D.A.R.E. to keep kids off headphones.

It's no secret that music can have psychedelic effects (ever heard of the Pink Floyd laser show?), but these days teens are taking things to a whole new level with I-dosing. Dubbed "the latest Internet trend," I-dosing involves listening to two-toned audio files meant to alter your brain waves in the same way that alcohol, marijuana or other drugs might.

A quick YouTube search for "idoser" turns up pages of videos, some of which have hundreds of thousands of page views. One video shows three boys after they "take a hit" of digital drugs said to induce hard laughing and shaking (and, unless these boys are faking it, they do). Other videos show I-dosers laughing incessantly on nitrous and seemingly tormented by an I-dose of Gates of Hades.

Though the websites tout the downloads as a safe, legal way to get high, the digital drugs have parents crying "gateway." Concerns that I-dosing could lead to experimentation with other drugs has lead to the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics issuing a warning to parents. "Kids are going to flock to these sites to see what it's about and it can lead them other places," one official warned. But how is it possible for parents and schools to crack down on a "drug" that kids can access online, for free? After all, the only necessary supplies are a computer and a set of headphones — no bongs required.

It can take just an instant to fall in love with a face; it can take a lifetime to forget one. Now, according to an announcement from the Cleveland Clinic on Wednesday, it has taken a team of eight surgeons 22 hours to replace one. Sometime during the past two weeks, the clinic successfully performed the world's first near-total facial transplant, lifting a face nearly whole from a recently deceased donor and grafting it onto an anonymous woman who had suffered extreme disfigurement to more than 80% of her own face. Her upper eyelids, forehead, lower lip and chin are all that remain of her original features. The rest is entirely new — and so, the doctors say, is the life that has been restored to her. (See TIME's Top 10 scientific discoveries of 2008.)

"I'm very proud and very emotional," says microsurgeon Maria Siemionow, who headed the surgical team. "Our patient is someone who had been called names and humiliated, who suffered whenever she appeared in public. Now, she may be able to go comfortably from her home and face the world."

The breakthrough achieved by Siemionow and her team was a longtime goal in facial surgery. Partial face transplants had been successfully performed by teams in France in 2005 and 2007 and in China in 2006, all on patients who had been disfigured either by animal attacks or disease. But no one had ever attempted a procedure on the scale undertaken by the Cleveland team.

In 2004, the Cleveland Clinic gave Siemionow the green light for the improbable operation, one that involved the transplantation of about 500 sq cm of skin, arteries, veins, nerves, muscles and bony structure, all of which had to be attached with sufficient dexterity to restore the patient's ability to feel, blink, eat, smell, speak and — not incidentally — smile. This was not what doctors call solid-organ transplant; it was a multitissue transplant, which is an order of magnitude more difficult than, say, a heart transplant or a hand graft.

There are few men in the world who haven't muttered a quiet word of thanks to the anonymous man who invented the name tag, that "Hello, my name is" accessory that can be such a lifesaver at cocktail parties. It's not certain, of course, that a man invented it, but the odds are good, since so many males — far more than females — would be helpless without it.

It's long been an accepted truth among married couples that it's usually the wife who must steer the pair through social gatherings, reminding her husband that he's meeting someone for the first, second or 15th time — and science backs up that observation. In lab settings, women routinely outperform men in facial-recognition skills, both in terms of speed and reliability. Imaging scans have shown that part of the reason is that men rely only on the right side of the brain in summoning up images of a face they've seen before, while women recruit from both hemispheres — literally doubling the brainpower.(See if genetics can help you find love.)

Now, research from York University in Toronto has added a wrinkle to the existing wisdom. It's not just women whose brains are so nimble, the investigators have determined; it's gay men too.

In the Canadian study, psychologist Jennifer Steeves recruited a sample group of homosexual men, heterosexual men and heterosexual women. Significantly, she took care to include both left- and right-handed people among the subjects. All the volunteers were shown pictures of 10 faces and given time to try to memorize them. The photos were black and white, and digitally edited to remove ears, hair and blemishes. This eliminated physical landmarks people often use to remember faces and forced the subjects to rely on major features alone, which was the skill Steeves and her team were trying to test. Finally, those 10 faces were mixed with similarly edited images of 50 other people and flashed on a screen for just milliseconds apiece. The subjects' job was to press a key when they saw a face they'd seen before.

Now, Dad Feels as Stressed as Mom

By TARA PARKER-POPE

Published: June 18, 2010