Shakespeare, the Bible and Gray's Anatomy--this is all a doctor ever needs to read, according to American novelist and Nobel prize winner, Sinclair Lewis. In more modern times, however, the 146 year old Gray's Anatomy has been belittled as a "slightly updated Victorian dinosaur." The anatomical work has, therefore, undergone major surgery in its recently launched 39th edition and has been fully restructured by body region rather than system. Various sections have been expanded, and the number of illustrations has risen to nearly 2000. Despite these changes, the volume has shrunk by more than 20%, thanks to the removal of unnecessary "Victorian purple prose" (www.graysanatomyonline.com).

Eyespy recommends you to shut your baby up (by consoling it, of course). Leaving children to cry without offering them any comfort could result in lasting damage to their brains, psychologist Margot Sunderland alerts parents and carers in her new book on raising children. Persistent distress early in life is associated with agenesis of the corpus callosum (an area of the brain that links the two hemispheres) on computed tomography scans, she says. Professor Sunderland believes that uncomforted weeping during early childhood is a major cause of the rising prevalence of mental health problems in adolescents (www.dailymail.co.uk).

Are police stations and law courts soon going to stock up on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners for criminal hearings? American researchers claim that functional MRI (a technique that determines which part of the brain is activated during the performance of a given task) is at least as reliable in detecting liars as a conventional polygraph lie detector, which basically measures how anxious someone is. As lots of people may become anxious anyway, when attached to a polygraph, and as good liars may not become anxious at all, the latter technique has considerable limitations, the researchers argue. More and other areas of the brain were active in people who tried to lie than in those who told the truth, they showed in a pilot study with 11 participants. The team thinks that functional MRI has potential as an accurate test for deception (www.bbc.co.uk).

Father Christmas helps boost children's social and cognitive development, a psychiatrist declared in an article titled "What if Santa died?" in the Psychiatric Bulletin. Dr Lynda Breen argues that believing in Father Christmas may promote kindness and cooperation in children. "Many letters to Santa include a wish for someone else, including the poor or the sick," she says. Moreover, writing to Santa enhanced creative thinking. In the same issue, another psychiatrist warns that modern society is unwisely holding rationality above all else and that the issue is not merely about the death of Santa but rather the death of imagination. "Why should any child running The Sims on the home PC need to believe in Santa Claus, when he or she can actually be him?" he points out. Eyespy pleads doctors to do anything to keep Father Christmas alive and wishes "Merry Christmas!" to all her readers (http://pb.rcpsych.org).

Completely unaware of a 5 cm nail stuck in his skull, a South Korean man sought treatment for a severe headache at a hospital in Seoul. Doctors suspect that the nail had found its destination during an accident the man had had four years earlier (www.ananova.com).

AP/YONHAP

Two fifths of the male paramedical students had had more than 10 sex partners, compared with only 9% of the male medical students, found a recently completed study. Having questioned 359 senior students at a school of health professions in Greece, researchers presented their findings at the annual congress of the European Society for Sexual Medicine, recently held in London. Additionally, 73% of the male paramedics but only 37% of the male medics had had their first sexual experience before the age of 18. There was no major difference between female medics and paramedics. Most female students had had less than five partners and had started their sex lives between 18 and 20 years of age. Eyespy leaves the interpretation of these findings to you.

Eyespy has at last found a genuine excuse for her night time activities: infidelity may have a genetic origin. In a survey involving 1600 pairs of twins, researchers from St Thomas's Hospital in London found that as much as 40% of female infidelity could be explained by heredity. The team is assessing the impact of genes on various human behaviours and medical conditions by comparing identical with non-identical twins. They assume that, if genes play a role, identical twins are more likely to share a trait than non-identical twins. The latest study reveals that 22% of women reported being unfaithful to a regular partner, although most of them also thought that infidelity was wrong in every case. The researchers were unable to link human behaviour to a "fidelity gene," recently identified by American scientists in voles (www.guardian.co.uk).

Good news for chocaholics: chocolate may soon be available on prescription. Probably sponsored by Swiss chocolate manufacturers, scientists of Imperial College, London, suggest that theobromine, one of chocolate's ingredients, is more effective in treating cough than codeine. They show that higher concentrations of capsaicin were required to induce cough in people previously given theobromine than in those given a placebo or codeine. Theobromine apparently works by reducing vagus nerve activity and did not cause any side effects in the 10 volunteers that participated in the study. The researchers do not say how much chocolate coughers would have to eat to get a beneficial effect. A reader of the BBC News website concludes: "There is nothing that chocolate cannot [help with]. You can even melt it and pour it on ice cream if things are really bad" (http://news.bbc.co.uk).

studentBMJ 2005;13:1-44 January ISSN 0966-6494

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