Down
More than 1 in 3 PhD candidates at the University of Amsterdam is clinically depressed, shows a study by the local PhD network. For the study 20 PhD candidates answered questions about happiness and sadness. Economics and business studies researchers came out worst: 44 percent of them are at risk of depression. That is twice the rate among ‘normal’ people. Dental researchers came out best, at 22 percent.
Slobs
Meateaters are not slobs, as we know since Diederik Stapel’s finding that carnivores were antisocial was exposed as fraudulent. But they do die younger, shows a review by the Mayo Clinic in Arizona. Eating vegetarian for at least 17 years lengthens your life by an average of 3.6 years. Daily doses of red and processed meat are particularly deadly.
Smell
The smell of the audience’s breath in a cinema depends on the kind of film showing. Thrillers ‘smell’ different to comedies, researchers from the Max Planck Institute have shown. They analysed the air and correlated its composition with the film being screened. ‘The Hunger Games’ smell, for example, turned out to be very different to the ‘Buddy’ smell. On the basis of the smell alone, the researchers succeeded in guessing what kind of film was on the screen. Do you think lectures have different smells too?