Poor Mojo's Newswire

Serge Brand of the Psychiatric University Clinics in Basel, Switzerland, and his colleagues surveyed 113 teenagers at around 17 years of age, asking them to complete questionnaires about their conduct and mood and to keep a log of their sleep patterns. Of those, 65 indicated they had recently fallen in love and experienced intense romantic emotions.

The lovestruck teenagers showed many behaviours resembling "hypomania" – a less intense form of mania. For example, they required about an hour less sleep each night than teens who didn't have a sweetheart. They were also more likely to report acting compulsively, with 60% saying they spent too much money compared with fewer than 30% of teenagers who were not in love.

Moreover, the lovestruck teens were more than twice as likely to say they had lots of ideas and creative energy. Worryingly, they were also more likely to say they drove fast and took risks on the road.

The discovery sheds light on a question that has long puzzled scientists: how did this fish, thought to be so closely related to land animals, come to have fins that are symmetrical when our hands and feet are asymmetrical?

When it was discovered in 1938, the coelacanth was hailed as a living fossil. Before then it was believed to have disappeared more than 65 million years ago. Its two pairs of ventral fins were of particular note as they were found to have evolved from the same structures as the limbs of land animals.

The remarkable fins also presented a puzzle: unlike the hands and feet of land animals, they were symmetrical. Recent fossil discoveries have shown that hands and feet evolved from an extinct ancestral fish with asymmetric fins, but the question of how the coelacanth got its symmetrical fins remained.

John Bruno and Elizabeth Selig of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the US compiled data from 6000 studies that between them tracked the fate of 2600 reefs in the Indo-Pacific between 1968 and 2004. They used the extent to which reefs were covered by live coral as an indication of their health.

"The corals themselves build their limestone foundation, so if the surface of the reef is not covered with live tissue that is continually secreting it, the reef can erode fairly quickly," explains Selig.

University of Washington researchers warned in a report released Tuesday that Baby Einstein, Brainy Baby and other videos for infants may make a child slower in picking up vocabulary in the first two years of life.

Every hour babies spent watching videos, they understood an average of six to eight fewer words than a baby who didn't watch the programs, researchers found.

Babies who watched the videos scored 17 percent worse on language-skills assessments than babies who didn't, said Dr. Dimitri Christakis, co-author of the study.

What's more, the finding may have implications for Hillary Clinton as she attempts to become the first female U.S. president, according to its author Victoria Brescoll, a post-doctoral scholar at Yale University.

Her research paper "When Can Angry Women Get Ahead?" noted that Clinton was described last year by a leading Republican as "too angry to be elected president."