Always thought women were the stronger sex? Okay, I admit it, me too.

But I am inclined to be a little skeptical when someone pimping their book cites ancillary evidence rather than studies so even if the logic is good I tend to maintain a healthy disbelief.

Ryuichi Kaneko and Dr. Kunio Kitamura, two of the co-authors of "Sex no Subete ga Wakaru Hon (Everything You Need to Know About Sex)" write in the Mainichi Daily News:

"Green" laundry detergents have taken the leading role in a new effort by retailers and industry to market mainstream, environmentally friendly consumer products, according to an article scheduled for the Jan. 29 issue of ACS' weekly newsmagazine, Chemical & Engineering News.

In the article, assistant managing editor Michael McCoy describes how the cleaning products industry has embraced sustainability, with a variety of innovations. One, for instance, is an energy-efficient laundry detergent that cleans without hot water. Others are laundry detergents that cause less water pollution after they go down the drain.

Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. has been a major catalyst in the green detergent revolution, the article states.

This year, millions of Americans made the resolution to lose weight. However, many will get frustrated and give up before their goals are reached. Contributing to this problem is the host of bad information regarding diet and exercise circulating through gyms, workplaces, and the Internet. Julie Bender, a dietitian with Baylor University Medical Center at Dallas, and Phil Tyne, director of the Baylor Tom Landry Health and Wellness Center "weigh in" on the most popular diet and exercise myths:

1. Crunches will get rid of your belly fat. False. "You can't pick and choose areas where you'd like to burn fat", says Tyne. "In order to burn fat, you should create a workout that includes both cardiovascular and strength training elements.

A team of archaeologists and Earthwatch volunteers led by Dr. Mary Glowacki and Louis Tesar uncovered an elite Wari cemetery at Cotocotuyoc this past summer in Peru's Huaro Valley, near Cuzco. Among their finds was a "trophy skull," which offers insight into warfare in the Wari Empire based here from 1,500 to 1,000 years ago.

Researchers at the National Institutes of Health have developed an experimental vaccine that could, theoretically, eliminate malaria from entire geographic regions, by eradicating the malaria parasite from an area's mosquitoes.

The vaccine, so far tested only in mice, would prompt the immune system of a person who receives it to eliminate the parasite from the digestive tract of a malaria-carrying mosquito, after the mosquito has fed upon the blood of the vaccinated individual. The vaccine would not prevent or limit malarial disease in the person who received it.

An article describing this work was published on the Web site of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Scientists at Cardiff University (Wales, UK) have confirmed what thousands of people with arthritis have believed for years. Cod Liver Oil really is effective in treating joint pain and can slow, even reverse, the destruction of joint cartilage.

Cartilage is the ‘gristle’ that cushions bones and prevents them from grinding against each other. Loss of cartilage leads to osteoarthritis, the painful and disabling condition experienced by 1.5 million people in the UK and the major reason for joint replacement surgery.

Each holiday season, another woman who loves the rock band No Doubt will receive a plaid skirt that only the band's singer, Gwen Stefani, could pull off. Another athletic guy will receive an oversize sports jersey – even though off the field he prefers Brooks Brothers. Why are we so terrible at predicting the tastes of the ones we love? A new study explains why familiarity with another person actually makes predicting their tastes more difficult.

Past research has argued that lack of diagnostic information causes this sort of misperception, but Davy Lerouge (Tilburg University, the Netherlands) and Luk Warlop (Katholieke University, Belgium) found that we buy unwanted gifts even when we have plenty of knowledge.

Despite research efforts to find modern factors that would explain the different life expectancies of men and women, the gap is actually ancient and universal, according to University of Michigan researchers.

"Women live longer in almost every country, and the sex difference in lifespan has been recognized since at least the mid-18th century," said Daniel J. Kruger, a research scientist in the U-M School of Public Health and the Institute for Social Research. "It isn't a recent trend; it originates from our deep evolutionary history."

Although women consume less alcohol than men, they are more susceptible to some of the negative medical consequences of alcohol use, such as cirrhosis of the liver, cardiac disease, and cognitive impairments. Animal studies have also shown that males and females differ on behavioral as well as electrophysiological measures of alcohol's effects.

Three new studies by a University at Buffalo psychologist offer the first known evidence that some people anxiously expect that they will be rejected by others because of their physical appearance, and that this sensitivity, if not mitigated, has serious implications for their mental and physical health.

"Appearance-based Rejection Sensitivity: Implications for Mental and Physical Health, Affect, and Motivation" by Lora Park, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Psychology, UB College of Arts and Sciences, reports on three of Park's studies and is currently in press for publication in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.