Ever wonder about the consequences of your penis not being retractable? Wonder no more. Fortunately, a team of Australian researchers are willing to lay it out for us: "Before clothing, the nonretractable human penis would have been conspicuous to potential mates." Since clothing is a relatively recent development, there's a chance that its conspicuousness made a mark on human evolution, either in terms of male anatomy or in terms of female tastes. The authors grabbed a database from a study of the Italian male population and used it to make computer-generated male bodies. They showed them to a mixture of university students, campus staff, and random volunteers they recruited.

And, at least on some level, the results indicate that women do like a larger penis. But the effect tails off quickly once the penis passes a given length, with the critical measurement being influenced by body height (the taller the person, the bigger the penis had to be). Complicating matters, women liked tall men, as well—it had just as strong an effect as penis size. So, that helped drag the preferred penis size to even greater lengths than it would have been otherwise.

If you're emotionally attached to a Web service, using pot may be one of the least of your problems. A survey was used to check which of four factors was associated with college students growing emotionally attached to using Facebook. It came up with a simple answer: all of them. Loneliness, anxiousness, alcohol, and marijuana use were all associated with getting attached to using the service, while loneliness and anxiousness were associated with establishing a lot of connections on it. Elsewhere in the same journal, we have a demonstration that Facebook users are narcissistic. But they're also more extroverted and less lonely than non-users.

Spring, when a young person's thoughts turn to thinking that their OCD was just a case of Internet hypochondria. You've probably heard of Google's Flu Trends, where the company attempts to track the spread of the seasonal flu based on the number of searches involving typical symptoms. Now, some researchers have gone and checked for seasonal trends in mental illness, and boy, did they find some. That's not to say that mental illness spreads like a virus. Instead, we're all apparently just a lot happier in the summer than we are in winter. Anxiety shows the smallest inter-seasonal difference while the largest is eating disorders, which change by a hefty 37 percent as the winter fades into summer.

Giant women, but proportional. There are lots of species where females are larger, on average, than males. But there was no case as apparently extreme as the giant moa, a flightless bird native to New Zealand that was hunted to extinction after the arrival of humans. The males of the species were pretty large, weighing up to 85kg. But the females were positively monstrous, topping out at 240kg. The size difference was so large that the two were originally classified as different species. What caused this huge disparity? Nothing more than the huge size.

Looking at existing ratites (the group of flightless that included moas), larger females are the norm and the ratio of male to female body size varies within a typical range. It's just that when you blow things up to enormous scales that the normal difference between the sexes starts working out to be hundreds of kilograms.

Beer as an indicator of scientific progress. Letters to the editor are usually chances for readers of journals to, well, editorialize a bit. And, somewhat surprisingly, given its title ("A global comment on scientific publications, productivity, people, and beer"), this letter does have some serious points. Still, they're made within the context indicated by this graph, which shows that scientific achievement and beer consumption go hand-in-hand. The author says that beer is just an indicator, not a cause, of scientific achievement. However, he suggests that healthy funding of science might eventually decouple the two as, with enough research funding, "perhaps scientists would then drink less."