"Too much sleep does not significantly contribute weight gain."

Studies have repeatedly indicated that not getting enough sleep can lead to weight gain -- one long-term study of nearly 70,000 women found that those who slept less than five hours a night were a third more likely to gain significant weight (around 30 pounds) over 16 years. A new University of Washington study analyzed data from twin pairs, and found that sleeping over nine hours a night could suppress genetic activity that influences body weight (meaning that diet and exercise sometimes have more of an effect when people oversleep than when they undersleep). People genetically predisposed to obesity were more likely to gain weight, in other words, if they slept less (undersleepers were twice as likely to demonstrate inherited BMI factors than oversleepers).

"People with tattoos out-drink people without them."

In a study published in Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research, French researchers approached people leaving bars and asked if they'd be willing to take a breathalyzer; they also asked if the respondents had tattoos or piercings. Men with tattoos and piercings tended to have had 44% more alcohol than those with neither; women with both tattoos and piercings tended to have had twice as much as women who had neither.

"Debt-related stress doubles your chance of a heart attack."

An Associated Press/AOL poll found that money isn't just a potent source of stress; It's one that brings substantial, quantifiable health risks along with it. The poll investigated people who had stress specifically related to debt, and found that debt-stressed people were twice as likely to have a heart attack. Additionally, they were also around six times as likely to be depressed (23% reported depression, versus 4% of those unconcerned about debt), three times as likely to have ulcers (27% versus 8%), and 11 times as likely to report migraines (44% versus 4%).

"The left side of your face is your "good side.""

A study published in the journal Experimental Brain Research indicated that, regardless of the viewing angle, the left side of your face is probably considered more attractive than the right side. Wake Forest researchers asked students to rate 10 male and female faces for attractiveness, sometimes mirroring the images so that the left side appeared to be the right side. Whether these images were mirrored or not, the actual left side of the subjects' faces was rated as more attractive. Part of the reason for this phenomenon, according to the study's authors, was that due to right-brain dominance most people tend to show more emotion in the left half of the face, and people tend to find that increased expressiveness more attractive.

"Daydreamers have better working memory."

Working memory is essentially the RAM of your brain; you use it for multitasking with active information, usually in the space of a few seconds. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Science asked participants to perform tasks so simple that their minds would wander. They checked in to see how often the participants started daydreaming. Afterward, researchers asked the subjects to remember information while doing math problems, and found that participants whose minds had wandered more had better working memory. The implication, according to the study's authors, seems to be that daydreaming is the application of extra resources -- a mind with a considerable store of working memory is more likely to wander when that store isn't being occupied with anything.

"Tetris lessens the impact of traumatic events."

A 2009 study showed 40 participants footage of disturbing material that included surgery, injuries and violent imagery, and split the participants into two groups, one of which sat quietly while the other played Tetris for 10 minutes. All of the participants then kept a journal for a week and were then given a questionnaire to measure the lasting impact of the footage. The Tetris group both remembered less of the material and was less affected by it, partially, according to researchers, because flashbacks to traumatic moments rely on both spatial processing and verbal processing. Occupying the brain with visuo-spatial tasks also occupies the resources the brain normally needs to consolidate these traumatic memories.

"A dog in France was called as a witness in a murder trial."

In 2008, a woman was found hanging in her Paris apartment, having apparently committed suicide. The victim's family called for a murder investigation, and because the 59-year-old woman's dog had been home at the time of her death, the animal -- whose name is Scooby -- was brought into the witness box to see how he would react to a potential suspect. Scooby "barked furiously" at the suspect and was commended by Judge Thomas Cassuto for his "invaluable assistance." The Palais de Justice confirmed that this was the first time a dog had appeared as a witness in a murder trial.
 

"Adrenaline makes events more difficult to remember."

Even as little as one minute of exertion is enough to significantly impair memory, according to researchers at the University of Portsmouth. The research followed 52 veteran police officers in Winnipeg, Manitoba, all of whom exercised regularly and were in healthy physical shape. All of the officers were given a briefing about a target individual. Half of the officers were then told to assault a heavy bag while the others watched. All of them then continued on to a manufactured but tense scenario in which they entered a trailer inhabited by a suspect who shouted at the officers while a number of weapons were visible in the area. The officers who had engaged in physical activity remembered less about the target individual than their peers, made more memory errors and remembered less of the information they'd been given prior to the heavy bag phase. Of the rested officers, 90% were able to remember at least one detail about a random passerby they'd seen on their way to the trailer, while two-thirds of the exerted officers didn't remember seeing him at all.

"Migraines are linked to impotence."

A study at National Taiwan University examined the records of some 23,000 men and found a dramatic correlation between migraines and impotence -- men who'd been diagnosed with erectile dysfunction were also 63% more likely than sexually healthy men to have had a migraine diagnosis. The correlation varied with age; men in their 30s with ED were twice as likely as those without it to experience migraines. Researchers stressed that the relationship is not necessarily a causal one. Chronic migraines could cause sexual dysfunction, or men who were likely to report migraines to their doctors might simply be more likely to report ED than other men.

"Thinking about sex makes you take more risks."

A study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology began with the foundation that people are inherently loss-averse ("$100 is worth exactly $100, yet people are more psychologically moved by a loss of $100 than by a gain of an identical amount"). The authors, however, went on to demonstrate through three experiments that loss aversion disappears when men are first primed to think about sex. The first of these, for example, asked one group of participants to imagine meeting a sexually desirable person and spending a romantic day together, while the control group engaged in a similar but non-romantic thought exercise. In follow-up exercises designed to measure risk-taking, men in the experimental group were less risk-averse than their counterparts in the control group. Women were equally primed to think about sex from the initial exercise, but their risk-taking habits were unaffected.