Health & Science

Paying the price for the presidency

President Obama may have a spring in his step now, but over the next four—and possibly eight—years, he’ll likely age twice as fast as the average American, says a new study. After analyzing the public medical records of every president back to Theodore Roosevelt, Michael Roizen of the Wellness Institute at the Cleveland Clinic concluded that presidents show twice the normal wear and tear on their bodies during their terms in office. The relentless stress and isolation of the job can affect presidents’ cardiovascular health—six 20th-century presidents died of heart disease—and can lead to visible signs of aging as well. Recent examples include President Clinton, whose hair turned completely white during his eight years, and President Bush, who grew gray and drawn. “If you look at pictures of [Bush] in 2000, he looked almost boyish,” politics professor Robert Gilbert tells Newsday. “When he left office, he looked ravaged.” Part of the problem, of course, is that presidents’ decisions are so weighty; another part is that they’re essentially on duty every day. Even on vacation or at Camp David, presidents are constantly surrounded by Secret Service agents and aides, and they get daily intelligence briefings. For those reasons, Roizen says Obama was wise to hold on to his BlackBerry, so he can sometimes communicate with close friends. He also recommends that the president schedule a weekly basketball game so he can forget himself for an hour or two.

How you make ‘gut’ decisions

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

A wild guess isn’t as wild as the guesser may think, says a new study. When you have a “gut instinct” to make one choice over another, your brain is usually making the choice based upon experiences you don’t remember having. Countless memories shape our daily choices, but we can’t consciously keep tabs on all of them. Instead, says psychologist Ken Paller of Northwestern University, our unconscious minds do it for us. Paller and his team tested subjects’ ability to remember photographic slides, and found that they were actually better at identifying the ones they were shown while their minds were occupied with other tasks. “Even when people weren’t paying as much attention, their visual system was storing information quite well,” Paller tells LiveScience. In the experiment, subjects’ brains fired electrical signals about 200 milliseconds before they consciously “guessed” that they’d seen the photo before. “We may actually know more than we think we know in everyday situations, too,” Paller says.

The psychopath’s parole trick

Psychopathic criminals are more likely to be released from prison than are garden-variety criminals, new research shows. Psychopaths like Ted Bundy, who was handsome and gracious, and Jeffrey Dahmer, who appeared shy and sweet, have an inherent ability to charm and deceive people, and parole board members are no exception. Canadian researchers found that psychopaths were two and a half times as likely to be released than ordinary criminals, even though they were more likely to commit another crime within a year. “Psychopathic offenders are far more likely to re-offend, so they should be far less likely to be released,” study author Dr. Stephen Porter tells BBCnews.com. But psychopaths, he said, know what a parole board wants to hear, and as skilled actors and liars, they often make a convincing case that they’ve been rehabilitated. Even trained experts such as psychologists, doctors, criminologists, and lawyers “generally are no better than laypersons in detecting deception,” Porter says.

Why the flu likes February

Why is winter the flu season? Scientists had long theorized that it was mostly because colder weather kept people indoors, where the close contact was more likely to spread the virus. But a new analysis puts the blame on the amount of humidity in the air. Looking at previous studies, climate physicist Jeffrey Shaman of Oregon State University found strong evidence that flu transmission peaks when absolute humidity—the pure percentage of water in the air—is lowest, during cold, dry winter days. “The correlations were surprisingly strong,” Shaman tells the Associated Press. The virus’ ability “to survive and be transmitted person-to-person is greatly affected by how dry or wet the air is.” To humidify your air at home and help ward off flu, you can buy a humidifier, or try Grandma’s low-tech trick: Allow a teakettle to boil on the stove for a while.

A cure for the cold?

Scientists have unraveled the genetic code of the common cold, making a cure possible within a few years. Teams of genetic scientists from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and two other institutions deciphered the genetic sequences of 99 strains of the rhinovirus, organizing them into 15 branches. They found that while these viral strains all have a different sequence of genes, they are remarkably similar in what researchers called “the guts” of the virus. That offers a target for drugs that would block the cold viruses’ replication or impact on the body. “We are now quite certain that we see the Achilles’ heel, and that a very effective treatment for the common cold is at hand,” researcher Stephen Liggett of the University of Maryland School of Medicine tells The New York Times. Pharmaceutical experts warned, though, that if development of such a drug is extremely expensive, drug companies might not commit resources because most consumers or insurance companies would decline to pay $50 or $100 for a cold cure.