A study led by Prof. Mark Weiser of Tel Aviv University’s Department of Psychiatry and the Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer Hospital has determined that young men who smoke are likely to have lower IQs than their non-smoking peers. Tracking 18- to 21-year-old men enlisted in the Israeli army in the largest ever study of its kind, he has been able to demonstrate an important connection between the number of cigarettes young males smoke and their IQ. (More from SCience Daily)

NASA Scientists Plan To Approach Girl By 2018 

 Be Prepared! Know the risks!

 When will you have enough?

 Don’t Waste Time!

The Queensland Writers Centre, of which I am a member, distributes a newsletter each month (with a trendily obscure cover) with “helpful” advice to writers.

As there is no letters to the editor section or any other mechanism for comments, suggestions and feedback, it does appear to be a closed shop! In this digital age, they don’t even have a forum or allow comments on their own blog!

Unfortunately, like most of the publishing industry (it used to be a profession), it has its head buried in the sand and only occasionally blinks around in a lame and often late effort to discover what is really occurring! Like the entire publishing business inAustralia, it is, sadly, ten years behind the times. Publishers,companies, critics, agents -  you could slap a glass dish over the lot and call it Jurassic Park! Oops, that’s been taken, hasn’t it.

More here.

There were all shapes and sizes – the large and the small, the young and the old, and even a heavily pregnant woman who had re-scheduled the birth of her twins so she could take part.

Read more from The Times On-Line

“Doing all the little tricky things it takes to grow up, step by step, into an anxious and unsettling world.” – Sylvia Plath

Is religion and a belief in a God-like creature just an extrapolation of a child’s “imaginary friend”?

If so, why can’t we, as a race, grow up? 

From childhood, humans are capable of forming enduring, stable and important social relationships with fictional characters, imaginary friends and super heroes. Thus, for humans, it is not difficult to imagine a god who is although invisible and intangible, yet somehow involved with them. Religious thoughts are based on tacit assumptions, when people proclaim their loyalty to a particular faith, they subscribe to claims for which there is no evidence.

Read more from Brain Blogger

It seems that the age old saying “you are only as old as you feel” is accurate! (Let’s ignore the old joke about you are as only as old etc etc)

Markus H. Schafer and co-author Tetyana P. Shippee, a Purdue graduate who is a research associate at Purdue’s Center on Aging and the Life Course, compared people’s chronological age and their subjective age to determine which one has a greater influence on cognitive abilities during older adulthood.

“We found that these people who felt young for their age were more likely to have greater confidence about their cognitive abilities a decade later,” Schafer said. “Yes, chronological age was important, but the subjective age had a stronger effect.”

Read More from Physorg

Forget politicians and other wanker prophets, rock stars seem to understand what lies ahead better than anyone.

Take David Bowie. Eight years ago, he said:

“I don’t even know why I would want to be on a label in a few years because I don’t think it’s going to work by labels and by distribution systems in the same way. The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing.”

The Grateful Dead were pretty good at seeing the future as well. Read more The Guardian.