The Mad Blog

SHOCKING: Chinese man has emergency surgery to remove a live eel from his intestines When it comes to ancient, folk wisdom, it is important to use common sense, logic, and intelligence to do the right thing. Folk medicine consists of traditional healing methods used by our ancestors to cure diseases and promote emotional and physical well-being. These remedies have been handed down from generation to generation by word of mouth or written texts and can be the world’s best natural cures to treat common ailments. Some of them, however, should raise serious questions and be taken with a grain of salt. Unfortunately, not everyone is as savvy to determine what’s right and what’s totally crazy. Some people blindly follow everything they are told, resulting in disaster. What if you were told to stick a live eel up your anus to treat constipation, would you do it without giving it any thought or research? Probably you are justly frowning your brow by now at this crazy, o...

Science Says the First Born Child Is the Most Intelligent Your oldest child really has the potential to become the next Einstein! A new study carried out by Leipzig University suggests that the IQ of first-borns increases because they have to teach their younger siblings how things work. The fact that first-borns have their parents' attention all to themselves also boosts their IQ. It is said that the variations in intelligence are a result of how a child is raised and nurtured, not of biology. The study evaluates a 1.5 IQ drop per sibling. In families with two children, however, the first-born isn't necessarily the most intelligent since they only have a 60% chance of having a higher IQ. In this equation, there is still a good chance that the younger sibling will surpass them later on life. Apart from boosted intelligence, first-born children also show a heightened perception of their brain capabilities. The data for this study was accumulated from personality and...

Here Is The Powerful Letter The Stanford Victim Read Aloud To Her Attacker A former Stanford swimmer who sexually assaulted an unconscious woman was sentenced to six months in jail because a longer sentence would have "a severe impact on him," according to a judge. At his sentencing Thursday, his victim read him a letter describing the "severe impact" the assault had on her. One night in January 2015,   two Stanford University graduate students biking across campus spotted a freshman thrusting his body on top of an unconscious, half-naked woman behind a dumpster. This March, a California jury found the former student, 20-year-old Brock Allen Turner, guilty of three counts of sexual assault. Turner faced a maximum of 14 years in state prison. On Thursday, he   was sentenced   to six months in county jail and probation. The judge said he feared a longer sentence would have a “severe impact” on Turner, a champion swimmer who once aspired to compete in the O...

As women's brains work harder than men's, they also need more sleep Women tend to require more sleep than men because of their “complex” brains, according to research. Scientists found that around 20 minutes more sleep was needed by women compared to men - and said this was thought to be because the female brain works harder during the day. The study was carried out on a sample set of 210 middle-aged men and women.  "One of the major functions of sleep is to allow the   brain   to recover and repair itself," study author Jim Horne, a sleep expert formerly director of the Sleep Research Centre at Loughborough University, told the   Mail Online . "During deep sleep, the cortex — the part of the brain responsible for thought memory, language and so on – disengages from the senses and goes into recovery mode." Prof Horn said the amount of sleep was necessitated by the complexity and intensity of brain activity during the da...

Intelligent people tend to be messy, stay awake longer, and swear more Were you annoyed as a kid, when your parents told you to clean your room, sent you to bed early and scolded you for cursing? There might be a reason for your behaviour. Studies suggest, that it can be linked to an increase of your IQ. Intelligent people use more curse words You always hear, that people who swear have a "limited vocabulary". But if you think about it, those who don't use any swear words are the ones who limit their own vocabulary, because they intentionally use fewer words than others. In fact, there is a study deconstructing that myth about curse words. The result showed that people who could name the most swear words within a minute also tend to score higher on an IQ test. The study concludes that a rich vocabulary of swear words is a sign of rhetorical strength rather than the attempt to hide verbal deficits. Intelligent people are night owls Like to sta...

Biased strangers take a DNA test - the results show why we shouldn't judge others on their looks Humanity has in many ways come quite far, but it's also clear that it still has a long way to go. Prejudice is one such area where we have much room for improvement. It continues to create problems among people, and at worst, our bigotry leads to wars and conflicts where countless innocent lives are lost. Still, these massive problems often begin with the first impressions we make about others based on their skin color, physical appearance, and perceived nationality. In an effort to contrast the prejudices we all have with the facts about who we actually are, travel company   Momondo   gathered 67 people from various ethnicities and offered them a DNA test. All of the test subjects had one thing in common: they were proud of their nationality, ethnicity, and heritage. But they were also full of bias against people from other races, who in their eyes...