We already talk about being addicted to our phones, or addicted to video games - and there's some actual concern as to whether or not we're legitimately addicted to our tech - so it makes sense that as things like Google Cardboard and Oculus Rift emerge, we'll wonder about what kind of impact virtual reality will have on our lives and minds.

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Whether it's alcohol, emotions, or words, everyone on Jessica Jones has serious problems with manipulation and control.

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Confession time: I can't deal with not having my phone on me at all times. All. Times. It's bad enough that when I saw a link for the noPhone, a simple phone-sized piece of plastic for when you have to be away from your phone, my reaction was "That's stupid... wait... no... that's brilliant... I need that... damn it it's not real."

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In case you are wondering what drinking twice your body weight in Diet Coke a week will do to your health, British Coke addict Jakki Ballan has been there and done that so you don't have to. Unless you're looking for a difficult way to get high, that is.

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Is your love life languishing in the shadow of your eSports schedule? Do you forget to eat during your marathon WoW raids? Have you watched more cat videos than any single person you know? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, you might have an internet addiction – and now, there’s a program that can help you out.

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Cocaine addiction is notoriously difficult to treat, but researchers working on ways to fight it may have a unexpected new weapon in their arsenal -- lasers. Recent research in the field of optogenetics suggests that using lasers to turn certain parts of the brain on and off could help to curb addicts craving for the drug. Take that, cocaine addiction! Pew pew pew!

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Internet pornography is almost impossible to escape. A single ill-advised Google search and you're awash in the private parts of strangers. It's all downhill from there. That's what I'm told, anyway. The addicting aspect of pornography is well-documented, but what exactly makes pornography addicting? Thankfully, the good people at AsapSCIENCE have given an answer. Essentially, it all comes down to your brain.

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Interesting research out of the University of Buffalo's Research Institute on Addictions suggests that regularly watching a TV show can help maintain our ability to fight temptation. The study, published by research psychologist Jaye Derrick, theorizes that exposure to a "familiar fictional world" helps keep people from giving in to every impulse.

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Anyone who has ever been in the hospital for a major injury knows one incontrovertible fact about morphine: It is pretty damn spectacular. Opioids have been in use as pain relievers for centuries, and we have yet to find anything that is anywhere near as effective at managing physical discomfort. Morphine was the best painkiller surgeons had on hand hundreds of years ago, and it's still among the best today. Its only drawback, really, is that it's too good. The pain releiving qualities of opioids are deeply intertwined with the qualities that make it one of the most addictive substances known to science. A collaboration between researchers at the University of Colorado and Australia's University of Adelaide may have hit the jackpot of pain relief, though. In a paper to be published later this week in the Journal of Neuroscience the team is reporting a breakthrough that lets opioids retain their pain-killing punch while dulling their addictive qualities.

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Sasha Kennedy of Essex is addicted to water, drinking 25 liters of the stuff a day, far exceeding the USDA Recommended Daily Water Intake of  2.7 liters. Her condition provokes many pressing questions, namely "Won't that dilute her blood?" and "Has she ever tried soda?"

What surprised me most was that the condition had a name: Psychogenic polydipsia. It is "an uncommon clinical disorder characterized by excessive water-drinking in the absence of a physiologic stimulus to drink" and is typically found among mental patients on phenothiazine medications. Kennedy appears to be completely sane, although she does experience the dry mouth sensation characteristic of the condition.

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Tweeting is great, right? You bet it is. There's a reason we have Tweetosystem over there; we're addicted. That may sound a little extreme (and maybe it is, at least in our cases) but a new study suggests that Twitter and social media addiction isn't quite as ludicrous as it sounds. A recent experiment headed by Wilhelm Hofmann of Chicago University's Booth Business School shows that urges to tweet are extremely hard to resist, harder to resist than urges to drink, or smoke, for example.

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It seems that with every new technological advancement, a panic arises over addiction to that advancement. Addiction to television, addiction to video games, addiction to Facebook, and of course, addiction to the Internet at large. Some people might want to shrug Internet addiction off as a "fake" problem, not a "real" addiction, but a new study has found that certain brain structure correlates with what is observed as Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD), brain structure that is present in other varieties of addicts.

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Here's something you probably didn't know: Right now, Roger Tullgren of Sweden is recieving disability payments on account of the fact that he is addicted to heavy metal. No, he hasn't developed some sort of mercury or lead dependency, he just needs heavy metal music, badly. For years, his heavy metal addiction was a big part of his life and he claims to have lost his previous job as a result of attending over 300 concerts in the course of a year, often blowing off work to do so. The being the case, it seems that Tullgren was able to get an occupational psychologist to classify his love of heavy metal as a disability which is apparently enough to entitle him to disability compensation.

Since then, he has found a new job that is very accommodating to his situation. Tullgren is allowed to listen to his heavy metal music at certain times during work, dress how he likes and even miss work for concerts providing he makes up the hours afterwards. All in all, it seems like a pretty sweet deal. Needless to say, there are other occupational pyschologists who feel that this might go a little too far. While addiction may be classifiable as a disability, they argue, steps should be taken to treat the victim instead of accommodating him. Swedish newspaper The Local quotes a Stockholm psychologist who puts it like this:

"If somebody has a gambling addiction, we don't send them down to the racetrack. We try to cure the addiction, not encourage it."

Still, if you can get someone to pay you and encourage your addiction, rock on dude. You hit the jackpot. (The Local via Marginal Revolution)

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