I knew it the day I turned 22—it was all down hill from there.  After all, who actually looks forward to a birthday after 21.  At 21, you get to drink.  Maybe we need to legalize another substance and allow you to smoke it at 25.

Yes, it’s true.  I knew that the good life ended at 22, but until now, there was no actual irrefutable scientific evidence.  Now, there is.

Researchers at the U of Virginia have decided that people reach their mental peak at 22 and begin to decline at 27.  Face it; if you’re 28, you may already be on the road to senility.  And shouldn’t be allowed to drive.  Or chose the radio station.  Or the President.

They tested 2000 adults from the ages of 18 to 60 with visual puzzles and recollection tests.  I guess they made them solve Rubik’s cubes and take Starbucks orders—I dunno.  Reasoning started to go down the tubes at 27; memory at 37; and everything else collapsed starting at 42.

The sunny news?  Vocabulary continued to increase till age 60.  So as you ramble in your increasing senility, rest assured that you’ll be using big words.  That you have no idea the meaning of.

But apparently they’re much smarter than me.

A new study says doodling helps you concentrate better and remember stuff.  A bunch of researchers got 40 people together to listen to a telephone message.  The message had details about a party—who’d be there, who wouldn’t; presumably, what they’d be smoking.

Then the people were asked what they could remember about the message.  The people that didn’t doodle remembered SOME.  Those that DID doodle remembered a third more.  And the people smoking at the party couldn’t remember much at all.

None of this is any surprise to me.  I’ve been telling my boss for months that text messaging during meetings increases my ability to concentrate.  He wouldn’t bite.  So instead, I “carefully record his well-considered thoughts” on my I-Phone, explaining that the chime he occasionally hears is just the noise that it emits when it detects a particularly insightful nugget of wisdom.

PS: I just read about the study more closely.  It says that the people who were doodling were more likely to write down the party details.  And then were more likely to remember those details.  Doesn’t the study just prove that writing stuff down helps you remember s&*t?  Yeah; thought so.  Scientists are punks.

Scientific health studies, by and large, SUCK; am I right?  Nutra-sweet causes cancer, cell phones cause cancer, microwave popcorn gives you something called “popcorn lung” (which is not as fun as it sounds—look it up).  Science is depressing; better not to know stuff about stuff than to be afraid of everything.  Well I think this study alone makes up for all those crappy ones:

The only reason you’re fat is because you caught a virus!

That’s right! Stop exercising, put down those 38 flavors of Yo-Play and grab yourself a deep-fried chicken leg, because the only problem with YOU is that you caught something as common as the common cold!

Well, sort of. A new study out of Baton Rogue says that virus AD-36 “infects the lungs then whisks around the body” making fat cells multiply (while giving you a soar throat.)  One of the tests showed that a THIRD of obese people had the virus—whereas only 11% of super-skinny-turn-me-sideways-and-I-vanish-into-thin-air people had it.

Thing is, the fat only lasts for like 3 months till your body becomes resistant.

So what am I saying?  Good excuse to laze about the couch and have a 4-day Lost marathon while devouring Chinese take-out?  Probably not.  Good excuse for your ten-pound post-holiday weight gain?  Absolutely.

Science is funny.

Especially today.  Researchers just found out that drinking 3 or more cups of coffee a day can shrink your breasts.  Unless you’re a guy.  Then drinking too much coffee can increase your chance of man-boobs.  This is true!

It’s science!

Here’s the good news for breast-shrinking women: drinking more coffee also reduces the chance of breast cancer.

Having breast cancer is probably worse than having small boobs: so I say, drink up!  (And don’t listen to your boyfriend reading over your shoulder who’s disagreeing with me. Shame on you, boyfriend!)

The doc doing the study also said this: "Coffee-drinking women do not have to worry their breasts will shrink to nothing overnight. They will get smaller, but the breasts aren’t just going to disappear."

Heh.  Comedy.