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How about this?  You may use one part of your head to braid your daughter's hair and another to balance your checkbook. That's right.  You may think of yourself as using the same level of wisdom on each thing you do, but according to a new study, that's not quite right. While we may think some people are consistently wise, we actually demonstrate different levels of wisdom from one situation to the next, and factors such as whether we are alone or with friends can affect it, according to new research from the University of Waterloo.The study defines wise reasoning as a combination of such abilities as intellectual humility, consideration of others' perspective and looking for compromise, newswise.com reports.  "This research does not dismiss that there is a personality component to wisdom, but that's not the whole picture," says Professor Igor Grossmann, from the Department of Psychology at Waterloo and lead author of the paper. "Situ...

Men, did you know being a good father can lower your testosterone levels? What a bummer.  Just as we get to enjoy our partners pitching in to help with the kids, now they have a reason to stop. All kidding aside, however, a new University of Michigan study found that when men saw their infants in distress, it lowered their testosterone. Yes, when men are nurturing and caring for their children, their "maleness" declines.  While that might not make fathers very happy, I suspect it has to do with the law of the jungle, with male beasts preferring to shelter and protect their young rather than get bloody and torn up in fights with the others in the clan.  (Of course, this doesn't account for the fathers who eat their young.  But that's a story for another day.) But now it looks like men may be decompensated for being a good father. A crying infant can trigger certain emotions that may be accompanied by a corresponding hormonal response: empathy with decreas...

How scary is this?  Mice exposed to low levels of arsenic -- the amounts some of us may have in our ground water -- developed lung cancer. According to newswise.com, mice exposed to low doses of arsenic in drinking water, similar to what some people might consume, developed this cancer, researchers at the National Institutes of Health have found.  Arsenic levels in public drinking water cannot exceed 10 parts per billion (ppb), which is the standard set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. However, there are no established standards for private wells, from which millions of people get their drinking water. People in the northern suburbs of my town have discovered, to their horror, that their well water contains many things it shouldn't.  Including arsenic. The researchers used a model that duplicates how humans are exposed to arsenic throughout their entire lifetime. In the study, the mice were given arsenic three weeks before breeding and throughou...