Not long ago at Fort Bragg, N.C., the country’s largest military base, seven soldiers sat in a semi-circle, lights dimmed, eyes closed, two fingertips lightly pressed beneath their belly buttons to activate their “core.” Electronic music thumped as the soldiers tried to silence their thoughts, the key to Warrior Mind Training, a form of meditation slowly making inroads on military bases across the country. “This is mental push-ups,” Sarah Ernst told the weekly class she leads for soldiers at Fort Bragg. “There’s a certain burn. It’s a workout.”

Men tell twice as many lies as women, it emerged yesterday.

Researchers found they tell six fibs a day on average to their partner, boss and work colleagues, but women come out with just three.

A memory-cleansing drug that has the ability to remove any recollection of unhappy or embarrassing incidents could be developed by scientists.

Childhood teasing, the unpleasant experience of losing a pet and the upsetting memories of a failed love affair could all be wiped from people's minds.

The possibility of a memory drug for human consumption has been raised following successful animal trials by Andreas Lüthi, of the Friedrich Miescher Institute in Switzerland.

As far as we can tell we aren't one of them

The secretive US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) has awarded arms globocorp General Dynamics a $10m contract to set up a network of psychological-warfare "influence websites" supporting the Global War On Terror. France and Britain are specifically included as "targeted regions".