ODDBALL SCIENCE AND THE HOLIDAY SPIRIT
Having, in the past, famously solved “The case of the disappearing teaspoons” by calculating that the halflife of teaspoons in communal tearooms is 81 days irrespective of value, and scientifically proving that not getting enough beauty sleep makes you “less healthy, less attractive, and more tired”, the BMJ Christmas issue once again raises a toast to the holiday season with rigorously-validated answers to quirky questions, with tongue in cheek.
DO MEN FEEL SICKER?
The Oxford dictionary defines Man Flu as “a cold or similar minor ailment as experienced by a man, who is regarded as exaggerating the severity of the symptoms”.
So, are men wimps or immunologically inferior? Canadian research shows that men have weaker immune responses to viral respiratory viruses, which makes them more likely to die from respiratory infections than women. The research, done by a woman, observes it could be an evolutionary behaviour that protected man against predators.
DOES RAIN CAUSE PAIN?
Does humidity increase backache and joint pain? Rain has nothing to do with pain, found researchers from Harvard Medical School after wading through medical records of 1.1 million Medicare beneficiaries in the US from 2008 to 2012.
They matched insurance codes for joint or back pain with weather records and found 6.35% people reported pain on rainy days, compared to 6.39% on dry days.
PRIDE AND FALLS
The Bible says “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall,” but science begs to differ.
Researchers asked people 50 and older how proud they’d felt in the past 30 days, and asked them two years later whether or not they had fallen over the past two years and found that pride actually protected against falls.
The odds of a fall were significantly less for the very proud than those who had low pride, the study found, after adjusting for age, sex, household wealth, history of falls, mobility problems, eyesight, long-term illness, arthritis, osteoporosis, medication use, brain function, pain and depression.
MORE WINE FOR ALL
Wine glass capacity in England has increased sevenfold in 300 years, increasing from 66 mL in the 1700s to 449 mL in 2017 found researchers from the University of Cambridge.
While the increase in size over time reflects changes in several factors including price, technology, societal wealth, and wine appreciation, it also indicates a rise in the amount of wine poured and drunk.
The increase reflects “the unit bias heuristic,” in which people consume in units (a biscuit, a cup of tea, a glass of wine) if the portion is above a minimum amount.
Since people perceive the same portion as less when presented in a relatively empty large glass than in a fuller but smaller glass, downsizing glass size could help lower alcohol consumption.
IN BED WITH SIRI AND GOOGLE ASSISTANT
Can you rely on digital assistants for quality sexual health advice is the question researchers from New Zealand answered by jumping into bed (albeit independently) and pulling out their smartphones to ask Siri and Google Assistant. They compared their answers with a laptop-based net search. Unamused Siri unhelpfully included pictures of sex with aliens, men wrestling, and often dismissed questions with, “I don’t have an opinion on that.” She replied to a request for information about “good sex” with, “I don’t know what you mean by good sex.” Google Assistant was better than Siri in providing correct answers and useful references, including a magazine article on “10 sex tips,” but a simple online search outdid both digital assistants, who said researchers, “trivialised some important general health inquiries or failed to provide appropriate information”.
FULL MOON AND ROAD ACCIDENTS
Finally, do more people die in mobike accidents on full moon nights? US researchers studied 13,029 fatal mobike crashes between 4 pm to 8 am during 1,482 fullmoon nights.
The study found 4,494 fatal crashes occurred on the 494 nights with a full moon (9.10/night) and 8,535 on the 988 control nights without a full moon (8.64/night), with the most accidents occurring on the nights when there was a supermoon.
The study led researchers to warn mobike-riders not to step out without helmets or drive over the speed limit on fullmoon nights.