In June 2010, the Swedish-born Chairman of BP Carl-Henric Svanberg touched off a firestorm of controversy with his remarks about his company's reaction to the Gulf oil spill.

"... we care about the small people. I hear comments sometimes that large oil companies are greedy companies or don't care. But that is not the case in BP. We care about the small people."

The twice used reference to "small people" hit a raw nerve with residents of the Gulf in the wake of the manmade disaster. Svanberg was quickly forced to apologize and admit "he spoke clumsily."

From that condescending comment grew the germ for a recently published paper about whether powerful people misperceive their height compared to others.

The study, published in Psychological Science, looked at whether the psychological perception of power may cause people to feel taller than they truly are.

In one experiment, researchers first measured the height of 68 people. One-third of the people were then asked to write about a time when they had power over someone else;  another third recalled a time when someone else had power over them; and a control group recalled what happened to them the day before.

Then all the volunteers were asked to estimate their size in relation to a pole that was set at 20 inches taller than their true height. 

Men and women who had recalled a high-power incident tended to judge the pole to be shorter than their own height compared to those recalling a low-power situation.

"People perceived themselves as taller when they occupied a more powerful position," write the researchers.

In two other experiments involving nearly 200 volunteers, power was also shown to affect a person's judgments of their own stature.

The study suggests that people not only feel powerful in their minds, they also physically experience it in their bodies by overestimating their own height.

"Having power not only influences how others view individuals but it also influences how individuals view themselves physically," says study author Michelle Duguid, Ph.D. She is an assistant professor of organizational behavior at Washington University in St. Louis.

The frequent metaphoric use of height to connote power in terms such as "big man on campus" and "people look up to them," may achieve a physical reality of its own, suggests Duguid.

Other studies have found that taller people are more likely to gain power: They typically earn higher salaries, have higher-status jobs, are often in leadership positions, and tend to win presidential elections.

But this is the first study to show that the powerful may actually feel taller than a measurement would indicate.

The researchers conclude that their results suggest why the beleaguered chairman of BP "may have inadvertently provided a window into the physical experience of power."

More like this:

Deep-voiced dudes don't have macho sperm

Mmm, beer. Why we get a buzz from booze

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Leave it to science to take the mystery out of the “I just love you so much, man,” beer buzz.  But their findings may lead to better treatment for alcoholics, according to a study in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

Although researchers have known for decades that alcohol affects the brain, it remained unclear as to exactly how the hooch makes humans feel so darn happy. “We have three decades of animal data, but this study is the first direct evidence of how alcohol makes people feel good,” says lead author Jennifer Mitchell, PhD, clinical project director at the Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center at the University of California, San Francisco.

The research team found that found that drinking alcohol releases a flood of endorphins, the so-called “feel good” brain chemicals, in two very specific brain areas: the nucleus accumbens, which is linked to addictive behaviors, and the orbitofrontal cortex, which is involved in decision making.

Using positron emission tomography, or PET imaging, the team looked at the immediate effects of alcohol in the brains of 13 heavy drinkers, defined in the study as having two or three drinks every day, and 12 matched “control” subjects, who were not heavy drinkers. 

Before imbibing a special cocktail of alcohol used for research purposes, along with a little orange juice, the subjects were given injections of a radioactive drug that binds to the brain’s opioid receptors, a place where endorphins also bind.  The researchers then mapped the receptor sites that “lit up” on the PET image.

The subjects were then each given one minute to drink the special cocktail, a second injection of the radioactive drug, and another PET scan. 

By comparing areas of radioactivity in the first and second PET images, the researchers were able to map the exact brain locations where endorphins were released in response to drinking.

In all of the subjects, alcohol led to endorphin release, but there were some differences between the control group and the heavy drinkers.

Although all participants reported feeling a greater sense of pleasure when more endorphins were released in the nucleus accumbens, heavy drinkers reported feeling more intoxicated than the control group when a greater number of endorphins were released in the orbitofrontal cortex.

“Heavy drinkers got more of a reward, more of a high,” says Mitchell. “Their brains are changed in a way that makes drinking extremely pleasurable.”

The study also found that endorphins released after drinking bind to the Mu receptor, the target of narcotics like morphine and heroin. 

That finding could lead to “reverse engineering,” the drug naltrexone, which makes drinking and drugs like heroin less pleasurable by preventing binding at non-specific opioid receptor sites. Compliance, however, is low, because of side effects.

“People say they don’t like how the drug makes them feel, but now that we know that alcohol releases endorphins, we believe that we can make a better naltrexone, and it could be something that people who need help would want to take,” says Mitchell.

Related:

• What makes someone an angry drunk?
• Blame it on the alcohol? Maybe not, study suggests
• Post-booze blackout, how people fill in the blanks

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We ask a lot of weird questions here at The Body Odd. But so do you! Here's our answer to one of your latest queries. Got an inquiring mind? Head over to our Facebook page and ask us your oddest health, medical or human behavior question. We may answer it in an upcoming post.

Today's question: Why is cracking my knuckles so addictive?

The pop! pop! pop! of each cracked knuckle is so sweetly satisfying to you. But it's slowly driving everyone around you completely nuts. You don't remember when you started it, but you can't seem to make yourself stop. Why? "There’s not any hard science to explain why it’s so addictive, but certainly people speculate it’s one of these activities that releases nervous energy," says Dr. Rachel Vreeman, assistant professor of pediatrics at Indiana University School of Medicine and co-author of "Don't Cross Your Eyes ... They'll Get Stuck That Way!"

Some people twirl their hair, some people jiggle their foot up and down -- and some people pop their knuckles. "Many people who do it believe that it feels good," Vreeman says. "They find it to feel good or comfortable, or it even gives them some physical release."

We should note that when you "crack" your knuckles -- you're not actually cracking anything. "That sound you hear is synovial fluid vapor cavities -- or gas bubbles -- in the fluid around your joints. With certain amounts of pressure you can make those bubbles burst." She's making it sound like popping bubble wrap -- no wonder both activities are equally satisfying. 

And, no, cracking your knuckles won't give you arthritis, despite wild rumors you may read on the Internet. Vreeman says in studies of hand function in adults both with and without arthritis, those with arthritis weren't any likelier to be knuckle-crackers. In other words, she says "It doesn’t seem like you’re likely to get arthritis because of your annoying knuckle cracking."

Still, habitual knuckle-popping might lead to some hand discomfort, including swelling, reduced hand strength and even some finger or joint injuries. So, how do you knock it off? 

"Certain things that make you more likely to break your bad habit: coming up with a clear plan. Having some accountability. Telling other people about it," Vreeman says. "From weight loss literature we find that people do better with modifying their eating habits by keeping records -- so keep some record throughout the day how many times a day you did it.

"We also know from sort of the science of habits that it takes ... 28 days to form a habit," Vreeman explains, "so to form an opposite habit probably takes at least that long."

Is there a bad habit you're trying to break in 2012? Let us know how it's going on our Facebook page.

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You’d think somebody repeatedly sticking a needle in your penis would be a little off-putting, but the 21-year-old Iranian apparently thought it would be a grand idea to have Persian script reading borow be salaamat (good luck on your journeys), and the first initial of his girlfriend’s last name (“M”) tattooed onto his little gentleman.

He was left with a permanent semi-erection as a reminder of just how good the idea was. 

His case raises a number of questions, not least whether the wish for good luck is directed to the penis or to the man, and if it’s to the penis, where, exactly, is it going? But, medically speaking, how could getting penis ink give make the organ go haywire?

The answer rests in the traditional technique the man subjected himself to. “Handheld needles are used and there is no control of the depth of the needle,” Iranian urologists reported in the most recent Journal of Sexual Medicine. “Henna, ash, and other natural pigments are used by traditional tattooists. They first use their needles to penetrate the skin. Then they apply the coloring material on the perforated skin surface.”

Naturally, this proved painful. After several days, the pain subsided. Soon after it did, though, the man noticed that his nighttime woodies were lasting a long time. A week later, he had a 24/7 priapic erection.

As erectile dysfunction pill commercials constantly remind us, non-sex-related erections lasting longer than four hours are dangerous for penises. The lack of fresh blood flow can starve the spongy tissues of oxygen, destroying them and resulting in impotence.

There are two types of priapism, ischemic and non-ischemic, according to UCLA urologist Dr. Jeffrey Bassett. In a normal erection, blood flows into the penis via arteries, and as pressure builds, the veins leading out are temporarily blocked. In ischemic priapism, the veins don’t open up again.

In non-ischemic priapism, the veins allow blood out of the penile tissue, but too much blood is flowing in via the arteries and the veins can’t keep up. So blood pressure builds. This isn’t as dangerous since fresh blood is coming in all the time, but it can be pretty inconvenient. If it doesn’t resolve, either on its own or with treatment, it can cause damage in some cases.

Bassett once treated a 24-year-old skateboarder who’d traumatized his pelvic area in a skate accident. It tuned out that the injury caused a blood vessel fistula that interfered with normal flow into and out of the penis.

According to the Iranian doctors, this is what happened to the young man. The tattooist punctured too-deep holes that damaged vessels in the penis, resulting in fistulas, and then a pseudoaneurysm, a pooling of blood outside a vessel wall. They recommended he see a specialist to have the blood removed, but he rejected that idea and saw another doctor to have a shunt procedure performed. It didn’t work.

Since the fellow is still able to have sex, and achieve a more-or-less normal erection, he’s rejected any more treatments, even the one his urologists recommended in the first place.

In one of those statements you’d think nobody would actually have to make, the Iranian doctors wrote “based on our unique case, we discourage penile tattooing.”  

Related:

• Bedroom woes: When Viagra doesn't help
• Spider venom better than Viagra?
• Too much of a good thing: the 4-hour erection

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No, you can't really "cough up a lung." But according to a new case report in the latest New England Journal of Medicine, it's possible to get uncomfortably close.

Two days of chest pain drove a 40-year-old woman to Good Hope Hospital in Birmingham, United Kingdom, for relief. The woman had asthma, and had been coughing especially hard for two weeks. When examining her, doctors noticed some cracking, popping sounds coming from her right midaxillary line -- or the right side of her torso. Further examination with the use of X-ray revealed that the woman had coughed so hard -- she'd herniated her lung. (You can see photos, if you must, here.)

"While she didn't technically cough up her lung, she coughed out her lung, through her ribs," explains Dr. Rachel Vreeman, and assistant professor of pediatrics at Indiana University School of Medicine. Vreeman didn't treat this patient, but as the co-author of "Don't Cross Your Eyes ... They'll Get Stuck That Way!" she was more than willing to give her expert opinion on the strange case. "It's so unusual to have this happen that it would merit this case report -- unusual, but possible, apparently." 

The woman's lung tissue slipped through the space between two of her ribs -- the ninth intercostal space, to be exact. It's actually somewhat similar to a NEJM case study from last month, in which a woman's body "swallowed" one of her breast implants while she was doing Pilates -- in that case, the woman's implant slipped between two of her ribs and was sent into her pleural cavity, or the space between her lungs. (Maybe those two should form a support group.)

In the case of the herniated lung, it's possible that she had some sort of defect explaining why the area between her ribs was particularly vulnerable. But even so, "it really must have been some intense coughing," says Vreeman, adding that there are occasional reports of violent coughing fits causing similarly strange and terrible things. Whooping cough patients may hack so hard that a lung collapses, for example. But it gets worse.

"There are reports -- it's incredibly rare -- of people who have had their spleens ruptured because of coughing," Vreeman says. "There also are occasional reports of people who -- and this is a gross one as well -- some people are more prone to having their eyeballs coming out of their sockets -- there are a few reports of people having problems with that from bad vomiting or coughing." 

Surprisingly, Vreeman says in many of these cases, these people didn't have any underlying health problems that would explain these extreme happenings -- the ruptured spleens, the popped-out eyeballs. It's often simply a case of coughing way, way too hard, she says. 

"Coughing, in and of itself, is not bad -- it keeps the lungs clear by not allowing things to build up," whether it's phlegm or dust or whatever, Vreeman explains. "But it's when you're coughing in a really violent way -- you should, by all means, see a doctor." 

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By Wynne Parry
LiveScience 

A low-pitched voice in a man is associated with a litany of masculine traits: dominance, strength, greater physical size, more attractiveness to women, and so on. But new research strikes one trait off that list: virility.

An Australian study looked at male voice pitch, women's perceptions of it, and semen quality. Their first finding was no surprise: Women like deep voices and consider them masculine.

But contrary to expectations, they also found that these men aren't better off in the semen department. In fact, by one measure of sperm quality — sperm concentration in ejaculate — men with the attractive voices appeared to have a disadvantage.

This is a surprise because females, both humans and of other species, are believed to glean information about male virility through secondary sexual traits, such as facial hair and muscle mass in humans and other traits in other animals, such as colorful plumage in birds.

In the case of voice pitch, the researchers from the University of Western Australia suggest there may be a trade-off at work. In other words, traits associated with dominance and attractiveness, such as physical strength or a deep voice, may come at the cost of reduced sperm quality, they write in a study published Dec. 22 in the journal PLoS ONE.

For instance, higher testosterone levels are associated with a deeper voice, more masculine features, more dominant behavior and success in obtaining sexual partners. Although testosterone plays an important role in the formation of sperm, however, high levels of it can actually impair sperm production, they write.

To conduct the research, the team recruited 54 men to provide voice recordings and semen samples. Their recordings were analyzed by software and ranked by 30 female volunteers on attractiveness or masculinity.  

More from LiveScience:

• 5 Myths About the Male Body
• 6 (Other) Great Things Sex Can Do For You
• 10 Surprising Sex Statistics

More from Body Odd: 

• Mind-blowing sex actually can wipe memory clean
• Allergic to orgasms? Man's sad story has happy ending
• Brainy guy, better sperm? 

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By Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience

In science, it's not enough to think something is so. Researchers must show that what  we believe to be true is in fact true, proven through statistically significant and reproducible results. Questioning assumptions is, after all, what science is about.

Nonetheless, some studies really take the cake in the "duh" department, discovering  things that were already obvious. Here are findings from this year that should come as little surprise.

1. Unsafe sex is more likely after drinking

Drinking too much alcohol can impair decision-making. And a study out this year drove this point home: Canadian researchers, reporting results that will be published in January in the journal Addiction, said they ran 12 studies looking at the link between blood alcohol and the likelihood of agreeing to use a condom during sexual intercourse. The more alcohol in a person's system (yes, the drunker they were), the more likely they were to throw caution to the wind and ditch safe sex. Specifically, for every 0.1-milligram-per-milliliter increase in study participants' blood alcohol levels, there was a 5 percent increased likelihood of having unprotected sex.

2. Men appear confident by suppressing fear, pain and empathy

When mixed martial arts fighters need to show off masculine strength and confidence, they suppress fear, empathy, pain and shame.

Yeah, not too shocking: that tamping down those emotions might make someone seem more formidable. But the research, published in December in the journal Social Psychology Quarterly, was aimed at understanding how men manage their emotions and expectations of manhood.

"Managing emotional manhood, whether it occurs in a locker room or board room, at home or the Oval Office, likely plays a key role in maintaining unequal social arrangements," study author Christian Vaccaro of Indiana University of Pennsylvania said in a statement.

3. Smoking pot and driving isn't safe

Who knew, getting behind the wheel while high could be trouble? According to a study published in October in the journal Epidemiologic Reviews, marijuana use increases the risk of car crashes. People who took to the road within three hours of smoking pot, as well as those who tested positive for the drug, were more than twice as likely as other drivers to be involved in a car crash. And that risk increased for those who smoked more frequently and those showing a higher level of the drug in their urine.

4. Pigs love mud

Turns out pigs aren't just putting on a show when they haul butt around their muddy quarters, diving into the muck. They actually like it. While mud baths keep pigs cool, a review of research reported in 2011 found wallowing may also be a swine sign of well-being. While the review found the strongest reason noted in the past studies for wallowing was to keep cool, the pigs kept it up through winter months.

5. Fashion magazines glorify youth

Surprise, surprise: Fashion mags portray women over 40 sparingly, if at all. Young celebrities and models dominate the pages of these publications, even ones targeted at older age groups. For example, researchers reported in April in the Journal of Aging Studies, that 22 percent of the reader base of Essence is older than 50, but only 9 percent of the women in its pages were even older than 40. Vogue featured only one woman over 40 on its covers in 2010: Halle Berry (then 43).

6. People with generous partners have happy marriages

In the realm of unsurprising marriage advice, researchers found this year that generous marriages are happy marriages. Couples with spouses who offer back rubs and other seemingly selfless acts are happier with their relationships than people who report low amounts of generosity in their marriages, according to researchers with the National Marriage Project.

Half of women and nearly half (46 percent) of men who reported above-average generosity in their marriages described themselves as "very happy" with their relationships. In comparison, only 14 percent of people with low levels of generosity in their marriages said the same.

7. Parents don't think their kids are doing drugs

Smoking pot and drinking? Not my daughter! Parents are in denial about their own children's bad habits, according to poll data released in September by the University of Michigan's C.S. Mott Children's Hospital. That study found that while most parents believe at least 60 percent of 10th-graders drink alcohol, only 10 percent thought their own teen did. 

8. People aren't doing anything in particular on the Internet

Anyone who has ever gone down an Internet black hole, only to emerge hours (and dozens of Wikipedia articles) later, will be less than shocked at the revelation that online is the place to go for mindless entertainment. According to a Pew Research report released in December, 53 percent of people ages 18 to 29 get online at least once on any given day just to pass the time. Using the Internet to goof off isn't limited just to the young, either: Fifty-eight percent of all adults said they sometimes get on the Internet for no reason other than casual entertainment.

9. Restricting driver's licenses decreases teen fatalities

Graduated licenses, which allow teens more freedom behind the wheel as they gain driving experience, save lives. Researchers at the Institute for Research and Evaluation (PIRE) reported in November that fatal automobile crash rates among 16- and 17-year-olds fell 8 percent to 14 percent in states that enacted graduated-licensing laws. Restrictions such as limits on the number of passengers a teen can ferry around and rules against night driving decreased fatal crashes by 13 percent and 9 percent, respectively. Practice (and a little more maturity) makes perfect, it seems.

10. Most shoppers ignore nutrition labels

Calories, cholesterol, sugar … yawn. A study published in October found that grocery shoppers pay little attention to the information on nutrition labels. Even shoppers who say they "almost always" read nutrition information aren't likely to take in much information in a real-world shopping environment, the research found. Using an eye-tracking device on study volunteers, researchers found that only about 1 percent looked at information about total fat, trans fat, sugar and serving size on nearly all labels, even though between 20 percent and 31 percent of people said they looked at each of those categories when they shopped. Anything low on the label is particularly unlikely to get attention. The study found that the average consumer doesn't make it past the fifth line.

11. Presidents outlive their contemporaries

U.S. presidents tend to live as long or longer than their contemporaries, according to research published Dec. 7 in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Sure, being chief executive is stressful (and eight have died in office, four by assassination), but it turns out the top job in the country comes with perks: great medical care, for example. Presidents also tend to be well-off and well-educated, according to lead researcher S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of public health at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Unsurprisingly, money and knowledge tend to buy health and longevity.

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Not much good can happen when you send a bare foot smashing into someone's jaw. But during a summer beach brawl, a kick to the face caused one man to get part of his opponent's tooth stuck in his right foot.

Published in the Journal of Foot and Ankle Surgery, this case is the first to report a tooth "traumatically implanted in the foot." 

The case describes a 29-year-old Croatian man who came to the hospital emergency room complaining of swelling and severe pain in his right foot. At first, he claimed he had stepped on a piece of glass while walking on the beach.

The man had a wound on the sole of is right foot in the gap of skin between his third and fourth toe. When doctors x-rayed the foot, they didn't find a shard of glass but saw "an opaque object" that resembled a human tooth.

So, they questioned the patient again and this time he came clean.

He admitted that two weeks earlier he had been involved in a fight with another guy on the beach. He had been wearing flip-flops but they flew off during the scuffle as he kicked his opponent in the jaw with his right foot.

That strike to the jaw broke off one of his opponent's teeth, which then embedded itself beneath the man's right foot.

Ten days after the brawl when pus from the wound started to ooze out, the man went to see his doctor about his injury. But he didn't fess up to the fight, and his doctor cleaned the wound and prescribed an antibiotic to reduce the risk of infection.

When the pain did not let up, he headed to the emergency room and that's when the tooth was discovered. The doctors decided to surgically remove it because the skin had developed an abscess.

"We consider all foreign body puncture wounds to be 'dirty,' " says Zenon Pogorelić, MD, the case study lead author and a pediatric surgeon at the University Hospital Split in Split, Croatia. Dr. Pogorelić removed the tooth from the patient's foot, and says that because human saliva contains nearly 200 different species of micro-organisms, this can also increase a person's risk for infection.

From the looks of it, the surgeon's suspect the tooth was an incisor from the front part of his opponent's mouth.

Stepping on toothpicks, sewing needles, glass, metal, and insect stingers are the most common objects to cause deep cuts to the sole of the foot. Finding a human tooth there is a rarity, although the medical literature describes unusual cases where a tooth has been found in the tongue, throat, sinuses, and ear canal.

The wound eventually healed, and "the patient returned to his regular activities 15 days after the operation." Let's hope those regular activities didn't include putting his foot into another person's mouth.

More tales of misplaced things:

• Engineer lived with bullet in his head for 8 decades
• Swallowed pen still works 25 years later
• Woman's breast implant disappears during Pilates

Want more weird health news? Find The Body Odd on Facebook.

New England Journal of Medicine

This image shows the bullet that was lodged in an 85-year-old man's head -- specifically, his foraman magnum -- for more than 80 years.

When a Russian man was only 3, his older brother accidentally shot him with a pistol. More than eight decades later, the bullet was still there, according to a case report just published online in the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. 

The bullet hit the little boy right below the nose and eventually lodged itself in his foramen magnum, the opening in the bottom of the skull that allows the spinal cord to pass through and connect to the brain. The 3-year-old lost consciousness for several hours. At the time, a doctor examined the poor kid, but didn't remove the bullet for fear of causing more harm than good, says Dr. Marat Ezhov of Moscow's Cardiology Research Center, who examined the patient more than 80 years later. Incredibly, the boy recovered completely. 

"The body has an amazing ability to 'get used to' things," explains Dr. Richard O'Brien, a spokesman for the American College of Emergency Physicians. "Also, children have a great ability to overcome hardship and rebuild themselves when injured."

Eighty-two years later, Ezhov and Dr. Maya Safarova were treating the man at the cardiology center for his coronary heart disease. His patient history included the story of the accidental shooting, so doctors did a CT scan to check it out, which revealed the stowaway bullet. But the bullet had left no sign of neural damage -- further evidenced by the man's successful career as an award-winning engineer. 

"High-speed missiles, like a bullet, can cause great damage and usually do," explains Dr. David Ross, an emergency physician at Penrose Hospital in Colorado Springs, Colo. "However, because they are high-speed, they generate a lot of heat. That heat usually means the missile is sterile -- meaning it is unlikely to serve as a basis for infection if it stays in one place for many years. So if it did not cause much damage, which it apparently didn't, it was unlikely to cause him ongoing troubles."

A weird little detail: Ezhov notes that the during his engineering career, the man oversaw construction of ballistic missles.

Doctors at the Russian cardiology center decided that at this point, the bullet didn't need to be removed -- after all, he was in good condition, Ezhov noted, and he had been doing well for decades. Besides, even his scar wasn't affecting his life negatively -- the bullet did leave a scar under his nose, but his curved, Roman nose keeps it invisible, Safarova said in an email. 

Related:

• Swallowed pen still works 25 years later
• Woman's breast implant disappears during Pilates

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When twins Danielle and Nicole Fisher gave birth to baby boys within minutes of one another, people wondered whether it was the result of some sort of special twin telepathy. After all, what are the chances that two young women would get pregnant within weeks of one another and then deliver 13 minutes apart?

The duo insists they didn’t consciously plan to get pregnant together. Twenty-three year old Nicole Fisher put it down to the “twin thing.” “It just has something to do with that twin communication,” she told her hometown New Jersey newspaper, The Courier-Post.

But twin experts aren’t ready to explain this away with ESP.

“I’ve heard of these things happening before,” said Nancy Segal, a professor of psychology at California State University at Fullerton and author of “Entwined Lives: Twins and What They Tell Us About Human Behavior.” “It’s fascinating. But I don’t think there’s any kind of ESP going on.”

Segal thinks the more likely explanation is shared genetics. While genes aren’t destiny, she said, they tend to greatly influence our lives.

“Twins’ lives tend to be in synch, particularly identical twins,” Segal said. “And you could see how genetics might come into play when it comes to the ease of conception, for example.”

Segal has interviewed hundreds of twins and for the most part she hasn’t come across many instances of any special sort of twin communication.

“They can have very close connections,” Segal said. “They can spend a lot of time together because they get along so well.”

It’s not just the power of genes that makes twins feel so close, said Ricardo Ainslie, a professor in the department of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and author of “The Psychology of Twinship.”

“They grow up together in the same developmental context,” Ainslie said. “That’s very powerful. And because of it there will always be a kind of intimacy between twins that doesn’t exist between siblings that are different ages.”

Model Lauren Scruggs, who lost her left eye after being struck by an airplane propeller, has a fraternal twin sister, Brittany. In a recent post on CaringBridge.org, their mom, Cheryl Scruggs, reported that Brittany’s left eye had been twitching for days. “She knows it’s because of their deep connection she and Lo have, and God allowing her to go through this with her at the ‘twin’ level,” she wrote.

Still, the whole mythology of twin ESP can be oppressive, Ainslie said. Some twins even feel they come up short because they can’t communicate telepathically.

“When I interviewed twins,” Ainslie said, “I asked about this phenomenon. And what is interesting is that many twins seemed to feel that they didn’t measure up to that myth. They’d say ‘My twin and I try to communicate in these ways. Maybe we’re just not as twin-like as other twins.’” 

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Petr David Josek / AP

There are weepy drinkers, inappropriately affectionate drinkers, giggly and goofy drinkers. But there's one type of reveler you really want to avoid: the angry drinker. New research suggests how to spot one. 

Impulsive, live-in-the-moment types are likely to become aggressive when they're intoxicated, according to a new study from Ohio State University's Brad Bushman, a professor of communication and psychology at the school. "We already know that alcohol increases aggression. And people who have aggressive personality traits also tend not to think about the consequences of their actions," Bushman says. "You put the two together, and it's really a toxic mix." 

The average age of the study's 495 volunteers was 23, all of whom described themselves as social drinkers and none of whom had any past or present drug, alcohol or psychiatric-related problems. They each took a questionnaire designed to measure which of the participants were future-focused, and which were more impulsive. Half of the volunteers were given alcohol mixed with orange juice; the other half were given orange juice with just a teensy bit of alcohol -- but researchers sprayed the rims of the glasses with alcohol so it smelled like a full-on alcoholic drink (genius).

Then they played a little game: The participants were told they were playing against an unseen same-sex opponent in a speed reaction test, and that the winner got to give the loser an electric shock -- harmless, but still a little painful. (But, actually, they were playing against the researchers themselves.) As the game wore on, the shocks got longer and more intense, making it seem like the opponent was getting meaner and meaner with every win. The more impulsive the participants had rated themselves, the more likely they were to retaliate by upping the intensity and length of the shocks they sent the "losers." 

“The less people thought about the future, the more likely they were to retaliate, but especially when they were drunk.  People who were present-focused and drunk shocked their opponents longer and harder than anyone else in the study,” Bushman explained. "Alcohol didn’t have much effect on the aggressiveness of people who were future-focused."

While the impulsive types who were not intoxicated did up the intensity of the shocks, it wasn't to the same degree as the impulsive folks who were drunk.

"If you carefully consider the consequences of your actions, it is unlikely getting drunk is going to make you any more aggressive than you usually are," Bushman said.

That's because alcohol is a disinhibitor, explains New York City psychiatrist and regular TODAY contributor Dr. Gail Saltz. It doesn't cause a personality trait; it reveals what's already there, hiding somewhere inside your personality. A drunk friend may appear to be acting out of character, but we don't know what that person might be keeping under wraps, Saltz explains.

Think you're only an angry drunk when you're throwing back, say, shots of tequila? It's not that simple, says Bruce Bartholow, associate professor of psychology at University of Missouri College of Arts and Sciences. (Bartholow led a study we wrote about earlier this year on alcohol and behavior.) Bartholow says there isn't much research looking at how drinking an unfamiliar type of alcohol changes cognitive function.

"There’s a social influence on your drunken behavior," Bartholow explains. "People drink different kinds of things in different situations. If you're at a dinner party at your boss's house, you're probably not going to be doing shots of tequila." There, you might be drinking a good sauvignon blanc, so you learn to associate the experience of drinking wine with mind-your-manners behavior. "There's a difference between what it feels like to be drunk off of wine and what it feels like to be drunk off of shots of tequila because the situations are vastly different," Bartholow explains. 

Related: 

Post-booze blackout, how people fill in the blanks

Blame it on the alcohol? Maybe not

Why do hangovers seem so much worse as we get older?

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The pen is said to be mightier than the sword. But an unusual case report has shown that a pen may be mightier than stomach acid.

The case, which appeared in the British Medical Journal Case Reports, described a 76- year-old British woman sent to a GI specialist because of weight loss and diarrhea.

She was diagnosed with severe diverticulosis, a condition that's common in older people in which small pouches bulge out from the colon. But when doctors did a scanning test of her belly they noticed something strange: "A linear foreign body in the stomach." (Click here for photos.)

When asked about it, the woman remembered accidentally swallowing a black felt-tip pen 25 years earlier. (In case you're wondering, dentures and toothpicks are two of the most common items that adults accidentally swallow.)

According to her gastroenterologist Dr. Oliver Waters, who authored the case report, she was standing on her stairs using an uncapped pen to poke a spot on her tonsils. She was also holding a hand mirror to guide the pen to the exact spot. Somehow, while doing this, she lost her balance and stumbled. The fall managed to push the pen down her throat. It glided down her gullet and found a home in her tummy.

She told her husband and her doctor what had happened, but they were skeptical of the story. X-rays done at the time were normal and found no trace of the pen. Flash forward to the present, to a different doctor and even better stomach-scanning technology to investigate the case of the missing marker. More than two decades later a scan hit pay dirt: The pen.

Although the woman's current digestive problems had nothing to do with the marker she had unintentionally downed, doctors decided to remove it anyway. Their rationale was a case in the medical literature of a child accidentally swallowing a ball-point pen that bore a hole in his bowel. Incredibly, the pen had stayed in her stomach for 25 years without causing any significant damage to her GI tract, Waters says.

After bathing in stomach acid for a two-and-a-half decades, the pen was corroded and the plastic was flaky, but, amazingly, the pen still had usable ink and could write!

"This case highlights that plain abdominal x-rays may not identify ingested plastic objects and occasionally it may be worth believing the patient's account however unlikely it may be," the report advises doctors.

Write on!

Related:

• Woman's breast implant disappears during Pilates
• Un-paralyzed by a crash? Docs say it's unlikely
• Man's image seen in ultrasound

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