Adults like to watch Chris Angel or David Blaine because we know the stunts are controlled, but there is always the chance they might off themselves. We get some fun out of figuring out the impossible and it's more challenging than figuring out how to cheat at Wii Fit.

Impossible tricks have a different effect on kids: a new experiment announced today at the BA Festival of Science in Liverpool says learning magical feats can boost children’s confidence and social skills.

The study, conducted by Rebecca Godfrey, Dr Sarah Woods, and Professor Richard Wiseman from the University of Hertfordshire, involved assessing the effect of teaching secondary school children some seemingly impossible illusions, including how to magically restore a rope that has been cut in half, and read another person’s mind.

Women employed in casual and contract jobs are up to ten times more likely to experience unwanted sexual advances than those in permanent full time positions, a University of Melbourne study has found.

The research by Associate Professor Anthony LaMontagne of the McCaughey Centre, VicHealth Centre for the Promotion of Mental Health and Community Wellbeing will be presented at the From Margins to Mainstream Conference: 5th World Conference on the Promotion of Mental Health and the Prevention of Mental and Behavioral Disorders.

Associate Professor LaMontagne's study examined the likelihood of sexual harassment in different types of employment.

Last month a Pew Research Institute survey reported a decline in the number of Americans who want churches and other houses of worship involved in political matters.

The survey also found that most of the drop in the past four years comes among conservatives.

Although Sarah Palin's entry into the 2008 presidential race has energized the religious right within the Republican Party, don't expect religion to be a major issue in this year's election, says University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) political communications expert Larry Powell, Ph.D.

The move away from overt religious appeals may be due to an effort to avoid what Powell calls the "Pharisee Effect",

In America, 50% of people are baffled by the notion that the same government responsible for FEMA should be more involved in something as important as health care. Not so in Australia. Professor Jim Butler, Director of the Australian Centre for Economic Research on Health (ACERH) based at Australian National University, says not only would national Medicare be good for people, it would make staunch capitalists happy by increasing competition and thereby lowering waiting times.

Private hospitals and capitalism are the reason there are wait times? No, but allowing private hospitals access to medicare money would allow them to compete with public hospitals and reduce wait times while lowering costs. Or so he says. Instances where government funding reduced the cost of anything? Still sitting at 0 throughout human history.

In Butler's analysis, a Hospital Benefits Schedule funded by the Commonwealth and not the states would be created to enable patients to use their publicly funded health service benefit in private hospitals.

If you've grown concerned that young people chuckling ironically at news clips of real events may actually not be getting a real grasp of what those fake news shows are ridiculing, you can rest assured there is no truthiness to it. A new study suggests that those entertainment news shows, such as The Daily Show or The Colbert Report, may not be as influential in teaching voters about political issues and candidates as was previously thought.

Previous studies have reported up to 48 percent of all adults and 60 percent of young voters used fake news shows as a source of campaign news in the 2004 presidential election. But researchers from Ohio State University have found reasons to discount how effective these shows are in informing the general public.

Patients visiting an ophthalmologist report that prayer is important to their well-being and that God plays a positive role in illness, according to a report in the September issue of Archives of Ophthalmology.

"Ethical medical practice includes physician behavior, beyond technical competence, that promotes healing and optimizes the patient's welfare," the authors write as background information in the article. "The physician who respects the patient as a person with dignity must acknowledge the patient's value system to establish a relationship that permits conversations that nourish trust for joint therapeutic decision making. For many patients, religion and spirituality is important to their value system and may represent a unique source of motivation and coping with life events, including the experience of personal illness (illness refers to the response of a patient to a disease)."

The fight against fake medicines could soon be aided by a small, portable device that quickly measures the hardness of a tablet, revealing whether it is counterfeit, according to research presented at the British Pharmaceutical Conference (BPC) in Manchester.

The study tested a series of dummy paracetamol tablets made with varying degrees of real medicine, versus lactose (an ingredient used by counterfeiters to replace the active drug). Tests showed that the fake tablets were harder than the tablet with the correct amount of paracetamol, and were more difficult to crush.

Free drug samples provided to physicians by pharmaceutical companies could actually be costing uninsured patients more in the long run, according to a study done by researchers at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center and colleagues.

The retrospective study looked at the prescribing habits of more than 70 physicians in a university-affiliated internal medicine practice in the months immediately before and after the closing of their drug sample closet. The results indicate that the availability of free samples from pharmaceutical companies greatly impacts whether an uninsured patient is given a prescription for a generic or a brand-name drug. The complete findings can be found in the September issue of Southern Medical Journal.

A new Institute of Physics report published Friday, 5 September, 2008, provides the most comprehensive evidence available to confirm that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)’s switch-on, due Wednesday September 10th, poses no threat to anyone.

Nature’s own cosmic rays, they note, regularly produce more powerful particle collisions than those planned within the LHC, which will enable nature’s laws to be studied in controlled experiments.

The LHC Safety Assessment Group have reviewed and updated a study first completed in 2003, which dispels fears of universe-gobbling black holes and of other possibly dangerous new forms of matter, and confirms that the switch-on will be completely safe.

A new study found that trained sexologists could infer a woman's history of vaginal orgasm by observing the way she walks. The study is published in the September 2008 issue of The Journal of Sexual Medicine.

Led by Stuart Brody of the University of the West of Scotland in collaboration with colleagues in Belgium, the study involved 16 female Belgian university students. Subjects completed a questionnaire on their sexual behavior and were then videotaped from a distance while walking in a public place. The videotapes were rated by two professors of sexology and two research assistants trained in the functional-sexological approach to sexology, who were not aware of the women's orgasmic history.