Reports the Telegraph,

For married parents, each child makes them progressively happier, Dr. Luis Angeles, an economist at Glasgow University, found. Writing in the Journal of Happiness Studies, he concluded that "raising kids makes married people happier", and that "the more they have, the happier they are". By contrast those who are single, separated or living together are more likely to have negative feelings about parenthood.

Earlier studies had, apparently, suggested something quite different: as EurekAlert explains, "Previous research suggests that increasing numbers of children do not make people any happier, and in some cases the more children people have, the less satisfied they are with their lives. Rather bleakly, this has been attributed to the fact that raising children involves a lot of hard work for only a few occasional rewards."

By contrast, Angeles concluded that the "happiness" seemed to be a direct result of whether the kids were planned, more common in marriages. And there's an obvious correlation between said planning and financial security, and schedule flexibility - the same things that can make child-rearing most stressful.

What can we take away from this? Apparently, that there is a Journal of Happiness Studies. And that Michelle Duggar is the happiest woman in the world. And Angelina Jolie, very rich.

Children 'Make Married Parents Happier' [Telegraph]
Married With Children The Key To Happiness? [EurekAlert]

5.) Ferris Bueller's Day Off
Written and directed by Hughes, he said that he based the character of Cameron on himself, and based Ferris on what he always wished he could be. But it was Ferris' jealous, cynical sister Jeanie (Jennifer Grey) that perhaps provided some of the biggest laughs.

4.) The Breakfast Club
Written and directed by Hughes, this is the quintessential Brat Pack film.

Hughes made a cameo, playing Anthony Michael Hall's father.

3.) Pretty in Pink
This movie always confused me as child, because '80s style guides implied that redheads should always avoid wearing pink, and instead, stick to green. But who doesn't love Duckie?

2.) Weird Science
While the whole computer geeks creating their own model magical dream girlfriend plays into male fantasies, there's something about the themes of Weird Science—underdogs coming out on top with the help of supernatural powers—that hold universal appeal.

1.) Sixteen Candles
John Hughes' directorial debut still stands as an absolute classic, and as such, warranted two clips.

I couldn't help but add this one, because while I was only about 5 years old when I first saw it, somehow, a quarter of a century later, the behavior of these two drunk chicks still rings true.

The creator, Matt Ganucheau, explains his creation as such: "The process leading to a female orgasm is a uniquely delicate challenge for both sexes leaving it a mystery to most men and women. Moaning Lisa is an instillation that examines this complex process by simplifying it into an almost game-like state. With Lisa, as in life, there are no instructions on display. This leaves each participant to discover how Lisa's true sexual potential is unlocked."

And just how does Lisa "teach" her users how to give a woman an orgasm? She moans at them, of course, when her eye sensors pick up someone's presence. Because when a woman wants to have sex with you, she typically stands in front of you with ridiculously unrealistic boobs with sensor tabs attached and begins to moan as soon as you look at her. Realism FAIL!

The robot, according to Oddee, has the following sensors:

Lisa's sensors include: 2 Piezo Touch Sensors are located on the posterior for grabbing, one on each cheek
# 1 Piezo Touch Sensors is located on the back of her neck for grabbing
# 2 Potentiometer knobs located on each nipple for tweaking
# 1 ribbon controller located on her clitoris, measuring friction speed for rubbing

So the user is essentially urged to grab and tweak this robot until the sensors hit overload, which will "escalate her moans to a full scream but also apply additional audio effects such as delays, slicers and reverbs." The artist claims the machine is meant to help both men and women understand the "process" of female orgasms better, but in reality, it seems to just be another case of objectification for the user's personal satisfaction: the woman never says a word, she only moans, and of course, she has no control over what is happening to her body.

This is a one-way sexual encounter that encourages users to grope an object that can't grope back in order to feel a sense of self-satisfaction once her "sensors" go off. It's hard to argue that anything like this can truly be educational when it doesn't involve the realities of sex: namely, consent, physical interaction from both partners, and the notion that GASP! every woman doesn't respond to the same sexual stimuli. The robot, by the way, is labeled as an "instrument" that plays "orgasmic electronic music," cementing the notion that this body doesn't represent a woman as much as it represents a creepy objectification of women and their orgasmic noises.

So what say you, commenters? Educational, or just plain offensive?

10 Most Bizarre Musical Instruments [Oddee]

According to Live Science, researchers asked 650 adults for pictures taken during their final year of school and rated the brightness of their smiles. The men and women were between 21 and 87, meaning some of the photos were 70 years old. The volunteers were then asked if they had ever been divorced. Those with the "weakest" smiled were more than three times as likely to have been through a divorce. A second experiment used pictures taken when people were as young as five and confirmed the findings.

"Maybe smiling represents a positive disposition towards life," said study leader Matthew Hertenstein, a psychologist at DePauw University in Indiana. "Or maybe smiling people attract other happier people, and the combination may lead to a greater likelihood of a long-lasting marriage. We don't really know for sure what's causing it."

What do you think the cause could be? Once a pessimist, always a pessimist? Is happiness contagious? Do some people just smile through the pain? And if you did this experiment on yourself (or your parents), what would the results be?

Smiles Predict Marriage Success [Live Science]
Related: Childhood Photos Could Hold The Secret To Your Marriage [Daily Mail]

The Daily Mail reports that men with a sense of humor are more likely to be seen as intelligent, more honest, and better material for a relationship or friendship. In order to arrive at this conclusion, Psychologist Kristofor McCarty asked 45 women the personalities behind a series of personal ads, some of which were funny and some of which were simply factual. Although the descriptions contained no information about the man's IQ, women were more likely to rate the humorous ad-writers as smart and trustworthy.

McCarty presented his research at the British Psychological Society's annual conference. McCarty said that there is a "kind of halo effect. The funny guys appear to be getting everything," which they use to their advantage. "For a man that doesn't look like Brad Pitt, it gives them a bit of hope," he said.

This sounds fairly reasonable, except then we get to the evolutionary bit:

It is thought women equate wit with brains - perceiving funny men as good providers and good father material.

Mr McCarty said: "From an evolutionary point of view the reason a woman wants to look for a humorous guy is because it is a sign of intelligence and intelligence gives a man the ability to provide resources for their children and survive rather than falling down a trap and dying."

Of course, babies had to be involved in some way. Women couldn't just prefer the more humorous personal ads because they seemed like better partners, or more fun. Ugh.

The Daily Mail also points out that society does not extend such benevolent feelings to funny ladies. McCarty does not think that men are out there combing through the personal ads for the wittiest partner available; "When a man says he would like a woman with a good sense of humor, he really means one that will laugh at his jokes," he said.

Who Gets The Girl? Funny Men Have The Last Laugh [Daily Mail]

He wrote us one Sunday afternoon and asked:

If I'm doing a girl up the butt and she farts will my penis explode?

To which former Jezebel editor Moe Tkacik presciently replied, months before the news of this discovery:

Yes.

It turns out, in fact, that Moe was completely correct. According to Professor Giuseppe Cirino of the University of Naples Federico II:

"We found that hydrogen sulphide is involved in human penile erection. That was proved in this study. Of course, the hydrogen sulphide pathway represents a new therapeutic target for erectile dysfunction and it should be possible in future to develop drugs that either deliver hydrogen sulphide or that control the hydrogen sulphide production."

This means that for men for whom Viagra doesn't work, researchers may be able to develop a drug that either stimulates the natural production of hydrogen sulphide — a component of human farts — or deliver a component of human farts directly to a man's flaccid cock in order to, um, "blow it up," so to speak.

So the next time a dude asks you for a blow job because he's having trouble getting it up, just toot on his dick instead. It should totally do the trick. It's science!

Sex Drug Hope Over Rotten Egg Gas [BBC]
Rotting Eggs Are New Vi-Eggra [The Sun]

Related: Flatulence [Wikipedia]
With Special Thanks To Mythbusters' Episode 48: Franklin's Kite And Flatulence Myths [Mythbusters]

In an article published in the latest issue of The FASEB Journal, Sinkkonen proposes that the "symmetry, shape, and position of umbilicus can be used to estimate the reproductive potential of fertile females, including risks of certain genetically and maternally inherited fetal anomalies." He found that people have very clear preferences for their belly buttons, preferring those that are only slightly indented (so never outies!), t-shaped or oval, and a little hooded. Sinkkonen suggests that abnormal bellybuttons may indicate a risk of several fetal abnormalities. However, in case you are feeling bad about your outie, or heavily-hooded navel, Sinkkonen says: "Don't worry. Nobody's perfect except Angelina Jolie." [LiveScience]

As one might expect, scientists experimenting with their kids is as old as crazy scientists. Piaget waxed child psychiatric, Salk injected his youngsters with polio and this other guy would tickle his kids wearing a mask (yeah, I don't know.) Nowadays, it's rather more regulated: "These days, scientists using human subjects are expected to seek approval from institutional review boards, which consider federal regulations on risk, coercion of subjects and researcher bias," while some researchers sign parental consent forms...to work on their own kids. Others admit that they think such measures are unnecessary, given the benign nature of the research.

If there is an upswing in at-home experimentation, it may be because financing means that it can be hard to get subject, and new technology makes research somewhat more portable. The experiments cited in the article are pretty benign, and range from "strapping a camera on baby Darius’s head, recording what he looked at", scanning kids' brains, and filming them round the clock to analyze language patterns - not that we imagine those performing vivisections or cancer drug trials on their twins would be particularly eager to talk to the Times.

Of course some "ethicists" find any of this problematic. Says one, “The role of the parent is to protect the child...once that parent becomes an investigator, it sets up an immediate potential conflict of interest. And it potentially takes the parent-child relationship and distorts it in ways that are unpredictable.” Sure enough, one scientist does gloat that his kids "were so determined to please their father that they would lie still,” in an MRI machine. Says another,

When one son, 4, answered questions about color and shape wearing an electrode-studded cap to measure brain waves, 'I wasn’t sure whether he’d be willing to put the cap on, whether he’d be willing to do the task,' Dr. Deak said. He did, although 'he needed more breaks than other kids. He wanted snacks.'...and when Karen Dobkins, a U.C.S.D. psychology professor, enlisted her infant twins, Gabriel and Jacob, she said, 'it was kind of painful, because one of my twin boys basically played the game really well, but my other son, we couldn’t even use his data.' She said that 'made me worry that he had autism.'...Her worries proved unfounded. Still, she said, 'I took only the good data and copied it and put it in both of their baby books.'

But, wow, the strangest case is the one in which the husband wants to do research on a new baby and his scientist wife chooses to draw a line. Since she was “'quite opposed to this idea of experimentation...it had to be done surreptitiously, whenever she would go out or when I would take him out in his little BabyBjorn' — still 'a sore topic between us.'”

All that one is left thinking, after reading this, is not that this is a "new phenomenon" so much as a much more obvious form of the parental madness that most people are prone to in one form or another. Should parents harm kids? Should doctors overstep boundaries? Should people be terrible parents and ruin their kids' lives? Ideally, no. Some of these researchers will obviously take this in a strange direction - but that strangeness will probably already be there in one form or another. Someone who's keeping weird secrets from his wife has, arguably, other problems. As a "phenomenon," it's hard to get too exercised...although that electrode cap would give us nightmares.

Test Subjects Who Call the Scientist Mom or Dad [NY Times]

Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin tested the hormone levels of 52 female undergraduates ages 17 to 30. They had the women rate their own attractiveness, and found that subjects who have higher levels of oestrogen are more likely to consider themselves pretty. They also showed photographs of the volunteers to a panel of two men and seven women, asking them to chose the students that they considered "prettiest." Again, researchers found that the women who were deemed physically attractive by their peers had higher levels of oestrogen. Finally, they delved deep into the sexual histories of their subjects, ultimately finding that the high-hormone ladies reported more sexual behavior outside long-term relationships, and were more likely to engage in “opportunistic serial monogamy.”

Dr. Kristina Durante, an evolutionary psychologist and author of the report, said: “Physically attractive women receive more male attention and, when in relationships, are more likely to be the targets of mate poaching.” So according to Durante, pretty women are more likely to cheat on their significant others when someone better (meaning hotter or richer?) comes along than their uglier, more faithful counterparts. In a particularly annoying scientific justification of negative stereotypes, Durante says:

Because it's difficult to obtain a partner who is a good provider and also has good genes, women often have to trade off between having a long-term mate who provides continual material resources and more physically attractive, short-term sexual partners with good genetic resources.

However, highly attractive women demand greater amounts of both types of resources in a male partner, in addition to good parenting and partner skills. Thus, physically attractive women may not only have more alternatives but also high standards that are difficult to satisfy.

So, to recap, women are simply waiting for a “good provider” to come along and sweep them off their feet, but until then, we are willing to mate with the genetically blessed, but materially poor, in order to fulfill our biological need to procreate. Durante even cites Angelina Jolie as an example of an attractive woman with a “highly desirable” mate. She argues that although women may no longer need men to provide for us, there's a deep-rooted psychological inclination to snag the Brad Pitts of the world and hold on to them for dear life: “[Angelina] doesn’t need Brad Pitt long term, but she still faces these same preferences.”

High hormone levels in women linked to unfaithfulness [New Scientist]
Feeling pretty? Hormones may lead to more... [Reuters]
Beautiful women more likely to have affair because of sex hormone [Telegraph]
'Marilyn Monroe' hormone discovered [News.au.com]

Wollstonecraft's death, following the birth of her daughter, the future Mary Shelley, was typical of the times in which she lived: "A part of her placenta needed to be pulled out by a doctor's hand. She developed puerperal sepsis, an infection of the genital tract, which very painfully, and over the period of about a week, killed her." These were the days of rampant puerperal, or childbed, fever, spread by doctors and midwives and a mystery to everyone.

"In the first half of the nineteenth century about five European women in a thousand died from childbirth. Death rates in maternity hospitals were often ten times that; the hospitals stayed open because doctors had an incurable faith in good intentions, and patients a poor grasp of mortality statistics. The physician and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes led the American campaign to stop the spread of the disease by getting doctors to wash their hands. Obstetricians felt slighted. 'Doctors are gentlemen,' said Charles Meigs of the Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, arguing that no such care was needed, 'and gentlemen's hands are clean.'

It's now generally accepted that, while still somewhat mysterious, childbed fever was caused by the streptococcus pyogenes organism, the same bacteria that cause strep throat and a host of other virulent ailments. Although it still exists, it can be treated with antibiotics and there has not been an outbreak in over forty years. And yet, the author asserts, childbirth hygiene standards are slipping. While we appreciate the end of sterility, anyone who reads the account of Mary Wollstonecraft's death can only thank God for gloves, soap and faucets.

When Childbirth Was Natural, and Deadly [Livescience]

Some of us love to cook and hate mixing it up with the math-tinged boringness that is "food science." We might follow Cooks' Illustrated meticulous recipes, but studiously avoid the dry sidebars explaining the whys and wherefores of leavening. A piece in today's Times critiques this kind of mindless order-following, as the author, Kenneth Chang, takes to the kitchen with kill-joy food scientist Shirley Corriher, for whom I've always cherished a deeply unjust animosity.

Cookbooks bark out instructions like boot camp orders — Add oil to pasta water! Salt the eggplant! Brown meat to seal in juices! — and legions of home cooks obediently follow them. I wondered how many of these truisms had a scientific underpinning and how many were but myths. Browning meat, for instance, does not seal in juices. The char adds flavor, though.

Corriher watches as the author cooks, and demystifies beans, grilled shrimp, and braised Brussels sprouts.

A duck leg basted with a soy sauce-rice wine-garlic-ginger-honey sauce provided another lesson in browning.
In addition to adding sweetness, the honey helped brown the duck skin, taking advantage of chemical reactions described by Louis-Camille Maillard a century ago. In the Maillard reaction, at high temperatures, fructose and glucose in the honey reacts with amino acids in the duck, producing a variety of new molecules that add flavor and color.

The anti-scientist might tell herself that if generations of peasant-women can cook without knowing this sort of mumbo-jumbo — using instead instinct, experience, sight and touch — surely we can do without it, too. If something tastes good, we think defensively, it tastes good: who cares why? Of course, if we are honest we know full well the real issue is the panic brought on by the memory of staring blankly at high school's impenetrable chemistry formulas and the horror that was mandatory college science courses. For my part, I was intimidated, I was afraid, and so, like a Medieval ignoramus, I preferred to see Galileo executed than face the realities of a brave new scientific world.

The point of the article, is, ultimately, that the two schools of thought need not really be in conflict. Chang discovers that his mother's "folk wisdom" — adding sugar to a stir-fry out of habit and tradition, for example — is based upon sound principles of food science. Because, as we are meant to see, there is no point to the science if it doesn't result in good-tasting food, and no point to the "folk wisdom" if it's not founded on a chemistry that makes ingredients respond in expected ways. It's all in the way you look at it: food scientist Harold McGee might see that a honey-braised turkey has browned up well because of a Maillard reaction, where a "cook" will just see a luscious skin. The proof of the pudding, as a man once said, is in the eating. And there is something to be said for having grasped the fundamentals of chemistry without every cracking a book.

At The Stove, A Dash Of Science, A Pinch Of Folklore [New York Times]