Are you listening, Phillies?
My kids hate baseball. Wait, let me qualify that—they hate it when I watch Phillies games on TV. “They’re so slow,” they moan, dragging the last word out to match their meaning. And I see what they’re saying. The batter up at the plate swings at a pitch, steps out of the box, unstraps his left battling glove and tightens it, unstraps the right glove and tightens it, hitches up his pants, touches his hat, checks his belt buckle, steps back into the box and taps his right toe three times …
What the kids are impatient with, what slows the game down, are the rituals, those small symbolic acts that pitchers and batters engage in for luck. Everybody in sports seems to have such rituals, whether it’s making the sign of the cross or pointing up to heaven or wearing lucky underpants or eating the exact same meal before every game. They may seem silly and superstitious, but scientists are beginning to pin down why they’re so endemic.
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New research shows that your brothers and sisters might have more to do with how you turned out than you think.
I wasn’t especially close to my older sister when we were kids, and we really weren’t close as teenagers. In fact, it wasn’t until we began to have kids of our own that we truly became friends, calling each other, exchanging advice and tips, sharing stories of first words and first steps. So I never gave much thought to whether she influenced the way I grew up. But more and more studies say she did.
In one California study, psychologist Patricia Evans found that younger sisters whose older siblings are teen moms are five times more likely to also become teen moms. Evans was working in an ob/gyn clinic when she noticed how many pregnant clients were greeted by her fellow staffers with questions like, “Aren’t you Anna’s little sister?” The staffers recognized the young women from their previous trips to the clinic with Big Sis.
And Richard Rende, a psychiatry prof at Brown University, has done studies showing that older siblings have more influence over whether their younger siblings smoke or drink than parents do. Using devices that record study participants’ behavior, Rende has even shown that sibling pairs exhibit “shadow” behavior—they tend to smoke at the same times even when they’re apart. Bad news? If your older sibling smokes, you’re 25 percent more likely to smoke, too; if your older sibling drinks, you’re 36 percent more likely to drink. Good news? Little sibs also mimic positive behavior by their elders. So, Sister Nan, I guess I should thank you for my good habits, too.
Photo: Shutterstock
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Your fingers may be telling you more than you think.
 Look at your hand. Go ahead: Look at your hand right now. Is your index finger longer or shorter than your ring finger? If it’s shorter, you’re inclined to be physically aggressive and, if you’re a women, you’re also more likely to develop osteoarthritis.
Does this sound like palm-reading mumbo-jumbo? The latest issue of Discover magazine has a whole article on why it’s not—and on some other mind-bending findings from the field of what scientists call “digit ratio.” Such diverse characteristics as verbal and physical aggression and athleticism have been linked to the shape of one’s hands.
As University of Alberta neuroscientist Pete Hurd explains it, boy babies experience a “surge in testosterone” in mid-second trimester that usually makes their ring fingers longer than their index fingers. Researchers are studying other hormonal changes as well as diet and stress levels in pregnancy to try to tease out what causes what. But findings so far include:
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To pee or not to pee—asparagus-urine, that is.
 We’re going to try not to get too TMI here, but we love asparagus. We eat as much of the lovely green herald of springtime as we can. And, well, we’ve always wondered: Why does it give our urine that peculiar asparagus-pee smell? Even more curiously, why doesn’t it affect the urine of other members of our family? We’d always heard that detecting this warm-weather harbinger was somehow genetically coded. Now comes a more detailed explanation from one of our favorite websites, mentalfloss.com. (If you don’t follow it on Twitter, you’re missing lots of fun!)
Back in 1891, a guy named Marceli Nencki got some other guys to chomp down on three and a half pounds of green stalks apiece and figured out the culprit in asparagus’s afterlife was methanethiol; later research implicated the (imaginatively named) asparagusic acid. Asparagusic acid contains sulfur. Sulfur stinks—so much so that ancients considered hell to be filled with it in the form of brimstone, the old-fashioned name for sulfur. Volcanoes spew brimstone, so it was considered an agent of divine pissed-offedness.
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New studies highlight the complicated role vitamin D plays in health.
 Along with all the other stuff you’ve got to worry about when you’re pregnant—coffee or no coffee? The occasional glass of wine? How old’s your baby daddy?—here comes another. A group of Canadian researchers exploring vitamin D and adverse health reactions in pregnant women performed a meta-analysis of 31 different studies and found associations between deficiencies of the “Sunshine Vitamin” and complications including gestational diabetes, preeclampsia and bacterial infections. Those with low levels were also more likely to give birth to small babies. The scientists noted that it’s common for pregnant women to have low levels of vitamin D, especially vegetarians, dark-skinned ethnic minorities, and women who get limited exposure to the sun. (That’s what you get for trying to be conscientious with the sunblock, right?)
But taking vitamin D supplements, says another report, won’t increase your baby’s bone density. And yet another study showed that babies of women who took vitamin D supplements while pregnant were more likely to develop food allergies during the first two years of life. So the safest course of action might be to get your vitamin D the natural way–via sunshine. Experts today say scientists may have gone overboard in urging people to stay out of the sun to avoid skin cancer. Ten minutes a day of exposure is enough for fair-skinned folks to manufacture sufficient D in summertime. In northern climes like ours, up your D count in winter by eating fatty fish.
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Can a new report from the American Academy of Neurology stop our addiction to Adderall?
 I never wanted my kids to do drugs. Except for one drug: Adderall. I was curious about its purported ability to improve a user’s focus and academic performance. Both my children did fine in high school without the drug. But like a lot of parents, I always wondered: What might they have accomplished if … Maybe they would have been their class valedictorians. Maybe they would have gotten into Harvard. Maybe they wouldn’t have watched so much crappy TV and played so many video games and would have been more like this kid in Ambler who just won $75,000 in a nationwide science contest.
I wasn’t curious enough to haul either my son or my daughter to the doctor and ask for a prescription for Adderall, which the Huffington Post has called “the most abused prescription drug in America.” But the New York Times devoted space last year to an Atlanta pediatrician, Michael Anderson, who advocates giving the drug to kids at low-performing schools, in a sort of cosmic evening-out of the odds against their success. Says Anderson, “We might not know the long-term effects, but we do know the short-term costs of school failure, which are real.” The Times story mentions a 12-year-old girl whose parents agreed to let the doctor prescribe the drug for her because she was, they said, “a little blah.”
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Just when you thought we were done blaming parents …
 The best thing about the rejection of Freudian analysis and the widespread acceptance of drugs for treating mental illness was that it let guilty parents off the hook. We were no longer the source of our children’s phobias, fetishes, depression and psychopathy; the fault lay with our kids’ genes, in their imperfect mental wiring. Thank God. Most parents already haul enough guilt around with them from day to day.
But now comes news of a study in which Swiss scientists were able to induce schizophrenia in mice. And they couldn’t have done it without the mice’s mums.
In the research, performed at the Laboratory of Physiology & Behavior at ETH Zurich, the scientists showed that two separate environmental factors combined in mice to trigger development of brain changes that resemble those found in schizophrenics—changes that manifest at the stage in mouse life that corresponds to early adulthood, which is just when symptoms usually surface in human beings.
The first environmental factor is a viral infection suffered by the mother of the mice—from a simple cold to herpes to toxoplasmosis. According to the scientists, such infections activate immune cells within the central nervous system in the mouse-fetus’s brain, called microglial cells. These then produce cytotoxins that change the way the brain develops. When the mother recovers from her illness, the microglial cells go into dormancy.
In most mice—and people—the story ends there. But when the scientists subjected these mice to chronic, severe stress as they were going through puberty—stressors that equate to sexual abuse or physical violence—the microglial cells resurfaced and again effected changes in the brain. “Evidently,” doctoral student Sandra Giovanoli, who did most of the work on the study, reports, “something goes wrong with the ‘hard-wire’ that can no longer be healed.” The mice didn’t show any immediate signs that anything was amiss, but in early adulthood, they began to act abnormally, with behavior patterns comparable to symptoms of schizophrenic humans; they were less alert to sounds, for example, and showed increased sensitivity to drugs such as amphetamine.
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Patients lie to doctors; doctors lie to patients. Going for a checkup, it seems, is one giant exercise in falsehoods.
Do you lie to your doctor? I lie to my doctor. Not big lies, just little ones. And as it turns out, my doctor knows I lie. She counts on it. When I say I have one glass of wine a day, she doubles it to two. When I say I exercise three times a week, she looks at me and thinks: Yeah, right. But according to the Wall Street Journal, I don’t lie as much as my doctor thinks I do. And guess what? My doctor also lies to me.
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Ladies, listen up: Another study rocks the hotly contested debate over supplements for women.
I don’t worry much about vitamins. I take a big ol’ multivitamin every day and eat a lot of fruits and veggies, so I’m reasonably certain I’m covered when it comes to A, B, C, et al. But my multivitamins only have half the recommended daily allowance of calcium for a woman my age, and I do worry about that. My grandmother spent the last few years of her life in a wheelchair, unable to stand on her brittle bones; my dad, in his last year or so, broke bones with startling regularity. I’d like to avoid those fates. It’s hard, though, when you don’t drink milk, don’t eat yogurt, don’t like cheese all that much. You have to eat a lot of broccoli, at 21 milligrams of calcium per serving, to hit the target 1,200 milligrams a day. It doesn’t help that in the initial post-menopause years, women frequently lose three to five percent of their total bone mass every year. So—calcium supplements, right?
Not so fast. Back in 2010, a meta-analysis by the Women’s Health Initiative indicated a link between calcium supplements and heart attacks. Some scientists carped at the methodology, however, and as of Monday, the National Institutes of Health website stated: “The recent suggestions of potential harm from calcium supplements to the cardiovascular system have generated debate within the scientific community. Further investigation is needed, but overall, the totality of evidence to date does not support a link between calcium and cardiovascular disease risk.“
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The recession is shaving years off our life expectancies. Why? Two words: health care.
 Cheery economic news! Over the weekend, the New York Times told us that even though young college grads are living miserable lives in their parents’ basements and 30-somethings can’t afford to marry or breed, older Americans—those close to retirement age when the Great Recession hit—are suffering most of all, because losing their jobs is killing them. Literally. A team of Wellesley College researchers reports that unemployment is slashing as much as three years off normal life expectancies of older people. Why? They can’t afford health care.
The Times article, by Catherine Rampell, notes that while unemployment rates are lower for Americans in their 50s and 60s than for the younger cohorts, it’s much harder for them to find work again once they’re let go—they’re unemployed for an average of 53 weeks, compared to 19 weeks for those in their teens. Employers believe that older potential hires are too hard to train and will cost too much in … all together now: health benefits. Discouraged would-be employees leave the workforce rather than face the demoralizing odds of finding a new job; many opt to join Social Security early, thus permanently diminishing the monthly benefits they receive. The overall combination of loss of income, worry and anxiety, and lack of health care is leading to early death. The situation’s dire enough that Slate’s Matthew Yglesias scents a conspiracy:
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