably some major downsides. Really, we have no idea what the implications of this are and whether it would even be possible to put off menopause for an extended period as these researchers are suggesting. Dr. Tim Hillard, a British gynecologist and expert on menopause, calls this development "exciting," but he says we have a long way to go:

[W]e would need much more data before claims could be made about the menopause. You would have to balance it very carefully, the higher risks of breast and womb cancer that go with having oestrogen circulating for longer against the increased risk of heart disease, oesteoporosis and maybe dementia that go with the menopause. Theoretically it could be used as an alternative to hormone replacement therapy, particularly in women who go through the menopause prematurely, but that could be ten or 15 years away.

Blerg. Okay, but seriously, health consequences aside, let us not forget a major downside which none of the doctors seem to consider: this means you'd have your period for almost your entire freaking life. As much as extended fertility would be a blessing, an eternal menstrual cycle sounds more like a wretched curse. Either way, it sounds like we'll still have to wait a while before we have to commit to a few extra decades of visits from Aunt Flo—though if the tampon companies catch wind of this possibility, they'll probably jump on board and fund this research so fast we'll be able to start doing this next week. In the meantime, let's hope cancer patients can benefit from being able to preserve their fertility, and the rest of us better start mentally preparing ourselves to be chasing our toddlers around at our retirement parties.

Fertility preservation with cryopreservation of ovarian tissue: from experimental to mainstream [EurekAlert]
Women could delay the menopause indefinitely with ovary transplant: doctors [Telegraph]

Image by Jim Cooke, source photo via Tinydevil/Shutterstock.

Well, if it isn't a new entry for the Terrible Excuses Hall of Fame. A woman in Arkansas gave this bold explanation for why she fled the scene of a car accident she was involved in: "I left because I didn't want my ice cream to melt." Flora Burkhart rear-ended someone who was in a turn lane, but she failed to stop after she'd hit the other car. The driver called police, who followed Burkhart to her home where they got that doozy of an excuse for why she drove off. She tried to say she didn't think there was enough damage to stop, but generally after you smack into someone's car it's a good idea to check anyway just to make sure. As for the ice cream, yes, these are tough economic times, but could she not have re-frozen it AFTER she dealt with the car accident? The police didn't buy it either, and they gave her a ticket for following another car too closely (she must have been in a hurry to get home and have a sundae) and leaving the scene of an accident. Lesson learned: when it comes to priorities, attending to car accidents comes before melting ice cream.

Driver leaves hit-and-run because she 'didn't want my ice cream to melt' [4029TV via AP]

Image via PSD photography/Shutterstock.

Here's some sad news, you guys: Mermaids don't actually exist. I know, I know, we've spent all that time that Splash was a documentary, but no, mermaids are nothing but a figment of our collective imagination. How do we know (except for, you know, already knowing)? Because the National Ocean Service, a part of the federal agency the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has officially said so on their website. Here, you can read the cold, hard truth for yourself:

But are mermaids real? No evidence of aquatic humanoids has ever been found.

Why did the government feel the need to address this burning question at this exact moment? It appears to be in response to a show that Animal Planet recently aired called Mermaids: The Body Found, in which they looked at whether there is "a kernel of truth that lives beneath the legend of the mythic mermaid." (Hint: no.) This seems to have caused the NOS to get some questions about the existence of the half-woman, half-sea creatures, and so they helpfully provided us all with the truth. As heartbreaking as it may be to give up on the illusion that somewhere a real Ariel is married to a charming Disney prince, we'll just have to face facts and move on with our lives. Let's just hope that next week the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service doesn't issue a statement revealing that centaurs don't exist, because that would just be too much to handle.

Really? Mermaids don't exist, NOAA website notes [MSNBC]

Image via Linda Bucklin/Shutterstock.

Sure, it's America's birthday, but did you know that it's also Malia Obama's birthday? Well, it is, and she's turning 14. FOURTEEN? It seems like just yesterday that she was a little girl on the campaign trail with her family, and now she's turned into an amazingly poised teenager. We looked away for, like, one second, and she grew to be almost as tall as her dad. She's got a level of grace and style that most adults, let alone teens, would find completely enviable. And no matter how cool the rest of us think her parents are, she seems suitably embarrassed by them—as any reasonable teen should be. Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that she's turning out so well, given how awesome her mom is (and her dad is not exactly a loser either), but it's nevertheless impressive to see how she's handled being thrust into the spotlight and what a great adult she's shaping up to be. If it's possible to have a role model that's a decade or two younger than you, then Malia is it.

LONDON, ENGLAND - JULY 04: Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge and Prince William, Duke of Cambridge chat in the Royal Box on Centre Court during day nine of the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Championships at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club on July 4, 2012 in London, England. (Photo by Clive Rose/Getty Images)

The only thing cuter than a puppy talking in her sleep is a puppy who gets super embarrassed when she discovers that her humans have been watching her talk in her sleep.

[Via Tastefully Offensive]

Ever since she dropped the D-bomb on Tom Cruise last week, Katie Holmes has been popping up around New York City acting all smiley and casual. I guess that's what happens when one is giddy from freeing oneself from the overzealous grip of a couch-jumping megastar. Anyway, as much as we've seen her, we have not yet heard her comment on this urgent matter of national importance. But fortunately she has finally broken her silence. A New York Daily News reporter followed Katie and Suri into a Whole Foods earlier today and presumably harassed them until Katie finally said something. So what did she say? Brace yourselves because right there in the produce section she spilled all of the dark secrets we've been dying to know about their marriage and about Scientology. Haha, gotcha! Here's what she actually said when asked how she's doing:

I'm all right. Thank you.

Well, there you have it. She's A-OK. Apparently she was smiling and her tone was gracious rather than "leave me alone, you stalker parasites." So she must legitimately be in a good mood. From the contents of her shopping cart—ground beef, hamburger buns, strawberries, and bananas—it seems like she and Suri have some Fourth of July BBQ plans. Sadly, Tom won't be in on the fun, since he's in LA being "somber" and probably still feeling sorry for himself because Katie and Suri ditched their pre-divorce plans to celebrate his 50th birthday with him yesterday.

Tom Cruise, Katie Holmes divorce: Holmes, Suri hit Whole Foods to stock up for Fourth of July BBQ [NYDN]

As medical technology has gotten amazingly advanced, and we've gained more and more control over how and when babies are born, we tend to think that as long as you're not extremely premature, it doesn't really matter exactly how long a baby cooks in its mother's womb. Well, think again. Two new studies have found that a lot can depend on when you're born—even if you're born during the period that's considered full term—and it can have long-lasting effects on things like your academic performance and mental health.

The first study looked at babies that fell within the 37 to 41 week period that most consider full term. You probably wouldn't think there'd be much difference in how children born during this period would end up doing in school, but think again. Researchers looked at 128,000 kids in the New York City public school system and found that whether kids were born at 37 weeks or 41 weeks mattered. By third grade, the kids born at 37 weeks were a third more likely to have severe difficulties in reading, and they also had a 19 percent greater chance of having moderate problems in math than those born at 41 weeks. Overall, the differences in the test scores between the two groups of kids were small but significant.

Researchers say these results should factor into how we decide which babies are considered premature, and they should also be considered in the ongoing debate about whether it's a good idea to allow pregnant women to schedule early C-sections for the purposes of convenience. Dr. Kimberly Noble, the study's lead author and an assistant pediatrics professor at Columbia University Medical Center, says expectant parents should "at least proceed with caution before electing to have an earlier term birth." There's no need to panic if your baby is born at 37 weeks, but people also should not be going out of their way to have them that early.

If you go much earlier than 37 weeks, things get a bit more frightening. Another study, this one conducted by researchers at Kings College London, found that babies born prematurely were far more likely to suffer from mental health problems like schizophrenia, major depression, and bipolar illness. The researchers used birth and hospital records for more than 1.3 million people born in Sweden between 1973 and 1985, and they compared data from those born at full term and those born very premature (less than 32 weeks). They found the premature babies were more than twice as likely to land in the hospital for schizophrenia, three times as likely to have major depression, and a whopping seven times more likely to be bipolar.

Even if babies were not extremely premature but were instead born between 32 and 36 weeks, they were still at increased risk. They had a 60 percent higher chance of schizophrenia, they were 34 percent more likely to have major depression, and twice as likely to be bipolar. While all of these numbers sound terrifyingly large, do keep in mind that while the relative risk of mental illness is higher for preemies, the number of people that were actually hospitalized for any of those illnesses was still very low.

As for why there is a connection between being premature and having mental illness, researchers explained that the "preterm brain" is especially prone to injury, and MRIs of kids who were born very early have found that there are "disruptions in brain networks" that are like what you'd see in a psychiatric patient. It's also possible that there is some genetic factor that is triggered by being born early.

Of course, people don't generally opt to have premature births in the way they might to have an early C-section. So it's not as if you can warn people off against having their babies extremely early, but these findings are helpful in that they could lead to earlier or more careful mental health screenings for people who are born prematurely. And, taken together, this research seems to confirm what we already sort of knew: ideally you leave a baby in the womb for as long as is safely possible—as long as it's not too long, like two or three years long because that's just weird and probably very uncomfortable and sure to cause a whole host of other problems for the child's development.

Smart babies stay in the womb longer; Study shows improved brain development in full-term infants [NYDN]
Early Birth May Pose Higher Risk to the Mind [New York Times]

Image via Dragana Gerasimoski/Shutterstock.

Abortion providers, pro-choice activists, and pretty much anyone associated with them have been relentlessly targeted by anti-choice protesters. They've been subject to everything from garden variety stalking, to violence, and, in some cases, murder. Yet, it's far more rare that the tables are turned and anti-choice activists find themselves the target of harassment campaigns or violence. But Keith Mason, head of the burgeoning "Personhood" movement, is now alleging he and his family were violently attacked by someone who opposes their highly controversial cause. Is this the beginning of all-out war or could it lead us down a slightly less hateful road?

Mason (pictured above) is the charismatic leader behind the organization Personhood USA, which—in case you haven't spent the past year or so getting enraged about it—is seeking to declare that life begins the minute that sperm meets egg. If this were to happen, abortion would be totally out since killing a person is illegal, but it could also be a crime to use some forms of birth control, IVF would become hugely problematic, and even miscarriages could be criminal in some cases. Despite the extremeness of this position, Mason, with the help of his wife Lisa, has launched a movement that's managed to get this idea on the ballot in a growing number of states. This incident targeting Mason appears to have been precipitated by a Newsweek profile of him which ran last week and has caused a bit of an uproar as more and more people get clued in to what personhood laws could actually mean.

Mason told the Daily Beast that he was at home in Colorado last Wednesday at about 1:30 in the morning when it all began: "I was in the basement, catching a movie and having a beer, to just chill. I heard a loud noise and thought one of our kids had fallen down the stairs." He went upstairs and "ran through a bunch of glass" and "saw red." Apparently, someone had thrown a boulder through the glass in his front door, which explains the glass. He also says whoever it was "yanked down" security lights that had been on the house. As for the red, Mason says:

I didn't know if it was blood on the glass or what. It turned out to be spray paint. There was red paint all over the side of our house. They spray-painted coat-hangers all over my sidewalk and door. We called 911. The police were there within three minutes.

As for those police, they've confirmed there was an attack and said they're looking for suspects. The Masons, who have three kids and one on the way, are taking the threat to heart. He says he's moved his family to an "undisclosed location" and, amazingly, they do not plan to go back to their home. His kids are "pretty traumatized," but Mason seems to be taking this whole thing with an odd mix of seriousness and levity. He cracked a joke that he didn't expect that his movement would inspire people to "redecorate his home," but then he also said, "There was a tricycle in our front yard. I just don't get that. I'm told there's some really bad cats out there."

As scary as this incident sounds, that "there's some really bad cats" remark is more than a little disingenuous coming from Mason, who is intimately familiar with the anti-choice protest movement and their notorious badgering tactics and sometimes their outright violence. Of course, it's clearly inexcusable to throw a giant rock through anyone's door, even if you completely disagree with their cause and worry their actions will impinge on your rights. And, assuming this business was perpetrated by a pro-choice activist of some kind, it's a short-sighted—not to mention illegal—way to act and it does nothing to further the cause. It's only gaining sympathy for Mason's agenda and making the entire fight even nastier.

It remains to be seen whether this is only the beginning of an escalating two-sided war—as opposed to the more one-sided anti-choice protest scene we deal with now. Though if there's any bigger lesson to be learned here, it is that violence and harassment is the terrible thing to be on the receiving end of no matter which side you're on. It would be nice if this incident could cause BOTH sides of this debate to look at their tactics and really think about how little good it does to terrorize people you disagree with.

‘Personhood' Leader Keith Mason Says His Family Home Was Attacked [Daily Beast]

Whoa, if you've been innocently posting photos on Facebook as a means of conveying what a fun time you and your friends had at the beach, you're doin' it all wrong. According to a somewhat crazy sounding survey, many women are posting unflattering photos of their friends online as a means of getting back at them. Gee, friendship is so wonderful.

The survey, which was done by Mymemory.com, asked 1,500 women over the age of 18 about their photo posting habits on social networking sites. It turns out that one in four women deliberately posts unflattering pictures of friends wearing bikinis. They do? I can honestly say that I don't think I even have any pictures of my friends in bikinis to post, even if I wanted to. And it's not just bikinis: two-fifths of women said they'd purposefully put pics of friends wearing no makeup online. And why would you want to post less than flattering photos of your BFFs for all to see? For revenge, of course! The majority of women posting the photos said they did so after falling out with their friends, while nearly a third said they were taking revenge on people who had done the same to them. An half-closed eye for a half-closed eye, as the old saying goes.

Women 'deliberately post ugly photos of friends online' [Telegraph]

Image via spotmatik/Shutterstock.

At last night's Olympic swimming trials in Omaha, Dara Torres narrowly missed qualifying for her sixth Olympics. The 45-year-old finished fourth in the 50-meter freestyle and lost out on a spot on the team by just nine-hundredths of a second. Torres said afterward, "I'm used to winning, but that wasn't the goal here. The goal was to try to make it. I didn't quite do it, but I'm really happy with how I did."

While this may have been a somewhat low-key ending to a long and successful Olympic career, there are plenty of other high notes to remember. She competed in her first Olympics in 1984, and has won 12 medals in total, tying her with Jenny Johnson as the most decorated female swimmer in the U.S. Torres was the first American to swim in five Olympics, and she was also the oldest female swimmer ever to compete at the games.

She won three of those medals in Beijing, but since then she's undergone a radical knee surgery. As nice as it would have been for her to go on setting records, Torres accepts the reality of the situation: "I don't think there's anything I could have changed. You got to look at it realistically. As much as I want to win and I wanted to make the team, that's pretty good for a 45-year-old." Indeed it is. As for where she goes from here, she's got some important plans: She's heading back to Florida with her six-year-old daughter Tessa, where they plan to watch the Olympics at home and enjoy the rest of the summer together.

Torres Moving on After Olympic Bid Fails [AP]