Impulsive killers less intelligent
People who murder impulsively lack the intelligence of calculated murderers, according to a new study. Impulsive murderers are more likely to have impaired brainpower or disabilities than premeditated murderers, scientists say. The study compared the minds of 77 murderers incarcerated in prisons in the US and found that their intelligence and the nature of their crimes followed a distinct pattern. Of the impulsive murderers 59 per cent were impaired mentally, compared with the 36 per cent of strategic killers who were intellectually challenged. More than nine in 10 implusive murders involved substance abuse or the murderers had a history of drug use or alcohol addiction. Dr Robert Hanlon, a professor of clinical psychiatry and clinical neurology at Northwestern University, Illinois, who carried out the investigation said: “Impulsive murderers were much more mentally impaired, particularly cognitively impaired, in terms of both their intelligence and other cognitive functions.”
Why men look at other women
Husbands may now have an excuse if they get caught looking at other women as they walk past — evolution has programmed them to do it.
Psychologists have found that while women find men they are familiar with more attractive, men are more drawn to strangers. They say this may be due to a relic in our evolutionary past, where our male ancestors would have tried to mate with as many females as possible. This would have increased the chances of them passing on their genes and is common elsewhere in the animal kingdom. However, women have evolved to seek reliable mates that will support their offspring, and so will become more attached to those already familiar to them.
They crawled like toddlers
Dinosaurs crawled on all fours like toddlers before switching to two feet when they grew up, experts have discovered. Analysis of bones 100 million years old showed baby Psittacosaurus had long arms and short legs, which were used to scuttle around shortly after hatching. The arms grew quickly between the ages of one and three, suggesting that the Psittacosaurus continued to move on all fours during their ‘toddler’ years.
But aged four, Psittacosaurus — known as the
‘parrot dinosaur’ — experienced a massive growth spurt
in their legs, while the development of their arms slowed. This meant legs grew to twice the size of arms — causing
the dinosaurs to spend their adult life on two feet. Palaeontologists from Beijing, Bristol and Bonn discovered
the differences in limb growth through a combination of biomechanical analysis and bone histology.