Men may think about sex more often than women do, but a new study suggests that men also think about other biological needs, such as eating and sleep, more frequently than women do, as well.

And the research discredits the persistent stereotype that men think about sex every seven seconds, which would amount to more than 8,000 thoughts about sex in 16 waking hours. In the study, the median number of young men's thought about sex stood at almost 19 times per day. Young women in the study reported a median of nearly 10 thoughts about sex per day.

As a group, the men also thought about food almost 18 times per day and sleep almost 11 times per day, compared to women's median number of thoughts about eating and sleep, at nearly 15 times and about 8 1/2 times, respectively.

The college-student participants carried a golf tally counter to track their thoughts about either eating, sleep or sex every day for a week. Each student was assigned to just one type of thought to record. Before receiving the tally counter, they had completed a number of questionnaires and were asked to estimate how often they had daily thoughts about eating, sleeping and sex.

Overall, a participant's comfort with sexuality was the best predictor for which person would have the most frequent daily thoughts about sex.

"If you had to know one thing about a person to best predict how often they would be thinking about sex, you'd be better off knowing their emotional orientation toward sexuality, as opposed to knowing whether they were male or female," said Terri Fisher, professor of psychology at Ohio State University's Mansfield campus and lead author of the study. "Frequency of thinking about sex is related to variables beyond one's biological sex."

Correcting this stereotype about men's sexual thoughts is important, Fisher noted.

"It's amazing the way people will spout off these fake statistics that men think about sex nearly constantly and so much more often than women do," she said. "When a man hears a statement like that, he might think there's something wrong with him because he's not spending that much time thinking about sexuality, and when women hear about this, if they spend significant time thinking about sex they might think there's something wrong with them."

The study appears online and is scheduled for publication in the January issue of the Journal of Sex Research.

Though crossword puzzles may give your brain an edge every now and then, research suggests other types of brain training can be more effective in improving cognitive function -- for older adults at least.

The findings add to what scientists are beginning to learn: attention-based visual training has the potential to strengthen neural connections in the brain.

Researchers plan to finish the project in January, but the first round of results are available in British Medical Journal Open.

The team drew data from the Iowa Healthy and Active Minds Study. In the setup, 681 participants 50 years and older were randomly assigned to testing groups. One group received 10 hours of training under supervision, while another participated in one session of brain training with a four-hour follow-up session 11 months later. The third group completed one session of brain training at home, and the fourth participated in a computerized crossword puzzle training session under supervision. Most people trained for two hours at a time.

The global supply for hard drives will fall 70 million units short of the 180 million needed in 4Q11.

Following a similar price hike initiated by Acer, PC manufacturers Asus and Dell are expected to increase the prices of notebooks slated to arrive in December by 2 to 3-percent thanks to the current shortage of hard drives. In 4Q11 alone, the global supply is expected to be 35-percent short of the overall demand for 180 million units, leaving only around 110 to 130 million units available worldwide.

Retail channels in Taiwan have already seen a 20 to 30-percent HDD price hike since the flooding shortages began back in October, and will reportedly see another 10-percent price increase in December. Vendors like HP, Acer, Asus and Dell will get first priority, leaving the secondary retail buyers fighting for what's left -- some of which are already hoarding hard drives in fear of a depleted global supply.

According to unnamed sources in Taiwan, several PC manufactures are actually optimistic about the hard drive supply in 1Q12, believing that the shortage will finally ease before the spring. Other manufacturers aren't quite so positive, predicting that supply will begin to pick up in the second quarter of 2012. Either way, PC vendors will likely see increased hard drive costs throughout 2012, as the supply chain won't return to pre-Thailand flooding levels for another nine to twenty-four months.

Physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a particle accelerator at CERN Laboratory in Switzerland, are trying to slam particles together hard enough to break them into never-before-seen pieces, which could solve some of the biggest puzzles in nature.

But UFOs - unidentified falling objects, that is - keep getting in their way.

The LHC is a 17-mile (27-km) circular tunnel lined with powerful magnets, which accelerate protons (particles in the nuclei of atoms) to 99.9999991 percent the speed of light. Beams of these super-brisk protons are accelerated clockwise around the ring and collide with beams traveling counter-clockwise, and, like a well-struck piñata, a dead-on hit produces a thrilling outburst of subatomic goodies. When they turn the proton beams up to full power, the physicists hope to find the Higgs boson, also known as the "God particle," which is believed to create the drag that gives everything else mass, among the collision debris. They'll also look for dark matter, the invisible substance that permeates the outskirts of galaxies.

The search for greener, more power-efficient lighting systems won't stop with compact fluorescents and LED systems if Dutch electronics giant Philips has anything to say about it. In an effort to embrace a truly natural approach to lighting, the company took a cue from fireflies and deep-sea creatures to create a (literally) green light powered not by electricity or sunlight, but by glowing bioluminescent bacteria.

As one of numerous systems in its Microbial Home (MH) concept, Philips tasked itself with creating a lighting system driven by the wastes typically generated in the average home. To feed the bacteria housed in the bio-light's unusual hand-blown glass compartments, methane - which could generated by the MH kitchen's bio-digester unit from composted bathroom solids and kitchen vegetable waste - is piped in through thin silicon tubes connected to a reservoir at the base.

Light produced by bacteria, or luminescence, is heat-free in contrast to incandescence, which is light generated by objects heated to glowing. A similar form of light, chemoluminescence, is given off by the familiar snap and shake glow sticks (a mixture of phenyl oxalate, fluorescent dye and hydrogen peroxide) but those are closed one-use systems with a limited light-production period.

Babies as young as 8 months want to see wrongdoers punished, a new study finds.

In contrast, younger babies prefer to see individuals being nice to one another - even when that means that someone is nice to a character who deserves a slap on the wrist.

"This study helps to answer questions that have puzzled evolutionary psychologists for decades," Kiley Hamlin, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, said in a statement. "Namely, how have we survived as intensely social creatures if our sociability makes us vulnerable to being cheated and exploited? These findings suggest that, from as early as eight months, we are watching for people who might put us in danger."

Billions of ethereal particles known as neutrinos pour through us every second from the sun. Lately, scientists have realized that these mysterious entities do possess mass, albeit a small amount, despite previous predictions that they had none.

Now a giant scientific experiment housed deep beneath mountains in Italy is analyzing neutrinos from the sun with unprecedented detail, which might one day help solve the enigmas neutrinos pose, as well as shed light on the inner workings of stars.

Neutrinos are generated by nuclear reactions and certain types of radioactive decay. They are created in great multitudes in the nuclear furnace of the sun, flowing through Earth's surface in numbers as high as 420 billion per square inch (65 billion per square centimeter) per second. However, they have a neutral electrical charge and almost never interact with other particles, which means they stream through regular matter virtually unaffected, only rarely slamming into atoms.

The new findings come from the Borexino experiment buried under the Apennine Mountains at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy, one of the most sensitive neutrino detectors on the planet.

Another experiment at Gran Sasso, called OPERA, also studies neutrinos, but looks for particles created in a lab in Switzerland, rather than those coming from the sun. OPERA's science team recently made headlines when it announced findings that suggest neutrinos may be traveling faster than the speed of light, which was thought to be the ultimate cosmic speed limit.

'Underdominance' experiment on remote island

Remorseless German boffins say that the time may now be ripe for scientists to begin release of "transgenic individuals into populations". Concerns that this might result in those populations being completely replaced by the superior lab-developed individuals can be addressed, they say, by the use of cunningly selected mutants.

Rather than some kind of sinister play to replace unsatisfactory human beings with superior lab-grown varieties, this is actually aimed at helping people - for instance by wiping out the terrible menace of mosquito-borne malaria, one of the most potent threats to human health around.

Magic material gets yet another surprising application

Long gone are the days when the inkjet printer was the consumable that people bought for school projects and family photographs: a group of researchers from Cambridge University has added graphene-based transistors to the list of things that you can take from the output tray.

The researchers, led by Andrea Ferrari of the university's Department of Engineering, created an ink able to deposit graphene on a flexible silicon substrate, using this year's favourite magic material to improve the efficiency and performance of an organic semiconductor material.

While inks able to produce printable electronics aren't new, they produce devices that are large (and therefore slow, since if electrons have to travel a bigger distance to traverse the transistor, it takes longer, and therefore switching speed is reduced).

Colossal magnet we live on perhaps a Silicon roundabout

Scientists carrying out extreme boffinry into the makeup of the Earth's liquid core have announced that they are very puzzled to find it is not made of what they had thought it was.

The great bulk of the liquid outer core of the planet, of course, is made of molten iron. That's just as well for us and all life on Earth, as the spinning blob of superhot melted metal we all live on top of generates a tremendously powerful magnetic field which keeps off all the plasma storms and cosmic rays and suchlike deadly space radiation so that we aren't fried out of existence on a routine basis.