1. Procrastination is on the rise, with some pretty far-reaching effects.

   A study released in 2007 by Piers Steel, a Canadian industrial psychologist, found that procrastination is on the rise and that increased procrastination makes us poorer, fatter, and unhappier on the whole. During his 10-year study, Steel discovered that while in 1978 only 5% of Americans thought of themselves as chronic procrastinators, today the figure is a whopping 26%. Why the change? It could be because there are so many ways to easily distract ourselves these days, from video games to iPads, Steel theorized. While procrastination may not seem like a big deal when you’re doing it, Steel found that it actually takes a big toll on corporate profits (to the tune of billions of dollars in lost profits), as well as the mental, physical, and financial health of those who procrastinate chronically.

2. Procrastinators get poorer grades in college.

   With three out of four college students admitting to regular procrastination, many of them may be doing their academic performance a real disservice. A study at Ohio State University compared the grades of severe, moderate, and low procrastinators in a study skills class. The worst procrastinators got an average grade of 2.9 (on a 4.0 scale) while those who procrastinated very little earned an average of 3.6 — a substantial difference. Bruce Tuckman, the professor behind the study, said that many procrastinators justify their habits by saying that they work better under pressure, but his findings demonstrate that this likely isn’t true at all and is in reality just wishful thinking.

3. Most people underestimate the amount of time it will take to get something done.

   One reason many people procrastinate is because they believe they can easily complete something in a short amount of time later, when it’s closer to the deadline. Unfortunately, a study by the U.S. Department of Labor has shown that people are generally pretty bad at estimating how long a task will take to complete, at least consciously. The authors of the study refer to this as the “planning fallacy” and it could be why so many people end up stressed out or unable to complete projects when they’re down to the wire. Strangely, the researchers believe that people really do know how long it will take them to work on something, and that’s precisely why they put it off; it’s easier to believe the lie and relax now than to face the reality and have to work.

4. Procrastination may actually be connected to a wide range of other disorders in self-regulation.

   If you’re a procrastinator, there’s a good chance you have some other issues with self-regulation as well. That’s what a recent study in the Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology suggests, anyway. Researchers found that those who procrastinate, essentially a failure in self-regulation, also had many other characteristics in common including: reduced agency, disorganization, poor impulse and emotional control, poor planning and goal-setting, reduced use of meta-cognitive skills, distractibility, poor task persistence, and time- and task- management deficiencies. Additionally, they believe the deficiencies in these characteristics could have to do with differences in brain structure and function, specifically in the pre-frontal cortex, even though those studied appeared on the surface to be neurologically healthy.

5. Undergrads may procrastinate more than graduate students.

   In a 2011 study from Cumhuriyet University in Turkey, researchers set out to determine who was more likely to procrastinate: high school students, undergraduates, or graduate students. The biggest culprits? Undergrads were found to be more likely to procrastinate overall, though all grade levels admitted to procrastination to some degree. High school students and undergraduates were found to procrastinate more when it came to exams and grad students when it came to writing papers.

6. Given a choice between two movies, one to watch now, and one for later, people almost always chose a lighthearted comedy, saving a serious film for later.

   We’d all like to think we’d choose an Oscar-winning drama, acclaimed foreign film, or lauded classic over a silly comedic release when picking a movie to watch, but studies show otherwise. During a recent study, participants were given an assortment of movies to choose from, and had to select one for now and one for later. Unsurprisingly, comedies and other lighthearted fare almost always won out as being chosen first. Why? The serious films were thought to require more concentration and effort to watch, and thus were put off until a later date. This not only sheds light on why those serious films have been hanging out in your Netflix queue for years, but also exposes some interesting truths about procrastination. Even when we’re doing something we enjoy, we often put off less desirable things (even if they might be great) for what will give us instant gratification.

7. Getting people to focus on a concrete task may make them better at finishing their work, even if the task is very different from their work.

   A German study found that getting people to think about concrete problems, even something as simple as opening a new bank account, can actually improve their performance in their other work, even if it’s entirely unrelated. Researchers think it has to do with getting the brain to focus on what is concrete, absolute, and present, perhaps giving new perspective to tasks that might have otherwise seemed too abstract to tackle. It echoes something that productivity experts have been touting for ages: if you want to get something done, you have to break it down into more concrete parts. Otherwise, you’ll be much more apt to procrastinate.

8. Our propensity for procrastination may be evident even when we’re children.

   A study conducted at Stanford in the 1960s and 1970s offered children a treat (a marshmallow, pretzel, or cookie) with some strings attached. They could eat the treat right away if they couldn’t resist it or if they could wait a few minutes they would be able to get two treats. At the end of the study, a third of the children couldn’t resist the temptation. Researchers continued to follow these children into adulthood as they went to college, got jobs, and started families of their own. Those who were unable to resist temptation at a young age were found to have more behavioral problems, trouble maintaining friendships, difficulty paying attention, and scored a whopping 210 points lower on average on the SAT than their more-patient peers. This inability to self-regulate was found to have lasting effects on health, happiness, and success in the participants.

9. College students given long-term deadlines actually have reduced performance in their courses.

   While you’d think that having more time to work on a paper would result in a better grade, the results aren’t always that cut-and-dried. A 2007 study conducted at MIT compared three different classes using different deadline-setting techniques for a series of paper due for the class. In the first class, students were allowed to set their own deadlines. In the second, all the papers were due on the final day of class. In the third, students had to turn in papers on set dates throughout the semester. Which performed the worst? Despite having the longest amount of time to work, students who turned papers in on the last day got the worst overall grades, as most admitted to putting off the bulk of the work until the end of the semester. The class with the highest grades was that which required papers turned in at set intervals throughout the semester, perhaps because it helped to spread out procrastination and forced students to do at least some amount of work each week.

10. Men and women may procrastinate differently.

    Career and IQ assessment service Queendom.com studied procrastination through a recent online survey. Along with reaffirming many long-held beliefs about procrastination, the study also revealed some gender differences in procrastination. Women are more likely to procrastinate on issues related to health, because of perfectionism, or because of a low tolerance for frustration. Overall, however, men may procrastinate more than women. Interestingly, procrastination seems to differ by age as well, with more people 25 and over procrastinating than those in younger age groups.

11. Studies on willpower have found that any use of willpower seems to reduce the amount of it left over for other tasks.

    Willpower may not be unlimited, new studies suggest. Any time you use self-control, say to tackle a task you don’t want to do, you’ll have less willpower for other, often unrelated tasks. Studies also show that your willpower will get lower as the day goes on, as you get more tired, stressed, or tapped out through situations that draw on self-control. Researchers refer to this as the “muscle model” of willpower because, like the muscles in your body, willpower gets exhausted from concentrated effort. Like your muscles, however, researchers believe willpower can be trained, which may give hope to those who struggle with procrastination.

12. Procrastination may be tied to issues of self-esteem.

    Researchers at DePaul University in Chicago believe that procrastination and levels of self-esteem may be tied to one another. Their study found that those who had lower self-esteem, participated in self-defeating behavior, and exercised interpersonal dependency were much more likely to be procrastinators. Low self-esteem most often led participants in the study to put off completing tasks and to choose situations that were counterproductive to meeting their long-term goals. This study, among others, demonstrates that procrastination may be much more complicated and deeply rooted in our personalities than many of us realize.

13. Relying on support from an outside person can actually make people procrastinate more.

    You’d think that having a supportive person in your life to cheer you on as you lose weight, work on projects, and get your life in shape would be a big help, right? Well, not always. A study released in early 2011 found that when people thought about the support a significant other offers in pursuing goals they were actually undermined in their progress and motivation toward actually achieving these goals and tended to procrastinate more. It might seem strange, but researchers believe that it happens because individuals begin relying on others to push them forward and excuse themselves from putting forth extra effort.

14. Anxiety may increase procrastination.

    Have you ever thought about the real reason you’re not taking to a task? Is it because you don’t want to do it or because you’re afraid that you won’t be able to do it? Researchers have found that the real reason may tend toward the latter. A study published in the British Journal of Educational Psychology found that the more anxious students were about an assignment, the more likely they were to put it off. Of course, as many have experienced, the longer a project is put off, the harder it is to complete at a satisfactory level, leading to a vicious cycle of anxiety and procrastination.

1. In Europe, 44% of citizens speak multiple languages. In the U.S., only a paltry 9% can say the same.
2. It is estimated that more than half the world speaks at least two languages, compared to our rate of slightly less than 1 in 10.
3. Students in Finland dedicate about 16 hours each week to foreign languages, and still manage to come in second in reading, second in math, and first in science. American students’ ranks: 14th, 25th, and 17th out of 34.
4. In the last 30 years, we’ve had just two presidents with passable abilities in one foreign language (excepting President George W. Bush’s attempts at Spanish).
5. We haven’t had a multilingual president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. That’s 66 years, if you’re counting.

6. “An avalanche of criticism” came down on Barack Obama in 2008 when he dared to suggest American children should learn a foreign language. Later he had to point out to the American public that learning is a good thing.
7. As of 2011, only 10 states have a foreign language requirement for graduating from high school…
8. …So it should come as no surprise that 2/3 of all U.S. high school students graduate without studying a foreign language. Not mastering a foreign language — studying.
9. Sign language is the No. 4 most-studied foreign language at American universities. Learning any language is a good thing, but considering there are many more Russians, Italians, Dutch, and Greeks in the world than there are deaf people, these languages deserve to be much higher on the list.
10. According to the U.S. Department of Education, as of 2006, not even 1% of American high school students combined studied Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, or Urdu. Together these languages are spoken by an estimated 1.7 billion people (so they’re kind of important).

11. An estimated 60,000 American students study Chinese, compared to 200 million Chinese students studying English. That’s a 1:3,333 ratio.
12. The recent spike in the study of Chinese is due to the fact China is sending us teachers and paying their salaries for us.
13. In the summer of 2011, federal funding to 14 foreign language programs arranged through the Higher Education Opportunity Act was cut by 40%, from $126 million to $76 million.
14. That $76 million for foreign language represents 0.00126% of the total federal budget.
15. Five years ago, the number of college students graduating without ever having taken a foreign language class was 92%.

16. The laughably-small total of 136 bachelor’s degrees was awarded for studies in foreign language in 2008.
17. From 1997 to 2008, the percentage of elementary schools offering foreign language instruction fell from 1/3 to 1/4.
18. It’s no wonder schools don’t offer foreign languages anymore — they can’t find anyone to teach them. In the 2007-2008 school year, 3/4 of states experienced shortages of foreign language instructors.
19. Of the 25 leading industrialized countries in the world, 20 begin teaching students foreign languages in elementary school. In the U.S., the average starting age for learning a second language is 14.
20. In 2008, Hillary Clinton, now the Secretary of State and thus the highest-ranking foreign diplomat in the country, demonstrated what an American education culminating with a diploma from Yale Law School apparently gets you — a total lack of foreign language skills.

1. Flagler College – St. Augustine, Florida: Seeing is believing when it comes to this gorgeous campus. "From a dining hall with million-dollar Tiffany windows to dorm rooms that once hosted celebrity guests such as John Jacob Astor and Gary Cooper, and Presidents Grover Cleveland and Theodore Roosevelt, you’ll find that living on the Flagler campus is an experience in itself."
2. Lewis & Clark College – Portland, Oregon: Surely you’ll be enchanted by the 137 acres of lush, park-like campus, environmentally sustainable academic building, or the view of Mount Hood from the Reflecting Pool. The college’s website houses plenty of compelling information for prospective students.
3. The University of Notre Dame – Notre Dame, Indiana: According to university reports, "Notre Dame stands on 1,250 acres considered by many to be among the most beautiful possessed by any university in the nation. From the Golden Dome that rises above Notre Dame Avenue, to the quiet splendor of the Grotto at the heart of campus, to the lakes and green spaces that provide recreational opportunities in all seasons, Notre Dame’s campus is a visual splendor."
4. Pepperdine University – Malibu, California: The main campus is located among several ridges that overlook the Pacific Ocean and the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, California. The main campus entrance road ascends a steep, well-groomed grassy slope past a huge stylized cross, known as the Phillips Theme Tower, symbolizing the university’s dedication to its original Christian mission. Most buildings were constructed in a typical 1980s-style reinterpretation of classic Californian and Mediterranean architecture (red tile roofs, white stuccoed walls, large tinted windows). There are views of the Pacific Ocean, Catalina Island, Palos Verdes Peninsula, Long Beach and the westside of Los Angeles from numerous points. Graduations take place at Alumni Park, a broad expanse of lawn overlooking Pacific Coast Highway and the Pacific Ocean.
5. Purdue University – West Lafayette, Indiana: Somewhere between the Purdue Mall, Bell Tower, Memorial Mall, Felix Haas Hall, and Cary Quadrangle, you’ll find a spot to sit and read, to rest between classes, or just to become one with the beautiful scenery around you. Indeed, you will not be disappointed by this beautiful and distinguished university.
6. Rice University – Houston, Texas: The campus of Rice University includes a number of buildings, designed primarily in the Byzantine architectural style. The university was founded in 1912 on a 285-acre plot of land located very close to what is now West University Place, adjacent to the Texas Medical Center, in the museum district of the city of Houston, Texas. The university’s first president, Edgar Odell Lovett, stressed the importance of a uniform architectural style for the many buildings the campus would come to have. The majority of Rice’s buildings have brick-colored facades, emphasizing courtyards, archways, and pillars. There are notable exceptions representing both modern and historical architectural styles, including brutalist and Mediterranean.
7. Sewanee University – Sewanee, Tennessee: The University of the South, more commonly known as Sewanee, has a 10,000-acre campus that was made for students who love nature. The campus and the surrounding area offer unlimited opportunities for outdoor recreation. Gothic style buildings and a newly completed centerpiece chapel add to Sewanee’s appeal.
8. Trinity University – San Antonio, Texas: Trinity overlooks downtown San Antonio, adjacent to the Monte Vista Historic District and just south of the prominent Olmos Park and Alamo Heights neighborhoods. The 117-acre Skyline Campus, the university’s fourth location, is noted for its distinctive red brick architecture and well-maintained grounds, modeled after an Italian village by late architect O’Neil Ford.
9. Wellesley College – Wellesley, Massachusetts : The Wellesley campus extends over 500 acres of woodlands, meadows, and water. Nestled into the rolling hills is a mix of 19th-century towered brick buildings arranged in quadrangles and newer buildings with avant-garde architecture. In the fall the heavily wooded campus looks as if it has been splattered with paint, with foliage turning variations of red, orange, and yellow. In the winter, a blanket of white often covers the grounds, and in the spring the campus comes alive with blooming daffodils, rhododendrons, and lilacs.
10. Yale University – New Haven, Connecticut: Yale is noted for its largely Collegiate Gothic campus as well as for several iconic modern buildings commonly discussed in architectural history survey courses: Louis Kahn’s Yale Art Gallery and Center for British Art, Eero Saarinen’s Ingalls Rink and Ezra Stiles and Morse Colleges, and Paul Rudolph’s Art & Architecture Building. Yale also owns and has restored many noteworthy 19th-century mansions along Hillhouse Avenue, which was considered the most beautiful street in America by Charles Dickens when he visited the United States in the 1840s.

Science, we are informed by conscientious historians of the discipline, is something that comes to us without anything we might call a “moral imperative” as to what we should or should not be doing with the knowledge. In fact, science has often been described as an “amoral” enterprise, which can be put to evil uses just as easily as good ones. Scientists themselves bear no responsibility to ensure how their discoveries are used by others.

But what if the scientist himself is a diabolical mad man?

Thank the FSM it doesn’t happen often, but here’s a list of ten people throughout history who fit the description of “Mad Scientist” because they used diabolical methods for their experiments. We can be thankful that this sort of research is not applauded today, nor are science students encouraged in these directions. But, they surely are interesting as historical footnotes.

1. Johann Conrad Dippel [1673-1734]

The first and most prophetic fact about Doctor Dippel is that he was born at Castle Frankenstein near Darmstadt, Germany. He studied theology, philosophy and alchemy at the University of Giessen, and promptly found himself in trouble for his theological opinions. In his search for the philosopher’s stone of alchemy, he became interested in creating artificial life.

It is on that score that Dippel gained a reputation for grave robbery, and performing gruesome experiments on cadavers in an attempt to do a “soul transplant.” There were rumors of him being driven out of town by angered townsfolk after blowing up a tower at Castle Frankenstein with nitroglycerine, but careful historical research fails to make a firm connection between Dippel and this substance (not discovered until after his time), or between Dippel and Mary Shelley’s immortalized mad doctor Frankenstein. What Dippel did manage to do with his alchemical experiments was develop “Prussian blue” dye which became a spectacular commercial success.

2. Giovanni Aldini [1762-1834]

The nephew of the man who developed the theory of muscular electricity, Giovanni centered his scientific career around working with galvanism – electricity. He examined medical uses, ways to illuminate lighthouses, and did experiments using electricity for preservation.

Aldini became most famous – or infamous – for his traveling horror show, touring all across Europe electrifying human and animal bodies for the delight of the public. But it was his performance at the Royal College of Surgeons in London in 1803 that earned him his place in Mad Scientist history. He used his conducting rods on the body of a hanged criminal named George Foster, causing muscles to contract and distort and frightening some people badly. For his efforts as well as his showmanship, Aldini was made a knight by the emperor of Austria and a councilor of state at Milan.

3. Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov [1870-1932?]

Yet another Stalinist era Russian scientist made his name doing bizarre and arguably unethical experiments on animals. Ivanov perfected the art of artificial insemination to aid his work, and went on to produce hybrids like Zeedonks (zebra and donkey), Zubrons (wisent and cow), an antelope-cow, a mouse-rat, a mouse-guinea pig, and a guinea pig-rabbit.

Ivanov veered off the merely interesting track with his human-ape hybrid experiments. Seems Stalin had high hopes for an army of man-apes that would be invincible, insensitive to pain and wouldn’t care about the quality of their food or treatment. At an experimental station in French Guinea he inseminated female chimpanzees with human sperm, but could not manage to produce a pregnancy. The French colonial government objected when he proposed inseminating human females with sperm from an orangutan. His contribution was primarily to establish the limits of interfertility, which modern scientists now get around with direct genetic manipulation and cloning.

4. Sergei Brukhonenko [1890-1960]

This Russian scientist of the Stalinist era contributed important research toward the development of open heart surgery, and invented a primitive heart-lung machine he called the “autojektor.” Sergei Brukhonenko’s experiments in how to keep a body (or some part of a body) alive led to some exhibitions that offended the ethical sensibilities of many.

The most famous of those were his experiments with the severed heads of dogs. One of which was able to eat a piece of cheese for the audience, which was then horrified when the chewed cheese exited the truncated esophagus at the other end. He did dog head transplants too, and brought executed dogs back to life. It was primarily experimentation using humans, human bodies and animals that first dictated the regulation of scientific experimentation, and grisly stories on that score helped to make the ‘Evil Scientist’ a stock character in fiction and entertainment.

5. Vladimir Demikhov [1916-1998]

Another organ transplant pioneer from the days of Stalin, Demikhov was famous for transplanting whole portions of live puppies onto the bodies of adult dogs. He also transplanted various organs around. There are videos of some of the most gruesome experiments of Demikhov and his contemporary Brukhonenko, which we’ll not link here. After inviting journalists to his lab to show off his work, a reporter from the Daily Mail wrote:

“Blinking unhappily in the daylight as Demikhov paraded it on its lead, this unfortunate beast had been created by grafting the head and upper body of a small puppy on the head and body of a fully-grown mastiff, to form one grotesque creature with two heads. The visitors watched in horror and fascination as both of the beast’s mouths lapped greedily at a bowl of milk proffered by Demikhov’s assistants.” The article did not say whether any of the assistants were named Igor.

6. Harry Harlow [1905-1981]

Harry Harlow was a psychologist interested in the psychology of maternal-infant bonding, who contributed greatly to the burgeoning animal rights movement that grew out of the long history of scientific research cruelty to helpless animals. One does have to wonder about many of these researchers, as in how many of them tortured animals in childhood and were steered into science as a “healthy outlet” for this sort of behavior that in the wider society would have earned them some serious legal troubles.

Harlow’s most infamous experiments were conducted with rhesus monkeys. He isolated infants from their mothers and offered them a choice of surrogate mother figures – a wire mesh construct or a terrycloth covered construct, one which provided milk and one that did not. He was quite open about his experimental apparatuses, giving them appropriate names such as “rape rack,” “iron maiden” and an isolation chamber called the “pit of despair.” For all the outrage at his cruelty to infant monkeys, Harlow did establish the importance of maternal-infant bonding for humans and his work led to ethics regulations of scientific research.

7. Shiro Ishii [1892-1959]

You may suspect that scientists who feel empowered to dream up tortures for animals might be willing to do the same sort of experiments on humans if the public sensibilities weren’t so averse to such things. You would be right, and there are times in human history when the public is distracted by other things, allowing scientists to do their worst. We call it “war,” and it’s offered cover for things diabolical enough to make an atheist suspect Satan exists, even if God may not.

Making a name for himself in the Japanese military establishment between world wars, Shiro Ishii enjoyed the title “Father of Biological Warfare” for his exploits as chief of Japan’s biological warfare program. Ishii supervised the deliberate infection of thousands of captives with deadly diseases, conducted grotesque surgies, and performed as many as 3,000 ‘dissections’ of live prisoners without anesthetic. A wealthy man never prosecuted for war crimes, Ishii died peacefully at his home in Japan at the age of 67.

8. Joseph Mengele [1911-1979]

His title is still “The Angel of Death,” which he earned the hard way as a German SS officer and physician at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps during the Holocaust. Mengele’s favorite subjects for grotesque experiments were twins, and he experimented on at least 3,000 sets of them. 26 of whom survived. He injected chemicals into children’s eyes to see if he could change their color, sewed a pair of Roma twins together so they’d be cojoined, giving them gangrene. He performed most of his surgeries – including amputations – without anesthesia.

It is questionable that Mengele really thought he was doing science, as most historians simply believe he was mad with power. Despite being the most hunted at-large war criminal in the world for 34 years, he died in Bertioga, Brazil in 1979 and buried under the name of Wolfgang Gerhard. He never expressed regret or remorse for his horrible crimes. While the study of twins has contributed much to knowledge of genetics and the “nature vs. nurture” debates in biology, both the Eugenics movement of the early 20th century and the Holocaust are not spoken about with much reverence by modern researchers.

9. Sigmund Rascher [1909-1945]

World War II offered lots of opportunities for evil scientific experiments the governments involved apparently figured no one would ever care about, given the level of sheer inhuman violence abroad at the time. Sigmund Rascher became a captain in the German Luftwaffe, under whose auspices he began human experimentation for research on high altitude flight. He was a favorite of Heinrich Himmler, who gave him absolute power at the Dachau concentration camp to choose his victims.

Rascher killed scores of victims with his portable pressure chamber, more than a hundred with his “freezing experiments,” which actually did document best methods for warming someone suffering terminal hypothermia. While at Dauchau, Rascher also developed those ubiquitous cyanide capsules that have been so often lampooned as the suicide option of choice for spies and other assorted bad guys. Himmler caught Rascher and his wife lying about extending their fertility into their 50s (they’d bought or kidnapped the babies) and had them executed shortly before the end of the war.

10. Sidney Gottlieb [1918-1999]

The world’s horror at the atrocities committed by German and Japanese ‘doctors’ during WW-II didn’t stop the United States government from investing quite a bit in its own versions of blatantly unethical (and illegal) human experimental projects. Military psychiatrist and speech therapist Sidney Gottlieb was put in charge of the CIA’s MK-ULTRA project in 1953 to investigate “techniques that would crush the human psyche to the point that it would admit anything.”

In addition to coming up with some highly humorous assassination plots against Fidel Castro (always involving some kind of poison), Gottlieb graduated to dosing unsuspecting people with LSD, causing some serious death and mental destruction along the way. In 1973, just as the Congress was closing on on the project, records of MK-ULTRA were ordered destroyed by then DCIA Richard Helms. It is not known (because no one involved has bothered to say) if they ever found the “truth drug” they were searching for but it is known that the program experimented with heroin, morphine, temazepam, mescaline, psilocybin, scopolamine, marijuana, alcohol and sodium pentothal. What we got instead was a Drug War that is still claiming innocent lives today.