It seems teenagers really are addicted to their phones. The average teen spends nearly 41 days of the year on their mobile—or two hours and 40 minutes a day, research has discovered.

The study of 1,500 parents with teenagers living at home found that youngsters from Liverpool clocked up the most time on their phones, with 48 days spent texting and browsing apps. Teens from Glasgow and Cardiff came third and second. London teens came bottom of the list with 37 days.

Researchers said that mobile phones are “increasingly our portal to 24-hour shopping, news and our chief mode of entertainment”. The research also found that 55 percent of parents often wonder how they survived without the Internet or a mobile phone as a teenager. Some 45 percent said it was easier being a teenager now than when they were young. Despite this 85 percent believe they had more freedom as a teenager.

It follows a study earlier this year which found children can get stressed or start to panic when they are separated from their phones. Researchers conducted experiments on 87 smartphone owners aged between 18and 26.

The study states: “We are in the middle of a nascent digital culture, with children being born into the world of smart devices. This age group was chosen because they are considered to be ‘cellphone natives’. The results support that humans form attachment toward their mobile: they seek the proximity(接近)of the mobile and show stress response upon separation.”

Art has always been a polarizing subject. Some people like realism, others like abstract. But do you know why some people value art in the millions, while others see the same piece as little more than a child's finger painting?

Many consider art to be quite random in terms of our likes and dislikes. But according to new research, there may be a scientific reason behind our fondness for certain works. The answer lies in how a person's brain breaks down the visuals of a painting combined with their judgment.

To prove their theory, neuroscientist Kiyohito Iigaya and his team from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech)gathered more than 1,300 volunteers and asked them to rate 825 different paintings from four different art genres

After analyzing the data, scientists found that the same groups of people tended to prefer similar aspects of the same paintings. These characteristics were then grouped into “low-level” features like color and blending, and “high-level” features like the emotion behind the painting.

From this experiment, Caltech's system was then able to predict an individual's specific taste in art and organize different works into one group, according to the paintings' features and volunteers' preferences.

Finally, the team repeated the first test on new volunteers. Again, the algorithm was able to accurately predict individuals' art preferences. According to Iigaya, this shows that the factors that contribute to whether a person likes an image are universal, not random.

Lesley Fellows, a neurologist at McGill University who studies value judgments, stated, “We know a lot about ‘how’ the brain carries out actions, but 'why' is far less well understood.”