10 papers outlining psychological research on how a simple (nonsexual) touch can increase compliance, helping behavior, attraction, and signal power. To get around in the world, we mainly rely on our eyes and ears. Touch is a sense that's often forgotten.But touch is also vital in the way we understand and experience the world. Even the lightest touch on the upper arm can influence the way we think. To prove it, here are 10 psychological effects which show just how powerful nonsexual touch can be.

In 1,993 responses to a Sex Survey questionnaire, responses consisted of 1,351 males and 642 females.   Progressives were over-represented (N=973), while Conservatives were under-represented (N=395).

These days, there are only two types of pirates that are important: Somali pirates and the "Pirates Of The Caribbean." As many teachers warn their students, Somali pirates are nowhere near as lovable as Captain Jack Sparrow and the seafaring renegades he bandies with. But if you look past their machine guns and grenade launchers (though you probably shouldn't), Somali pirates are often dressed just as interestingly as those pirates with a Hollywood costume designer. 

If you haven't seen "Thor", I am not spoiling the movie for you if I tell you Natale Portman's character is an astronomer.   So what, you ask?   Indeed, Jodie Foster was an astronomer in "Contact", I wasn't aware there was any particular dearth of female astronomers in cinema, or in astronomy, but if you are a culture blogger who masquerades in science, and there are less than 50% of women in a field, then it's cause for concern.

What does writing amount to?   To writers, the question is irritating because the implication is 'doing' something is better than writing about it.    If we write about the physics of climate change on Science 2.0, or idiotic non-solutions to climate change like hybrid cars, ethanol and cap-and-trade schemes, we are not doing as much as someone who plants a tree or buys a Prius or whatever.Shakespeare is an exception, argues Stephen Marche of National Post.  In fact, he is the most influential man who ever lived, he says.

Don't like Guantanamo?   In the mid-East, detention centers are the norm rather than an exception.   Dorothy Parvaz got a look inside Syria's secret prisons because her luggage had the misinfortune of containing a satellite phone and an internet hub.   And that was with an American passport and an Al Jazeera-sponsored visa.   You can imagine how Syrians get treated.  Most of the our days were spent listening to the sounds of young men being brutally interrogated – sometimes tied up in stress positions until it sounded like their bones were cracking, as we saw from our bathroom window (a bathroom with no running water, except for one tap in a sink filled with roughly 10 cm of sewage).

Data mining is nothing new but a group of former math majors who started an online dating site think the maths can tell them something about people.The founders of OkCupid say it can - they claim 7 million visitors per month and every six weeks,the writers create a blog posting there they sort members' online interactions and then make dating suggestions based on the results."It's our version of an advice column," says Sam Yagan, OkCupid's chief executive. "We love the fact that our own data tell us what works on a date." 

As Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, devolved into a one-trick crusade against America in general, and George W. Bush in particular, he ironically began to do the one thing he did not want to do; he validated the Bush approach of using 'enhanced interrogation' on terrorists by documenting the instances so historians can see how much it helped.The detainment approach, and Guantanamo Bay, have been shown by 765 illegally-obtained Wikileaks documents to actually be a crucial part of one of the most successful intelligence operations in history.  Oops.

Randy Savage, the "Oh Yeaaaah!" Macho Man with the unnatural tan and the gravelly voice, died in a car accident in Seminole, FL.   Savage, 58, apparently had a heart attack while driving and hit a tree.   If you ever heard him during a television broadcast, you likely thought he was having a heart attack at the time.    His neck was always bulging and virtually nothing he said was without hyper-exaggerated emotion.

Unless you have culturally been living under a rock, you have heard of Area 51 - Roswell, New Mexico.   Supposedly an alien spacecraft came down there in 1947 and a vast government conspiracy sprung up to build the thing and keep it secret for nearly 70 years.Annie Jacobsen, journalist and contributing editor at the LA Times (they are thrilled about that plug) says the UFO was just a Soviet spy plane that came down due to weather.    But that isn't the end of it.    The Soviets, no strangers to eugenics, had staffed it with genetically engineered pilots, 'alien-like' children aged 12 or 13 and Stalin hoped to cause some panic in the U.S., a la the Orson Welles radio broadcast of "War of the Worlds" in 1939.