Memorial Day weekend will kick off the summer travel season for many Americans, but some workers won’t be able to kick back on a vacation this year.

Nearly one in four Americans (23%) has no paid vacation days, according to a report released today by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a non-profit based in Washington, D.C.

“Relying on businesses to voluntarily provide paid leave just hasn’t worked,” says report co-author John Schmitt, a senior economist at the center.

The report analyzed national and international data on 21 democracies in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The group of 21 countries includes 16 in Europe, Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand and the USA.

The USA is the only advanced economy that does not require employers to provide paid vacation days, the report says. Many U.S. employers offer paid vacation days and holidays, but no law sets a minimum.

The 27-member European Union requires employers to grant at least 20 paid vacation days a year. Canada and Japan require at least 10.

U.S. law also does not make provisions for paid holidays, but many countries with a comparable standard of living do. For example, Austria guarantees 13 paid holidays; Canada, nine. France, with 30 paid vacation days, requires one paid holiday.

U.S. private sector workers have an average of 10 paid vacation days and six paid holidays a year, the report says. It notes that that does not meet the minimum requirement in 19 countries.

The report also finds a gap between the USA’s lowest and highest earners. About 90% of high-wage workers (the top fourth) have paid vacation, vs. 49% of low-wage workers (the bottom 25%). About 91% of high-wage workers have paid holidays, compared with 50% of low-wage workers.

About 86% of employees in companies with 100 or more workers have paid vacation, compared with 69% in those with 99 or fewer. About 87% of employees of medium and large companies have paid holidays, vs. 69% in small ones.

The center first analyzed vacation and holiday data six years ago. “It is striking that six years after we first looked at this topic, absolutely nothing has changed,” Schmitt says. “U.S law and U.S. employer behavior still lags far behind the rest of the rich countries in the world.”

Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla., this week introduced a bill that would amend the Fair Labor Standards Act to require employers to provide paid annual leave. He first introduced the Paid Vacation Act in 2009.

“We need it for the health and well-being of our workers,” Grayson says. “We also need it for businesses, because people who are forced to work every single day lose productivity.”

But some are skeptical about a government mandate. James Sherk, a senior policy analyst in labor economics at the Heritage Foundation, a think tank based in Washington, D.C., says employers provide paid vacation to attract and retain a quality workforce. Employers take the cost of required benefits out of workers’ pay, he adds; “Well, you might not want your pay cut.”

Daniel Mitchell, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a Washington-based think tank, agrees. “When you make it more expensive to hire workers, fewer workers get hired.”

Others stress the importance of ensuring vacation time for workers.

John de Graaf, executive director of Take Back Your Time, a Seattle-based non-profit that works on issues including vacation time and family leave, says it is “primitive” that the USA does not guarantee paid vacation. “We’re paying the costs of health and stress as a society,” he adds.

Joshua Coleman, a psychologist in the San Francisco Bay Area, says there is a strong work ethic in the USA. “People’s identity is somehow strengthened by how busy they are,” he says. “The idea is that if you’re busy, then you are a productive, contributing member of society. The implication is that if you’re not as busy, then you’re not as ambitious or successful.”

It’s important to take a vacation even if the work is pleasurable, Coleman says. “Work is inherently stressful. There are psychological demands of interacting with other people, meeting deadlines and performing. We need breaks from that to recover, reboot.”

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

Hands down — left-brain thinkers use their right hand to hold their cellphone, a new study finds.

The study shows a strong correlation between brain dominance and the ear used to listen to a cellphone, says Michael Seidman, the study’s lead author. If your hearing ability is the same in both ears and you hold your phone to your right ear, you are likely to be left-brain dominant. Your speech and language centers are likely to be on the left. If you hold your phone to the left side, you are likely to be right-brain dominant.

Among 717 survey respondents, 90% were right-handed, 9% left-handed and 1% ambidextrous. Among those who were right-handed, 68% said they hold the phone to their right ear. About 25% used the left ear and 7% used both ears.

People reported that they use the right ear because “it sounds better,” Seidman says. “If you put a phone to your right ear, 90-plus percent of the messages are going to the left side. The left side of the brain controls the right side of the body. It is a quicker route to the speech and language centers.”

Left-brain-dominant people are more likely to use their right hand for daily tasks, such as writing. Right-brain-dominant people are more likely to use their left hand.

But Seidman says the practice of right-handed people listening with their right ear is illogical. It is challenging to hold the phone and take notes at the same time with the right hand, he adds.

Susan Bookheimer, director of the Staglin Imaging Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at UCLA, says in an e-mail that the results show about equal proportions of right-handers holding the phone with their right hand and left-handers using the phone with their left hand. “The logical conclusion should be that individuals are more likely to hold the phone in their dominant hand than in their non-dominant hand,” she says.

Seidman says, “Our findings have several implications, especially for mapping the language center of the brain.”

“By establishing a correlation between cerebral dominance and sidedness of cellphone use, it may be possible to develop a less invasive, lower-cost option to establish the side of the brain where speech and language occur rather than the Wada test,” says Seidman, director of the division of otologic and neurotologic surgery in the Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. The Wada test is a procedure that injects an anesthetic into the carotid artery to put part of the brain to sleep in order to map activity, he adds.

Seidman says studies are underway to look at tumor registry banks of patients with head, neck and brain cancer to evaluate cellphone usage. Concerns persist around a potential link between cellphone use and tumors. Seidman advises using hands-free modes for calls until this is fully understood.

The study was published online today in JAMA Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery.

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

Some parents who peruse the Social Security Administration’s list of 2012′s most popular baby names, out today, will be looking for validation that they chose a good one, while prospective parents seeking a unique name may be looking for what to avoid.

Jacob and Sophia are the most popular baby names again in 2012, according to the list. They were tops in 2011 too; Jacob has been in the top spot since 1999.The biggest jumps in popularity in the Top 500 names are for the boys’ name Major and the girls’ name Arya. Arya is the name of a character on the HBO series Game of Thrones.

“I have no doubt Major’s rising popularity as a boy’s name is in tribute to the brave members of the U.S. military,” Carolyn Colvin, acting Social Security commissioner, says in a statement. “Maybe we’ll see more boys named General in the future.”

The second fastest-rising names are Gael for boys and Perla for girls. Those names are likely becoming more popular because of the growing Spanish-speaking population in the USA, the federal agency says.

The names are from Social Security card applications for births in the 50 states and District of Columbia. The agency, which has tracked names since 1880, lists the names on its website, socialsecurity.gov. The agency also provides popular names for births in U.S. territories, but that information is not included in the national data.

Various spellings of similar names are not combined. For example, Caitlin, Caitlyn, Kaitlin, Kaitlyn, Kaitlynn, Katelyn and Katelynn are considered separate names. Each spelling has its own ranking on the list.

Brantley had the greatest popularity jump for boys from 2010 to 2011. Briella had the greatest popularity bounce for girls.

Recent trends show that parents want unique names for their kids.

Parents mostly want to avoid the names at the top of the list, says Cleveland Evans, a member of the American Name Society, a non-profit that promotes the study of names and naming practices.

“Typical parents want to give their child a name that everybody has heard of and everybody likes, but no one has — which is an absolutely impossible task,” he says.

“Everybody wants to be unique,” agrees Laura Wattenberg, author of The Baby Name Wizard, Revised 3rd Edition, out this week.

The No. 1 names on the list will be less popular than the ones in previous compilations, she says. The top names will reflect smaller percentages of overall names, she adds.

“The sound today that parents are looking for is very smooth and bright — very heavy on long vowels,” she says. Examples are Liam and Mila, she adds. “Names with a similar sound, like Mia and Noah, you can count on thriving.”

Wattenberg says parents find ideas and inspiration for baby names everywhere. They look to places that are important to them, positive words in the dictionary, and surnames.

Names in some periods have a familiar ring because of the influence of a celebrity; a child star with ringlets is the leading example. “More babies were named after Shirley Temple than any celebrity today,” Wattenberg says.

Evans says some parents still name children after relatives and ancestors.

One reason names like Elizabeth have endured is that they have various nicknames. For example, Evans says, the nicknames for Elizabeth change from generation to generation — Betty, Beth and Lizzie.

The Internet has had an impact on the perception of baby names. “The Internet changes our perception of what’s popular if everybody is your next-door neighbor,” Wattenberg says,

Evans, a professor of psychology at Bellevue University in Bellevue, Neb., agrees that the Internet allows people to see which names are too common and avoid them more easily. “Every new technology presents people with possibilities,” he says. “People are naming their kids after characters in video games.”

While some parents pick a name early, others wait until they are in the delivery room, hoping that the baby will inspire a name. “That’s asking a lot of a newborn,” Wattenberg says. “Know what your back-up plan is because that’s a tough time to do heavy thinking.”

With so many choices, where do parents begin to find a name that is a snug fit?

Wattenberg says, “Whether we mean to or not, we are encoding our own values, hopes and dreams in our children’s names. Choosing a name is really the time that you dream about the future. That name becomes a bridge to the future — where you picture your life together.”

Evans, the author of The Great Big Book of Baby Names, published in 2006, says it is good for parents to choose a name that has some meaning to them. That way, he adds, “when a child asks you later why you picked it, you can give more of a reason than just, ‘I liked how it sounded.’ ”

Top baby names of 2012

Boys

Girls

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

This Mother’s Day, many women will squeeze their children in their arms while others will have to hold their babies in their hearts.

A report released today shines light on the plight of women whose babies died shortly after birth.

More than one million babies die on their birth day every year worldwide, according to a report from Save the Children, a non-profit that aims to improve the lives of boys and girls in need around the world.

That makes a baby’s first day the riskiest day of his or her life — in the USA and other countries, according to the 14th annual State of the World’s Mothers report. Released in the run-up to Mother’s Day, the report aims to increase awareness of the needs of mothers and children around the world.

The leading causes of newborn deaths are prematurity, birth complications and severe infections.

“It’s hard to imagine the depth of one mother’s pain in losing her baby the very day she gives birth, let alone a million times over,” says Carolyn Miles, president and CEO of Save the Children, which is based in Westport, Conn. “Yet, this report is full of hope. It shows there is a growing movement to save newborn lives and growing evidence that we can do it.”

Four products costing between 13 cents and $6 each can save newborns — many on the first day of life, Miles says. Resuscitation devices can help babies breathe, and the antiseptic chlorhexidine can prevent umbilical cord infections. Injectable antibiotics can treat infections, and steroid injections for women in preterm labor can help premature babies’ lungs develop.

Save the Children, which does not sell products, aims to make sure that health workers in high-risk countries have the supplies they need to save newborns. The organization works with health officials and donors to make the products available. Save the Children is funded through a variety of public and private sources, including corporations, foundations, individual giving and the United States Agency for International Development.

“As we come up on Mother’s Day, we’d like for mothers to think about what other moms are facing around the world,” Miles says.

Angela Rodman, 29, of Salem, Ore., says the timing of the report around Mother’s Day is helpful. “It brings awareness to all mothers — not just the ones who have children who are living but also the ones who only have children in their hearts,” she adds.

Rodman’s daughter, Charlotte, died on the day she was born — May 14, 2010. Rodman, who has a 1-year-old son and is pregnant, shares her story to raise awareness about newborn deaths. “It’s important that moms and dads know they’re not alone,” adds the stay-at-home mom, who writes a blog. “It is a very difficult journey, but it can be got through.”

The report also features the 14th annual Mothers’ Index, a ranking of 176 countries that looks at the health and well-being of mothers and their children. It looks at maternal health and child well-being as well as educational, economic and political status. Finland is named the best place to be a mother and the Democratic Republic of the Congo is ranked as the toughest.

The USA comes in 30th place. In this country, women face a 1 in 2,400 risk of maternal death. The under-5 mortality rate is 7.5 per 1,000 live births. In addition, women hold only 18% of seats in Congress.

Top 10 countries in 2013 Mother’s Index

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

Mental health advocates and doctors who treat bipolar disorders say managing the condition can be complicated — and they applaud Oscar-winning actress Catherine Zeta-Jones for seeking more help for her bipolar II disorder.

All kinds of things can trigger problems, from stress to irregular schedules, say doctors.

“It’s great that she is getting help for herself and serving as a role model,” says Ken Duckworth, medical director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, a mental health organization based in Arlington, Va. “Every time light is shed on this illness, I think people’s anxiety or sense of shame is reduced.”

Zeta-Jones’ spokeswoman, Cece Yorke, confirmed in an e-mail to USA TODAY this morning that “Catherine has proactively checked into a health care facility. Previously Catherine has said that she is committed to periodic care in order to manage her health in an optimum manner.”

Bipolar disorder is a brain disorder that causes shifts in mood and energy, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. The mental illness, which was known as manic depression, can develop in the late teen years or early adulthood.

About 3.9% of the U.S. adult population have a lifetime prevalence of bipolar disorder, according to the NIMH. About 2.6% of the population have a 12-month prevalence.

Manic episodes are associated with a long period of feeling “high,” or overly happy or irritable. Mood changes associated with a depressive episode include a long period of feeling “low,” or empty or worried.

Bipolar II disorder is marked by depressive episodes, shifting with hypomanic episodes. It has no full-blown manic episodes.

Duckworth, a psychiatrist, says the disorder can be difficult to treat at times.

Strategies for treating bipolar II disorder include psychotherapy, a medication regimen, stress management, a regular sleep schedule, aerobic exercise, and recognition of triggers, such as season of the year, says Duckworth, who has not treated Zeta-Jones.

David Miklowitz, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA School of Medicine, says episodes can be triggered by going off one’s medications and severe stress, such as job loss.

Miklowitz, who has not treated the actress, says a significant change in a person’s sleep cycle or circadian rhythm can be problematic. He recommends regular times for waking up and going to bed.

Duckworth advises people not to work night shifts or varied shifts. He also suggests that people with bipolar disorders exercise regularly, and notes that it is helpful to have loving and supportive relationships.

People usually have out-patient care with medications and psychotherapy, says Miklowitz, author of The Bipolar Disorder Survival Guide. How often people need to adjust their medications varies, he says. Sometimes people need more intensive treatment, such as hospitalization, if they are severely depressed, he adds.

In 2011, the Welsh-born actress spent five days at Silver Hill Hospital, a psychiatric hospital in New Canaan, Conn.

Zeta-Jones, 43, stars as Miranda Wood in the action-comedy movie Red 2, which is out July 19.

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

If you’re looking forward to a cold one this weekend, you may be interested in a new study creating buzz.

The study found that a beer’s flavor alone, without any effect from alcohol, can lead the brain to release dopamine, a chemical associated with pleasure and reward. It is also associated with drinking and drug abuse.

Previous research suggests that sensory cues (smells and tastes) associated with drug intoxication can provoke dopamine transmission.

Researchers from the Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis set out to measure the dopamine response from the taste of beer. They tested 49 men who tasted their preferred beer and Gatorade. The liquids, which were sprayed into the men’s mouths, were delivered in a small amount — 15 milliliters over 15 minutes. This method enabled the men to taste the beer without causing a detectable blood-alcohol level.

Positron emission tomography scans showed significantly more dopamine activity after tasting the beer than after tasting the sports drink.

“We believe this is the first experiment in humans to show that the taste of an alcoholic drink alone, without any intoxicating effect from the alcohol, can elicit this dopamine activity in the brain’s reward centers,” says David Kareken, a senior author of the study.

The dopamine response was most pronounced in the men with a family history of alcoholism.

This result suggests the release of dopamine in response to such alcohol-related cues may be an inherited risk factor for alcoholism, adds Kareken, a professor in the IU School of Medicine’s Department of Neurology.

Another finding was that men reported a greater craving for beer after tasting it. There were no similar responses after tasting the Gatorade, even though many said the sports drink tasted better.

Kareken, the deputy director of the Indiana Alcohol Research Center, says the research is continuing.

The findings were published online this week in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology.

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

The Ocean Conservancy said Tuesday that its 2012 International Coastal Cleanup collected more than 10 million pounds of trash.

More than 550,000 people picked up 10,149,988 pounds of trash along 17,719 miles of coastlines from Sept. 1 to Oct. 31.

This was the 27th year of the cleanup by the Ocean Conservancy, a non-profit based in Washington, D.C. In addition, country and state International Coastal Cleanup coordinators host cleanups around the year on their local beaches and waterways, or in response to natural disasters.

Nicholas Mallos, Ocean Conservancy’s marine debris specialist and conservation biologist, says the volunteer effort in the International Coastal Cleanup is testament to concern about the health and well-being of beaches and oceans.

“Trash doesn’t start and stop at the trash can, and out of sight doesn’t mean out of our ocean,” Mallos says. “From product creation to disposal, we must tackle trash at every point.”

Consumers can use reusable items, industries can reinvent materials in their manufacturing processes, and governments can implement policies that ensure trash is captured before entering the ocean, he explains.

Ninety-seven countries or locations participated in the 2012 cleanup. The 10 countries that yielded the most trash (in order): USA, the Philippines, Canada, Hong Kong, Dominican Republic, Mexico, India, Peru, Ecuador and Puerto Rico. The USA yielded about 3.6 million pounds of trash.

At most of the cleanups, weight of debris was measured either on site with scales or via waste-hauling services that reported the weight of the load after it had been hauled to a processing facility. Volunteers counted the items of trash by hand.

“The items that we use in our everyday lives routinely are the most common items we are finding on our beaches,” Mallos says.

Top 10 items found:

The weirdest finds included 4,159 candles, 2,492 sports balls, 236 toothbrushes, 117 mattresses and 40 lottery tickets. Rubber chickens and a kitchen sink also were found.

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.