Think about something that really stresses you out or annoys you. A pop quiz at school? Missing a goal in a big soccer game? When you’re in a stressful situation, would you rather be able to talk to Mom or Dad on the phone, or text?

New research shows that texting can’t calm your nerves like a soothing voice can. Mom’s voice can cause your body to decrease its levels of cortisol, a hormone related to stress, and to increase oxytocin, a hormone related to love and trust. Text messages have no effect on these hormone levels.

“You really need to hear that voice; just reading a written message isn’t good enough,” Leslie Seltzer of the University of Wisconsin-Madison told the Vancouver Sun. Seltzer is interested in the effect of human language on relationships. In a 2010 study, her team put a group of 7- to 12-year-old girls through a stressful math test. Afterwards, one third of the girls got to talk to their mothers in person, another third talked to Mom on the phone, and the final third didn’t get any contact at all.

In 2011, Seltzer’s team performed the study again, but added a fourth group: girls who got to text with their mothers. In both studies, the groups of girls who saw Mom in person or spoke on the phone showed a similar rise in oxytocin, and as you would expect, the girls who didn’t get any comfort showed a rise in cortisol. The surprising thing is, the girls who texted with Mom showed a rise in cortisol, too! Texting wasn’t any more comforting than no contact at all.

Your turn! You and a group of friends can test this theory. Next time you finish doing something stressful at school, like a test, rate your stress levels on a scale of 1 to 10. Then, choose half of you to call Mom and another half to text. Rate your stress levels again—whose numbers went down? Tell ODYSSEY the results: odysseymagazine@caruspub.com or: STRESS TEXT, ODYSSEY, 30 Grove Street, Peterborough, NH 03458.

There’s nothing more annoying than a lion attack. OK, “annoying” is probably the wrong word, especially if you live in Tanzania. How about “blood-curdling,” “terrifying,” and “deadly”? Between 1988 and 2009, lions attacked more than 1,000 Tanzanian villagers, killing and eating two-thirds of the victims.

Craig Packer of the University of Minnesota Twin Cities looked at when these attacks took place. Lions are nocturnal hunters, so it’s no surprise that the majority of lion attacks on humans happened between 6 p.m. and 9:45 p.m.—the hours when humans are still awake, and lions are out hunting.

The surprising discovery was that lion-attack danger increases sharply in the nights after a full Moon. Why? Because the lions are extra hungry. When there’s a full Moon, the light makes it more difficult for lions to stalk their usual prey of wildebeest and antelopes. The predators get hungrier and hungrier as the full Moon approaches. “Then WHAM, danger spikes as those hungry lions can now operate in darkness for the rest of the lunar cycle,” says Packer.

How can this new knowledge protect villagers? “Street lights would obviously be a good idea,” says Packer, “except that these areas are so impoverished, they rarely even have electricity.” Packer and his team are working on spreading the message that people need to be careful, especially in the week after a full Moon.

If you answered the kid, you’re right! For most adults, a child’s whining is more distracting than the screeching of a table saw. And there could be a good reason for this: The more annoying a child sounds, the more likely he is to get his mother’s attention when something is wrong.

Researchers at the State University of New York at New Paltz and Clark University wanted to test the idea that human adults are more attuned to the sounds of unhappy kids than other noises. So they asked some volunteers to try to complete math problems while listening to different sounds, including the whine, a table saw, baby cries, two grown-ups having a conversation, silence, and “motherese”—the cutesy, high-pitched voice moms use to talk to babies.

The tracks were recorded in a foreign language to make sure that any distraction was a result of the sound pattern of the speech, not what the people (or whiny kids) were saying.

It turns out, it doesn’t matter if you whine in French, Chinese, or English. You’re going to get grown-ups’ attention! The volunteers trying to complete math problems while listening to a whining child made almost twice as many mistakes as those listening to the saw, and it didn’t matter whether they were male or female or whether they had kids of their own or not. The crying baby was the second most distracting sound, followed by the motherese.

Before you go off and perfect your whining ability, remember that the power of a super-annoying whine evolved for emergencies, not so you could pester Mom into buying you a candy bar at the supermarket!

Remember when Pluto got kicked out of the lineup of planets in 2006? Now, our most distant planetary neighbor is known as a dwarf planet, but at least it has friends in a growing family of moons. Hubble telescope just discovered the newest moon in July 2011.

How could we miss something as significant as a moon in our own solar system? Well, this itty-bitty moon is only about 8 to 21 miles across—a distance you could probably walk in a day. “I find it remarkable that Hubble’s cameras enabled us to see such a tiny object so clearly from a distance of more than 3 billion miles,” said Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute in California.

Charon is the most famous of Pluto’s moons, and the other two are named Nix and Hydra. What would be a good name for the new moon? Cerberus, the three-headed dog who guards the underworld in Greek and Roman mythology is one leading choice, given that Pluto is god of the underworld and Charon is one of his cronies. Do you have a better idea? Tell ODYSSEY at odysseymagazine@caruspub.com or: NAME PLUTO’S MOON, ODYSSEY, 30 Grove Street, Suite C, Peterborough, NH 03458.

All over the Caribbean, elkhorn coral is dying. White pox disease, caused by a bacterium called Serratia marcescens, eats away at the brown, antler-shaped coral, leaving dead white patches. Over ten years, the disease has helped wipe out 90 percent of the elkhorn coral population. For a long time, scientists had suspected that leaky septic tanks in the Florida Keys were to blame for the disease, because S. marcescens is commonly found in human poop. In people, the bacterium may cause urinary tract infections, pneumonia, or other diseases; but it often has no effect at all. In elkhorn coral, it’s deadly.

S. marcescens is also found in animal poop, but the strain is slightly different. Researchers including James W. Porter of the University of Georgia tested samples of the bacterium from different animals, people, and infected coral, and found a match: The human strain is clearly the same as the one found on diseased coral.

“These bacteria do not come from the ocean, they come from us,” Porter said. To further test the theory, his team took healthy coral samples into the lab and infected them with the bacteria. In just five days, the coral caught the disease.

One bacterium alone probably couldn’t take down a healthy coral population. Many other factors including climate change have likely affected the coral ecosystem, and made the coral more vulnerable to disease. Will fixing leaky sewage tanks save the coral? Less poop in the water certainly couldn’t hurt!