New Study Reveals We Are Happiest At Age 33

Forget the old adage that your schooldays are the happiest of your life - a study has found that 33 is the age at which people are most content. Seven out of 10 people over the age of 40 picked the year they turned 33 as their happiest in a survey by website Friends Reunited.

More than half of those surveyed - 53 per cent - said life was more fun and 42 per cent said they felt more optimistic about the future.

One in three said their happiness stemmed from having children while one in five said happiness came from success at work.

Having a Facebook 'friend' request turned down - or even just ignored, hurts just as much as real-life rejection, claim psychologists

Being ignored or snubbed online leads people to feel 'numb', 'distanced' and 'withdrawn', researchers found. The finding suggests that for many of us, the internet is as 'real' a place as the real world.

'Most people would probably expect that being ignored or rejected via a remote source like the Internet would not hurt as much as being rejected in person. Yet, our studies show that people may experience similar psychological reactions to online exclusion as they do with face-to-face exclusion. ‘ said Joshua Smyth, professor of biobehavioral health and of medicine at Penn State.

However, the researchers caution that these findings may be related to the types of individuals who participated in their study.

‘These studies were conducted with college-aged students who have grown up with the Internet and other related technology, ‘ Filipkowski said. ‘These findings may not apply to individuals who have much less experience with technology and remote communication.'

Why you shouldn't even bother trying to remember last night!

Why you shouldn't even bother trying to remember last night: Drunken blackouts are caused by alcohol switching off brain’s memory function, study shows

It’s often said that alcohol killing off brain cells is behind the blackouts, but according to a study what’s actually happening is that booze is preventing new memories being recorded in the first place.

Yukitoshi Izumi, research professor of psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, said: ‘We’ve found that exposure to alcohol inhibits some receptors and later activates others, causing neurons to manufacture steroids that inhibit memory formation.’

The brain cells affected by alcohol are found in the hippocampus and other brain structures involved in advanced cognitive functions. When the hippocampal cells are treated with moderate amounts of alcohol, the key areas for memory formation are unaffected, but exposing the cells to large amounts of alcohol inhibits the memory formation mechanism.

‘Some people may be more vulnerable to alcohol’s effects than others. In other words, just because your friend may be able to drink a certain number of drinks and appear to be functioning fine, it does not mean that you or everyone else can.’ said lead author Reagan R. Wetherill.

‘Blackouts’, where very heavy drinkers wake up and are unable to remember anything that happened, are quite rare, says Weatherill – but their cousin, the ‘brown out’, where details vanish, is much more common.

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So Do redheads feel more pain? Scientists set out to discover truth of controversial theory

Numerous studies have suggested that redheads feel more pain. And now a new study from Southampton University Hospital is looking to confirm the theory. The trial includes people with red hair over the age of 30. Researchers are comparing their reactions to tiny electric shocks with those of people with brown or black hair. The trial is set to end in September.

In 2009, a study in the Journal of the American Dentistry Association showed that redheads experience more trepidation at going to the dentist. Past research has suggested that redheads generally require more anesthesia than people of other hair colors.

Not Paying Attention In Class?! You Might Be A Genius

Those who appear to be constantly distracted or drift often to thoughts have more ‘working memory’ and 'sharper brains', a new study suggests.

Published online in the Psychological Science journal the new report indicates that a wandering mind is a form of a mental workspace that allows you to juggle multiple thoughts simultaneously.

During the study, volunteers were asked to perform one of two simple tasks during which researchers checked to ask if the participants’ minds were wandering. At the end, participants measured their working memory capacity by their ability to remember a series of letters interspersed with simple maths questions. Daniel Levinson, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States, said that those with higher working memory capacity reported “more mind wandering during these simple tasks”, but their performance did not suffer.

Dr Jonathan Smallwood, of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Science in Leipzig, Germany, said: “What this study seems to suggest is that, when circumstances for the task aren’t very difficult, people who have additional working memory resources deploy them to think about things other than what they’re doing.”

Popcorn Has 'More Antioxidants Than Fruit and Vegetables', New Study Says

Popcorn, when it’s not slathered in butter and coated in salt, is already known to be a healthy snack food and now a group of scientists say it may even top fruits and vegetables in antioxidant levels.

The new research has revealed that popcorn is made up of just 4% water so the antioxidants are less diluted than in fruit and vegetables, which can be made up of up to 90% water. The study found that one serving of popcorn contains up to 300mg of antioxidants - known as polyphenols – nearly double the 160mg found in a serving of fruit.

The researchers also found the crunchy hulls of popcorn (those bits that have an annoying habit of sticking in your throat) have the highest concentration of antioxidants and fibre.

Researcher Jo Vinson said: “Those hulls deserve more respect. They are nutritional gold nuggets.”

Describing popcorn as “the perfect snack food”, he added: “It's the only snack that is 100 per cent unprocessed whole grain.

“All other grains are processed and diluted with other ingredients, and although cereals are called 'whole grain', this simply means that over 51% of the weight of the product is whole grain.