Linda Carroll writes: The electricity generated by a 9-volt battery might be all there is between you and the mathematical brilliance of a Newton or an Einstein.

OK, we can’t guarantee you’ll be that smart, but, amazingly, British scientists have now shown that low voltage current applied to the right part of the scalp can spark changes that boost the brain’s math abilities. What's more, that mild jolt can lock in your improved mathematical prowess for as long as six months, according to new research published in this month’s issue of Current Biology.

The findings come too late for those of us who already suffered through middle school algebra, but maybe future generations will benefit.

The researchers, led by Roi Cohen Kadosh from the University of Oxford, suspected that a little electricity directed at the right parietal lobe – a brain region at the top of the head and known to play a role in numerical calculations – might juice up a person’s math ability.

To test that theory, Kadosh and his colleagues rounded up some volunteers and equipped some with transcranial direct current stimulation devices that were positioned on the scalp over the right parietal lobe. Another group of volunteers served as a control group and got no stimulation.

All the volunteers were then taught some abstract math, which involved no numbers. They were introduced to a set of symbols, shown some rules about the symbols and then tested.

As it turns out, electrical stimulation helped people learn the math a lot better -- and faster.

And there was some more good news: the gain comes with no pain. The sensation sparked by the device is merely a mild tingling, says Dr. Ian Cook, an expert unaffiliated with the new study and associate director of the Laboratory for Brain, Behavior and Pharmacology at UCLA. The feeling is something akin to what you’d feel if you put your tongue on a 9-volt battery (not that we recommend you do that).

Math isn’t the only brain function that can be boosted with a little electricity, says Dr. Roy Hamilton, co-director of the Laboratory for Cognition and Neural Stimulation at the University of Pennsylvania. Set the device over a different part of the brain and you get enhanced language abilities, he explains.

So, will kids one day head off for school with a battery like device strapped to their heads that they’ll move from one spot to another as they go from class to class?

“I think that’s still in the range of science fiction,” says Cook. “But it’s certainly in the range of possibility.”

In the meantime, though you might be tempted to run a similar experiment on your own – with a battery and a wet sponge – experts caution against it. “This is in the ‘Kids, don’t try this at home,’ category,” says Cook. “There is the potential to injure the brain.”

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Linda Carroll writes: When it’s time to discuss his favorite things, President Barack Obama favors the left. Hand, that is.

Scientists have discovered that those who are left-handed, like Obama, tend to use that hand to gesture when they’re talking about things they feel positive about, and their right hand for things that are negative. For right-handed people, it’s the opposite.

In a study published this month in PloS ONE, researchers examined tapes from the final presidential debates from 2004 and 2008 to see if they could spot a right/left bias in the hand gestures of the candidates. As it turns out, both candidates in 2004 were righties, while in 2008 they were both lefties.

Sure enough, the politicians unwittingly communicated their feelings about a topic by the hand with which they gestured while speaking. So, when Obama launching into an enthusiastic discussion about the benefits of his health insurance plans he would use his left hand. If the topic was the war in Iraq, he’d gesture with his right hand.

The opposite was true of right-handed George Bush – positive words were emphasized with right handed gestures, negative ones with left handed movements.

Associating good things with the side of your dominant hand extends beyond just gestures. Researchers found that if you’re right-handed you’re more inclined to think that in general things on the right are good, while left oriented stuff – people, images, whatever – is bad. (The converse is true for you lefties out there.)

In one experiment, study volunteers were shown a drawing that depicted a group of space aliens sitting side by side. On average, righties concluded that the aliens on the right end of the picture were smarter, happier, more honest and more attractive than those on the left. Lefties liked the extraterrestrials on the left better.

“Overall, the data support the idea that people associate good things with the side of the body they can use most fluently – dominant is fluent, and fluent is good,” says the study’s lead author Daniel Casasanto of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, Netherlands.

It’s a good example of how our bodies influence the way we think without our ever knowing anything about it, says Diane Halpern, a professor of psychology at Claremont McKenna College.

We’re thinking this right/left thing could be a quick and dirty lie detector. Let’s say your boss is about to evaluate your work -- you might want to pay close attention to which hand is moving as she talks.

What body language do you think reveals the most? Tell us in the comments.

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Linda Carroll writes: Your teen has been begging for months to get a tongue piercing. All her friends have them and she can’t understand why you are such an old fuddy duddy, steadfastly refusing to let someone stick a stud through her tongue. OK, it’s icky, but you’re starting to lose ground with that argument.

Researchers to the rescue. A new study, published in the Journal of Clinical Orthodontics, shows that tongue studs cause a gap-toothed grins.

Apparently, kids like to play with their tongue studs, often pushing the barbell shaped ornaments back and forth against their front teeth. In the case described in the new study, a young woman managed to create a significant space between her upper teeth -- called a diastema -- by periodically wedging the thin part of the barbell between them and wiggling it around over the course of seven years.

“It is a basic tenet of orthodontia that force, over time, moves teeth," explains the study’s lead author, Dr. Sawsan Tabbaa, an assistant professor of orthodontics at the University of Buffalo School of Dental Medicine.

The new report comes as no surprise to Dr. Brian Martin, a chief of the division of pediatric dentistry at the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Over the years, Martin has seen plenty of similar piercing related spaces develop in his hip young patients. But that’s not the worst scenario, he says.

“I’ve seen patients fracture their teeth by repeatedly clacking the piercing against them,” says Martin, “Or sometimes a kid will break a tooth when she inadvertently gets the piercing between her teeth as she bites down on some food.”

Ultimately, the 26-year-old woman in the study got her teeth fixed with braces. And there’s the rub -- and your new best argument. Is it worth being like all the other kids if you’re going to wind up with braces or a broken tooth?

Ever been injured by your tongue piercing? Other hazards of being hip? Share in the comments.

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Linda Carroll writes: Men who want to be more magnetic need only don an article of red clothing, scientists now say.

Researchers from the University of Rochester and other institutions around the globe have discovered that the color red makes a man more attractive and sexually desirable to women, according to a report published this month in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

For the new study, researchers showed young women a series of photos of men. In some pictures, men wore shirts or other pieces of clothing or stood against a red background. In others there was no red. Consistently women were more attracted to men associated with red. What made the results especially believable was that they were the same, whether the women came from England, Germany, China or the United States.

The color’s charm can be traced to its ability to make men appear more powerful, says the study’s lead author Andrew Elliot, professor of psychology at the University of Rochester. “We found that women view men in red as higher in status, more likely to make money and more likely to climb the social ladder,” he explains. “And it’s this high-status judgment that leads to the attraction.”

As far as Helen Fisher is concerned, the call of crimson goes a lot deeper than that. These kinds of signals are wound tightly into our DNA, says Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University and author of “Why Him? Why Her?”

In the animal kingdom, red is attractive because it’s a sign of high testosterone, Fisher says. Certain monkeys develop a redder rump – and higher levels of testosterone - as they climb the social ladder. Male robins with the reddest breasts, caused by high levels of the hormone, are the most attractive to females of the species because these males are the most dominant and the most likely to be able to protect the nest and secure food for those hungry hatchlings.

Modern women may not want the man with the most testosterone. But we’re still unconsciously wired to be attracted to the outward sign of it – red color.

“I’d say we’re soft-wired, rather than hard-wired, to find males wearing red attractive,” Fisher says. “What I mean is, we have a huge cerebral cortex. So, if a man walks into a bar wearing a red sweater and has messy jeans, bad teeth and a bad haircut, we’re not going to be fooled by the sweater.”

But it works the other way around, too -- men are more attracted to women in red, a 2008 study shows.

Is there a color you find hot on the opposite sex? Tell us about it in the comments.

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