Here's an interesting new suggestion: a claim that you're more likely to smoke if you have to get up too early for your body clock. The questionnaire study of 500 people confirmed previous findings indicating that, although individuals vary widely, the average person prefers to sleep between 12.30 am and 8.30 am, and found that, while only some 10% of people living within an hour of their natural body clock were smokers, this rose to around 70% of people with 7 hours' "social jet lag" or more (measured by the difference between the mid-point of their sleep time on work days and free days).

I wouldn't be at all surprised if you'd find a similar correlation with caffeine use! But you know, it just reinforces what I think every time I read about these sleep studies -- that we should really change cultural habits to acknowledge this. Like starting school later for teenagers. Let's just ... shift the working day.

And on a completely different note, I can't resist this item: an "emotional social intelligence prosthetic" that can pick up on people's emotions is being developed to help people with autism relate to those around them. It will alert its autistic user if the person they are talking to starts showing signs of getting bored or annoyed. Of course, it's not only autistic people who could do with one of those!

New research reported in Nature has found that our sense of what our body's doing comes more from our brain's knowledge of the messages it has sent than any message back from the senses. The finding sheds light on "phantom limbs" as well as helping us understand how we move.

On a lighter note, Wired have an article about the Nintendo Brain Games I mentioned a week or two ago.

And Scientific American report on a recent study that found babies as young as 10 months are capable of associating an object with a word -- but only if the object is of interest to them.

You've probably heard the latest IQ-related furore -- an English professor (the same one who caused a fuss last year by claiming that men were more intelligent than women by an average 5 IQ points) now claims that people in the colder environments of Northern Europe are brighter than those in warmer climates further south (but Scots are duller than the English because all the bright ones migrated south). Personally I don't think the various IQ averages he gives for all these European countries (fascinating as they are -- let's be honest, few of us can resist things like this; it's like those survey results about how much sex people in different countries are having) tell us anything about intelligence, but they may have something to say about education. The results might also tell us something about nutrition, cultural values, childhood environments, ... The trouble is disentangling all these. It's simplistic to think you can draw any direct conclusions from data like this. And simplistic to think IQ is some fixed measure you're born with.

I also note that he regards the supposed difference in cranial capacity between northerners and southerners as significant. But he doesn't seem to take into account any difference in body mass. It's generally the case that you don't compare brain sizes directly -- otherwise an elephant would be brighter than ourselves -- you have to consider the ratio of brain to body.