The average British man or woman has slept with 2.8 million people – albeit indirectly, according to figures released to promote awareness of sexual health. A British pharmacy chain has launched an online calculator which helps you work out how many partners you have had, in the sense of exposure to risk of sexually transmitted [...]

France has by far the highest proportion of clinically underweight women in Europe, but only half of them think they are too thin, according to a new study. In other European countries the opposite is true: the number of women in Britain, Spain and Portugal, for example, who see themselves as seriously skinny easily outstrips [...]

SYDNEY ~ People grumbling their way through the grimness of winter have better recall than those enjoying a carefree, sunny day, Australian researchers have found. The University of New South Wales team used a Sydney news agency to test whether people’s moods had an impact on their ability to remember small details. Researchers placed 10 [...]

Whether you see life as a glass half-empty or half-full may depend on a single, hormone-delivery gene, scientists in Britain reported this week. Some folks, in other words, are likely hardwired for happiness while others are genetically gluttons for gloom, they suggested in a study published in Britain’s Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Earlier [...]

Seductive chemicals are hidden in sloppy kisses, scientists say, but even the most chaste caress can spark an intense hormonal response. “Men like sloppier kisses with more open mouth and that suggests to me that they are unconsciously trying to transfer testosterone to trigger the sex drive in women,” said Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at [...]

Better think twice before choosing a password for emails, online bank accounts and airline tickets. Passwords that show no imagination or distinctiveness are easy prey for information pirates, a new US study says. A statistical analysis of 28,000 passwords recently stolen from a popular US website and posted on the internet reveals that people often [...]

Many British victims of the Titanic disaster in 1912 may have sunk with the ship because of their gentlemanly behavior, according to Swiss and Australian researchers. After examining the economic and social backgrounds of the 2,200 passengers and crew onboard the fated ocean liner, University of Zurich economist Bruno Frey and colleagues from Queensland University [...]

Children who badly misbehave in school are likelier to end up with a dud job, poor mental health, teen pregnancy or divorce, according to a new British study. The paper, published by the British Medical Journal, provides statistical backing for teachers who sound warnings about antisocial behavior, its authors say. It draws on an exceptionally [...]

LONDON ~ Happiness is infectious and can “ripple” through social groups such as family and friends – but work colleagues are apparently immune to each other’s moods, according to a study. The effect creates “clusters” of happy and unhappy people, both socially and in geographical terms, said the study, stressing that contentment “is not merely [...]

Should I Stay or Should I Go? How the Brain Decides In making a decision, our brains operate like a bookie’s computer, weighing the actions of others in the same way that we learn from our mistakes in order to calculate the odds, according to a study released this week. Scientists observing the brain activity [...]