London, Mar 24: A new study has confirmed what many men and advertisers long believed: driving a flashy car really does make a person more attractive to women.

Psychologists at the University of Wales presented women with separate images of the same man sitting in a silver Bentley Continental, then a red Ford Fiesta.

The study involved 120 participants, reports The Scotsman.

After seeing the male, the volunteers viewed him as ''''more attractive'''' in the prestige car.

London, Mar. 24: While Smith and Jones remain Britain''s most popular surnames, new research has found that there are 1,48,498 residents in the country who carry the surname Patel or Singh, suggesting that Asian names are rapidly catching up.

The study claims that a century of immigration has seen the nation''s dictionary of names drastically altered.

The Chinese name Zhang was found to be the fastest growing name, having risen by 4,718 per cent in popularity in just 13 years.

People named Singh and Patel were also found to be at a record high, with 95,203 and 53,295 of them respectively currently living in Britain, reports The Telegraph.

New York, Mar 24: Journalists are no more safe in Pakistan as they are killed regularly, having no freedom to work and the 2009 Global Impunity Index of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) recent survey ranks Pakistan 10th among 14 countries.

Other countries in the region — India, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Nepal and Bangladesh — also figure on the index, a list of countries where journalists are killed regularly and governments fail to solve the crimes.

London, Mar 24: After diamonds, it seems, books are girls’ BFFs (Best Friend Forever). A new study has found that females are more avid readers of books than men – in fact, they can’t put a book down once they begin it.

According to the UK survey of reading habits, which asked 2,000 adults, almost half of women are ''page turners'' who finish a book soon after starting it compared to only 26 per cent of men, reports The Telegraph.

London, Mar 23: Dungeon dad Josef Fritzl’s former lodger has revealed that he is still haunted by the smell of the burning body of the infant, whom the 73-year-old rapist incinerated in the underground cellar.

The Austrian engineer was found guilty for locking up and raping his daughter Elisabeth in a cellar over 24 years, fathering seven children with her, and causing the death of his own infant son.

Albert Dubanovsky, who lived in Fritzl’s Amstetten home for 12 years, said that he went to school with Elisabeth.

London, Mar 23: There has been a dramatic increase in the number of people harming themselves deliberately in the past five years in Britain, according to a new survey.

The biggest rise in self-harm and attempted suicide has been among young women between the ages of 16 and 24, struggling to cope with the pressures of modern living.

According to the research led by World Health Organisation (WHO), there were 97,871 hospital admissions for deliberate self-harm in England in 2007-08, of which 4,337 were children under the age of 14.