Health & Science

Ignoring the treatment for AIDS

Despite the availability of effective anti-retroviral treatment, more than 70 percent of Americans with HIV do not have their infections under control, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The latest numbers, released on World AIDS Day, are sobering: There are 1.2 million people in the U.S. who are infected with the virus that causes AIDS, and only 40 percent of them are regularly following the drug regimen that suppresses the infection. About 20 percent of those infected—or 240,000 people—don’t even know they have HIV. Only 28 percent of those infected have been successfully treated. Anti-retrovirals can reduce the virus to very low levels, preventing the onset of AIDS symptoms, and greatly reducing the risk of transmitting HIV to anyone else. “The big picture is we could do a lot better than we’re doing today,” CDC Director Thomas Frieden tells the Associated Press. Many of those not receiving treatment—or not taking medications regularly—are poor, black, or Hispanic. About 16,000 Americans die of AIDS every year, and 50,000 people become newly infected. Without “substantial improvement” in rates of effective treatment, the CDC says, there will be 1.2 million new HIV infections in the U.S. over the next 20 years.

How often men think about sex

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It’s often said that men think about sex once every seven seconds. In reality, says a new study, men daydream about sex far less frequently than the adage would suggest—though still about twice as often as women. Ohio State researchers gave 120 men ages 18 to 25 a tally device, and asked them to click it every time they thought about sex. If it had been every seven seconds, the study subjects would have hit the clicker 8,000 times a day—leaving them little time to get any work done. Instead, the median count per man was just 19 per day. Even the study subject who thought about sex the most, with 388 clicks in a single day, still fell far short of the stereotype. A separate group of women registered a median of 10 sexual thoughts a day. “It’s amazing the way people will spout off these fake statistics that men think about sex nearly constantly and so much more often than women do,” study author Terri Fisher tells USA Today. The biggest factor, she found, was not gender, but whether people felt it was socially acceptable to have sexual thoughts or tried to suppress them.

Creativity can lead to dishonesty

Creative people who can “think out of the box” are prized in the business world, the arts, and science. But a new study has found that creative thinkers are also more likely to cheat to get ahead, and to rationalize away less-than-ethical behavior. Harvard Business School researchers gave personality quizzes to hundreds of study participants and then asked them to perform quick games or other tasks for cash. Participants who scored high on a creativity test were more likely to falsify their results so they could earn more prize money. People who were merely high in intelligence, however, were not more dishonest. It appears that the same “divergent thinking” and “cognitive flexibility” that enable creative people to come up with innovative ways of looking at things also equip them to circumvent ethical norms—and to justify their cheating to themselves. “When you’re a creative person, you can use that creativity to come up with reasons for why unethical behaviors may be okay,” researcher Francesca Gino tells The Boston Globe. These “self-serving rationalizations,” she said, can include deciding that “other people would cheat under the same circumstances or that a little cheating will not hurt anyone.”

Brain damage from soccer

First it became clear that football players are at risk of suffering brain damage, and then that hockey players are too. But soccer players? A new study now suggests that heading the ball may cause mild traumatic brain injury, says BBC.com, and that over time, the accumulated traumas produce the same kind of “subtle but serious declines in thinking and coordination skills” that are seen among some car-crash victims. Researchers reviewed brain scans from 32 amateur soccer players who practice almost daily. Only those who headed the ball a few times a day, or about 1,000 headers per year, showed significant damage. This suggests that the biggest dangers for players lie in frequent header practice and repetitive drills—not in the relatively rare headers performed during games.