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Stress Sweat Makes People Hate You, Divorce Is Contagious, America Loves Sandwiches, And More Surprising Studies

As if sweating wasn't bad enough, a brand-new research study has discovered that "stress sweat" makes everybody who smells you dislike you . The world also learned this week that positive thinking will not, repeat will not, prevent pregnancy, that divorce is as contagious as a winter flu, and that America's favorite food is — drum roll please — the humble sandwich. You want more of the week's weirdest research? Course you do...

by Jenny Hollander

Baby's First iPad

Once upon a time, childhood was about treehouses and trying to sneak into the snack cupboard — and, if you were lucky, a dose of screen time in the form of Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. Now, tiny fingers all over the country are constantly wrapped around tablets, cell phones, and laptops, reveals new nationwide research from nonprofit Common Sense Media.

The jump in kids' media use is staggering: the average American little 'un plays with a tablet or cell phone for three times longer than they did in 2011. In two years, the number of kids who own cell phones has quadrupled, and three-quarters of children have played with one — up from just a third in 2011. The average child enjoys two hours of screen time a day: half of that is spent watching TV, and the rest of the time using tablets and phones. No word on whether kids' eyes are steadily getting more square...

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Stress Sweat Makes People Dislike You

Time to stock up on deodorant: new research into "stress sweat" reveals that it's an entirely different kind of sweat from perspiring, and smelling it makes others view you as less confident and competent. Seriously. A study by the Philadelphia-based Monell Chemical Senses Center found that sweat produced from stress comes from a separate gland than normal perspiration, and smells differently.

More importantly, other people apparently smell all of that stress on you. In Monell's study, participants were asked to smell "stress sweat" compared to normal perspiration — which must have been a fun and not at all gross way to spend time — and then asked to judge the person's characteristics. When it came to "stress sweat," people viewed those who emitted it as less trustworthy, less capable, and less confident, compared to those who had produced "gym sweat." Nothing to be nervous about...

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You Can Catch Divorce

Here's a bunch of things we know to be contagious: yawning, flu, eating habits — and, according to a recent study by Brown University, divorce. Yup, apparently you can catch the breakup of a marriage; "clusters of divorce" extends two degrees of separation, meaning that when your spouse's cousin gets divorced, your marriage becomes a little more likely to hit the rocks.

The study's authors have studied longitudinal divorce data for years, and concluded: "Divorce should be understood as a collective phenomenon that extends beyond those directly affected." If a married couple has a lot of happily married friends, the researchers discovered, they themselves tend to have stronger and happier unions. Unfortunately, the same goes for divorce.

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Puberty Starts Before Age 10

Hey, remember how much fun puberty was? Well, it's coming even earlier for today's young girls, according to a new data study presented at a recent Pediatric Academic Societies conference. A five-year data set revealed that puberty has kicked in for most girls by the age of 10, with one in ten experiencing early-onset puberty by the time they're eight. The onset of puberty has apparently quickened for girls who are black, and girls who had a higher BMI.

So, if you ever wondered what's worse than being a moody, angry teenager, try being a moody, angry eight-year-old...

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Women Have Evolved To Be Bitchy?

Well, this is... dubious. A professor at the University of Ottawa conducted a review of 100 research projects on evolution, and concluded in a review paper that women have simply evolved to be, well, bitchy. In her paper in the oddly-named Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Tracy Vaillancourt insisted that women gossip because they've evolved to view younger and more attractive women as competition for male affections, so they cut one another down by spreading rumors and gossip.

Vaillancourt points out that woman react more negatively when they discover they're the target of gossip — they become more anxious, and experience heart palpitations — meaning that they (apparently) know they're being challenged by other wily women who don't want their men stolen. Not everybody agrees with these, cough, findings, with other researchers pointing out that Vaillancourt has done absolutely zero independent studies to back up her point, and her argument seems awfully rooted in "generalizations and opinion."

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America Really, Really Likes Sandwiches

Fruit is making a comeback! The 28th annual study of Eating Habits In America, conducted by market-research firm NPD and utilizing 5,000 participants, indicates that healthy food is favored by an increasing number of Americans. This year, fruit is the second most popular food in the United States — the most often eaten, in order: bananas; apples; oranges; and grapes. So, what got the number one spot? Once again, it's the humble sandwich!

Unfortunately, vegetables haven't seen the gains that fruit has made, which jumped from the number five spot to number two in just a year. "We've been told to eat more fruit and vegetables, but we're not eating more vegetables," said the study's leader. "We're eating more fruit because it's easy to consume. It generally requires very little preparation." So, making up the Top Ten, we have: Sandwiches, fruit, vegetables, carbonated soft drinks, milk, coffee, potatoes, salty snacks, fruit juice and cold cereal. (Cold cereal? Sounds yummy, America.)

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Breaking: Positive Thinking Won't Prevent Pregnancy

We'll let this one speak for itself: A new study confirms that "magical thinking" does not prevent pregnancy.

Tumbleweed.

According to a recent study by the Guttmacher Institute, 42 percent of women believe that they're at low risk for pregnancy — because they were on the pill, because they thought they weren't very fertile, or because they believed their partners to be infertile. Apparently most women who didn't want to get pregnant, and believed they they wouldn't, reported that they seemed "immune" to pregnancy — or that, hey, they weren't often privy to "bad luck."

Spoiler: this was not the case. Sixty percent of the women in the study had had at least one abortion. The researchers thought that this might indicate a need for better sexual education. Ya THINK?

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Everyone Hates Mondays

There might not be a day of the week that everyone feels their best, but there is a day that everyone feels their worst: in today's edition of No Shit, Sherlock, almost half of women feel most unattractive on Mondays. Nearly half of women polled said that Monday was the day of the week they typically felt least attractive, citing a weekend's worth of fatigue on their faces, and feeling unmotivated. Thursday, it turns out, is the day most women feel at their best, typically because they're excited about the weekend. And it's all downhill from there.

In other Monday research news, it turns out that smokers are most likely to consider kicking the habit on the first day of the work-week. Every Monday, Google sees a quarter more global traffic from people searching for quitting-smoking tactics. No word on whether they're searching for "how to control burning rage" by Wednesday...

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