As any man with the slightest experience knows, a woman's tears are powerful tools, eliciting abject apologies, unexpected confessions and urgent begging of "Honey, stop, please." But one thing they are not, is sexy.

Now a team of Israeli neuroscientists think they know why. Emotional tears shut down male desire.

In a study published Thursday in the journal Science, the Weizmann Institute of Science researchers collected emotional tears from female volunteers by showing them sad movies. Then they had male test subjects sniff the actual tears and fake tears comprised of saline.

A whiff of the real deal caused testosterone levels in the men to drop significantly. They found pictures of women less sexually attractive. When the men were sent into brain scanners, and shown a sad film, the men who were exposed to the fake tears didn't show much lower activity in a region associated with sexual desire, but the activity in the same region was greatly reduced in men who breathed real tears.

The brain scans, the big yawn over alluring pictures and the drop in the he-man hormone led the scientists to conclude that "women's emotional tears contain a chemosignal that reduces sexual arousal in men."

The scientists haven't determined which component in blubbering tears caused the men to go limp, but "a major effort currently being carried out is to isolate the active component of the tears that exerts the physiological effect," Sagit Shusan, one of the study authors, said.

"Emotional" tears are different from tears caused by, say, an eye irritation, prior research has shown. Kari Green-Church, an expert in protein analysis at Ohio State University, has identified scores of tear proteins. "The function of proteins are wide-ranging," she said. Some defend the eyes against germs, some are hormones. Emotional tears from post-menopausal women are different from those of pre-menopausal women. In one experiment she conducted, her team ran samples from grad students and found "a protein unique to pregnancy and it turned out the women was pregnant."

Other researchers also have detected proteins associated with emotions: They've found dopamine and serotonin in tears, as well as prolactin, the desire-squelching hormone that spikes right after a man ejaculates and sends him running to watch SportsCenter rather than sticking around to cuddle.

Bottom line, ladies? If you're looking for arousal, don't turn on the waterworks.

Update: Nightly News covered the study, too:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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Some of us get the chills when hearing Handel’s exultant “Messiah” this time of year. For others, it’s the simple, yet joyful opening strains of Vince Guaraldi’s music at the start of “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” Or it might be Bing Crosby’s poignant “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” that triggers goose bumps. (Or for the sillier of us, his whimsical “Mele Kalikimaka” might just do it.)

Well, it turns out that getting chills upon hearing music is an actual thing, you know, like scientists study. And a new report in the journal Social Psychology and Personality Science says that who gets music-induced chills and who doesn’t might depend on personality.

Musical chills, write the authors, from the University of North Carolina, are “sometimes known as aesthetic chills, thrills, shivers, frisson, and even skin orgasms [who knew?] … and involve a seconds-long feeling of goose bumps, tingling, and shivers, usually on the scalp, the back of the neck, and the spine, but occasionally across most of the body.”

The scientific explanation for chills is that the emotions evoked by beautiful or meaningful music stimulate the part of the brain called the hypothalamus, which controls primal drives such as hunger, sex and rage and also involuntary responses like blushing and goosebumps. When the song soars, your body can't help but shiver.

Some people report lots of skin orgasms and some people say they never get them, but the personality trait “openness to experience” seems like a good predictor. (By "open to experience" the researchers seem to mean those people who enjoy art, good movies, aesthetic stuff.)

That’s what the North Carolina researchers wanted to test. So they took 196 people and assessed their music preferences; how often they experienced chills, goose bumps, hair standing on end and the like; their engagement with music (such as whether they played an instrument); and their personality types. The only personality trait with a significant impact on music-induced chills was indeed “openness.”

Genre, the style of music people listened to, didn’t seem to matter, though a deeper engagement with music in general did. So “Messiah,” Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas,” and your child’s rendition of “Oh Christmas Tree” might all give chills (though your kid’s singing might just be scary) if you’re the open type.

In 2007, scientists from the University of California San Diego studied whether or not getting chills from music enhanced altruism by measuring whether or not those who got them were more willing to donate blood. It turned out that the skin orgasm getters may be open, but chills didn’t make them any more giving, which might mean those guys ringing those damn bells ought to give it a rest already. Since music doesn't make us any more generous why not play something good? Try some Vince Guaraldi instead.

What music gives you chills? Tell us in the comments.

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As if holiday shopping weren’t stressful enough, a new report says the dwindling stash of cash in your wallet might be tainted with the controversial chemical BPA.

Tests on a small sample of dollar bills found traces of bisphenol A, the hormone-mimicking chemical linked to health problems from infertility and cancer to early puberty and obesity, said Erika Schreder, a scientist who led the study.

“Most people don’t expect to find a toxic chemical in their wallets,” said Schreder, who works for the Washington Toxics Coalition in Seattle, which co-sponsored the report with the advocacy group Safer Chemicals Health Families.

This isn’t the first time currency has been linked to nasty contaminants. Other studies have found bills to be tainted with germs, bacteria -- even cocaine.

But it is among new findings to suggest that cash contributes to BPA exposure already found in canned foods, baby bottles and water bottles.

The BPA likely rubbed off on the money from store receipts, which have been found to be loaded with the chemical used in thermal paper printing, Schreder said. Previous studies have shown that BPA-laced receipts are issued by major retailers such as CVS, KFC and the U.S. Postal service, and that the powder-like substance can stick to people’s fingers and get in their mouths.

In this new study, Schreder and other scientists tested 22 receipts from retailers in 10 states and Washington, D.C., and detected BPA in half of them. In a receipt from Safeway, for instance, BPA accounted for 2.2 percent of the receipt's total weight.

Then they tested 22 dollar bills from the wallets of people in 18 states and Washington, D.C. Twenty-one of the bills tested positive for BPA at levels ranging from .12 parts per million to 11 parts per million. Government officials generally agree that BPA doses should remain below 50 milligrams of BPA per kilogram of body weight per day, but too few studies have been conducted to determine definitively actual levels of BPA exposure or the health effects of those exposures.

That adds to the arguments in pending bills in Congress that call for better regulation of potentially dangerous chemicals, Schreder said. Government health officials have expressed concern about the effects of BPA on unborn and very young children.

“People should be concerned that there are unregulated uses of a hormone-disrupting chemical that are leading to widespread contamination in unexpected ways,” Schreder said.

But at least one critic said that testing 22 dollar bills for BPA contamination hardly counts as a scientific sample. The U.S. Treasury Department printed 2.6 billion $1 bills last year alone.

“I hear these kinds of reports and my first reaction is to shrug and say, ‘So what?’’’ said Neal Langerman, a chemist and member of the health and safety division of the American Chemical Society. "The data don't even rise to the level of speculation."

BPA is ubiquitous, Langerman agreed, but he said there's little evidence so far to suggest that low levels of exposure lead to major health hazards.

There’s little doubt that BPA rubs from receipts onto money, Langerman agreed. On that point, he and Schreder offered similar advice to consumers worried about dirty money: Wash your hands.

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Christi Foist doesn’t drink a lot of wine, but when she does, it’s not pretty.

“I find that if I have one to two glasses of wine, my sinuses will get stuffed up,” says the 32-year-old web editor, who lives in the San Francisco area. “And if I don’t drink enough water, I’ll get the headache. I think it must be the sulfites or something else.”

Turns out, Foist is allergic to wine, along with an estimated 500 million other people -- about 8 percent of the world's population -- who can’t sip vino without suffering symptoms of a bad cold.

Sulfites have long been known to cause sniffles, sneezes, headaches, skin rashes and/or breathing difficulties in about 1 percent of that group, but, until now, the trigger for the other 7 percent has been chalked up only to “something else.”

But thanks to new research out of the University of Southern Denmark, scientists now believe they’ve identified a potential culprit: glycoproteins.

Those are the sugar-coated proteins that develop during the grape fermentation process. They’re also the molecules that trigger allergic reactions to substances like dust mites, ragweed and latex.

“We have hypothesized that there could be a link between protein glycosylation and allergenic response, but more clinical data are necessary to prove it,” says Dr. Giuseppe Palmisano, a molecular biologist at the University of Southern Denmark and lead author of a new study recently published in the American Chemical Society’s Journal of Proteome Research.

“When we started the experiments, we wanted to identify the glycoproteins present in wine to understand more about oenological problems like haze formation and aroma changes, but the results led us to think about another possible implication of these glycoproteins.”

In a nutshell, Palmisano and his colleagues analyzed a bottle of Italian chardonnay and discovered 28 different glycoproteins. Upon further analysis, they realized that some of the grape glycoproteins were strikingly similar to other known allergens.

What does this mean for people who sneeze and sniffle every time they sip?

Well, Palmisano said researchers are working to map out a complete “molecular picture” of wine components, the better to understand which tiny particles deserve focus.

“If these molecules are proven to be responsible for allergy in wine, then the winemakers will have a target to remove them,” he explained.

In other words, hypoallergenic wine may be coming to a glass near you.

No more stuffy noses. No more skin rashes. No more headaches.

Unless, of course, you drink too much.

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Make your post-Thanksgiving food coma work for you: New research suggests that eating a big turkey dinner may keep you from spending impulsively on holiday sales.

The study, published in the December issue of the Journal of Marketing, builds on the turkey-tryptophan trope that we all hear this time of year -- it's practically guaranteed that somebody at your Thanksgiving gathering will say,"Did you guys know that turkey makes you sleepy?" That's only kind of true -- an amino acid called tryptophan is found in turkey, and it does work as a natural sedative, but we really don't eat enough of it, even at Thanksgiving, to be affected. Our after-dinner lethargy is more likely caused by overindulging on delicious carbs and cocktails.

But the body uses tryptophan to produce serotonin, and serotonin is known to inhibit impulsive behavior, which made researchers from the University of Utah curious: How might Thanksgiving dinner affect Black Friday binge buying?

To find out, they recruited 170 volunteers and instructed them to fill out an online survey on Thanksgiving evening in 2007. They rated how likely they were to buy popular items at a deep discount -- such as a Dell laptop marked down to $499. Those who had consumed a traditional Thanksgiving dinner were less likely to splurge on any of the marked-down items, say Arul Mishra and Himanshu Mishra, the University of Utah marketing professors that co-authored the study. (Fun fact: They're also husband and wife.)

Of course, as Himanshu Mishra points out, "The influences are not going to be there after 12 hours. If someone is going out shopping tomorrow morning, probably the person will not see that effect." So here's how to make these new findings work for your wallet: Either skip the shopping on Friday and do your holiday shopping online Thursday night, or load up on leftovers before heading out to the stores on Friday.

Would you give this a try? Or is impulse shopping on Black Friday half the fun?

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Jeff Garvin had never heard of Purple Glove Syndrome until his wife, Sue, woke up with her right hand painfully swollen and violently discolored from the wrist down.

The Fort Myers, Fla., woman had suffered a massive stroke in 2008 at age 52 and was hospitalized. Then, as if that weren’t bad enough, she got a botched injection of intravenous phenytoin, a seizure drug linked to cases of the oddly named disorder that has caused lingering pain, amputations -- and death.

“With the Purple Glove Syndrome, she can’t do all the things with her hands she used to do,” Jeff Garvin said. “Her biggest complaint from the stroke is a speech impediment -- and the pain in her hand."

Today, an advisory committee of the Food and Drug Administration recommended that IV phenytoin, marketed as Dilantin, should be labeled with warnings that the drug can cause Purple Glove Syndrome. The group voted not to recommend pulling the drug from the market.

PGS is a rare condition first noted in the 1980s, when patients who received IV Dilantin were developing painful, swollen hands that turned a deep shade of violet. Some 43 cases of PGS have been documented, according to the FDA. However, it's very likely the disorder is under-reported.

No one’s sure exactly how often PGS occurs. Studies have suggested that severe cases of PGS may occur in up to 6 percent of patients who receive IV phenytoin, with less-serious incidents in perhaps 25 percent of patients.

The condition is often caused when the toxic drug doesn’t go directly into a vein, but instead seeps into the underlying tissue of the hand. Often, the damage is permanent.

Another drug, fosphenytoin, marketed under the brand name Cerebyx, appears to control seizures as well as phenytoin. It carries some risk of PGS, but the panel was divided on whether there's adequate information to conclude that it also causes the disorder. Both drugs have similar risks of other side effects.

The FDA will now consider the recommendations of the joint meeting of the Peripheral and Central Nervous System Drugs Advisory Committee.

In Jeff Garvin’s opinion, the agency should take it very seriously.

“I think they need to look at it really closely,” he said. “There are other ways to do it that don’t pose the risks. Certainly for somebody in my wife’s situation, I learned there were alternatives that had less toxic side effects with better results.”

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Talk about a bad case of indigestion.

One Rhode Island hospital has spent more than $2 million in the past eight years removing foreign objects -- including knives, batteries and bedsprings -- from the bodies of patients who swallowed them on purpose.

That’s according to Dr. Steven F. Moss, a gastroenterologist who counted 305 cases of intentional consumption of odd objects at Rhode Island Hospital in Providence between 2001 and 2009. Moss decided to study the issue after noticing a peculiar trend.

“We have patients swallowing things almost every week or two,” said Moss, whose findings are published in the latest issue of the journal Clinical Gasroenterology and Hepatology. “We’re a pretty busy clinical service and the last thing we need is to spend a lot of time taking these things out.”

It’s not clear why so many patients showed up after swallowing objects that included teaspoons, toothbrushes and razor blades, Moss said. He doesn’t think there’s anything strange about the local region that would contribute to it, and, besides, a hospital in Los Angeles reported similar findings in 2008.

What is clear is that nearly 80 percent of the 33 people in the study who consumed foreign objects suffered from psychiatric disorders. Most were either prisoners or patients in a local psychiatric hospital. And even many of those who came from home settings were suffering from severe mental illness, Moss said. One mentally ill patient was responsible for 67 separate swallowing incidents.

Most of the patients were aware enough to know what they were doing and some were manipulative, Moss said. For prisoners, a trip to the hospital can be a chance to escape. Mentally ill patients sometimes swallow objects to ensure a change of scenery.

The tough part, Moss said, is getting the objects out. He and other doctors had to use complicated endoscopy tools, including snares, nets and rat-toothed forceps to do the job. Fortunately, only two cases required surgery and there were no deaths or serious injuries.

Still, the problem continues to confound Moss and others.

“We haven’t really come up with a good way to prevent people from doing it,” he said.

Many of the patients seem to be compelled to swallow things and will often awaken from anesthesia only to try to ingest nearby medical supplies. One patient managed to swallow something even while being watched by two guards in an acute care hospital.

The obvious answer of getting rid of objects too small to swallow doesn’t always work, Moss said. Eventually, you have to give a person a toothbrush. And many of the patients become psychologically stable enough to be discharged.

“Once he’s out,” Moss said, “he’ll do whatever he wants."

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Dizzy doesn’t begin to describe Gene Pugnetti’s bouts of vertigo.

For at least four years, the 56-year-old Yakima, Wash., man has suffered repeated episodes of stomach-lurching, head-spinning disruptions in his equilibrium, attacks so severe that they require him to sit down, cover his eyes and wait an hour – until the Valium kicks in.

Just since February, Pugnetti has endured 45 such spells, all caused by what doctors diagnosed as a severe case of Meniere’s disease, an inner ear disorder that erodes victims’ hearing and leaves them vulnerable to unexpected vertigo. The most recent bout was three weeks ago.

“It was pretty bad,” said Pugnetti, an information technology worker, who has 65 percent hearing loss in his right ear. “Just, bang!, you’re focusing on something and then all of a sudden you can’t focus on anything.”

Pugnetti has tried almost everything to quell the problem, which affects some 615,000 people in the United States, according to the National Institutes of Health. Drugs, diet, exercise and even an implanted shunt failed to do the trick.

On Thursday, though, Pugnetti became the first person to be implanted with a new device aimed at stopping the vertigo as soon as it starts. Dr. Jay Rubinstein and Dr. James Phillips of the University of Washington’s otolaryngology-head and neck surgery department, assisted by a team of experts, chose Pugnetti as the first member of a 10-person clinical trial to test an invention four years in the making.

It’s the “UW/Nucleus Vestibular Implant,” a clunky name for the behind-the-ear device that’s basically a revamped version of a cochlear implant, an electronic aid typically used to help deaf people hear. In Meniere’s, the disease short-circuits the power supply that allows balance, Rubinstein said. The new device restores it by sending electrical impulses to electrodes implanted in the bony ear, disrupting the vertigo.

Once it’s turned on, in about three weeks, Pugnetti will be able to don the device at the first sign of dizziness, disarming symptoms ranging from mild to severe.

It won’t eliminate the Meniere’s, for which there is no certain cause or cure, but it should get rid of the worst effect. If the clinical trial is a success, the device that was tested in monkeys and approved in June by the Food and Drug Administration could find a wide audience of Meniere’s victims, says Pugnetti, who has no qualms about being first.

“The fact is, there are a whole lot of people who are out there suffering,” he said. “Just talking about this procedure to them gives them hope. And that’s a big deal."

For information about the new device, call (206) 598-8896.

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