Adding to the deep body of research associating mental acuity with a lower risk of Alzheimer's disease, a study published online on July 8 by the journal Neurology suggests that people who possess sophisticated linguistic skills early in life may be protected from developing dementia in old age — even when their brains show the physical signs, like lesions and plaques, of memory disorders. That discrepancy is not unheard of: many elderly patients develop the brain lesions, plaques and ...

Someone at technology news site, Cnet, came up with the clever idea of running a poll to learn the age of people who use Amazon's miracle book reader, the Kindle. Seven hundred people responded, which puts the survey somewhat below what researchers would expect from Gallup, but it is a reasonable straw poll, nonetheless. What surprised Cnet and what should surprise anyone who looks at the results is that 50% of the people who use Kindles are over 50 years ...

Alcohol often gets blamed for sexual assignations that, in the bright light of the next morning, seem unwise. It's called beer-goggling, but does it really exist? Does drinking actually affect how your brain evaluates the attractiveness of other faces, or do we just use alcohol as an excuse to hook up with the first willing target? There's no better place to ask such questions than in Britain, where the culture of alcohol and inappropriate sex is so ingrained that ...