The good news? There is some truth to the adage “practice makes perfect.” The bad news? In most cases, two thirds of all cases, according to researchers at Michigan State University, the adage is approximately one third truth and two-thirds fiction. A Michigan State news release reports that researchers analyzed 14 studies of chess players and musicians, looking specifically at how practice was related to differences in performance. Practice, they found, accounted for only about one-third of the differences in skill in both music and chess. The rest, says Michigan State University’s Zach Hambrick, is explained by intelligence or innate ability, as well as the age at which people start the particular activity. A previous study conducted by Hambrick suggested that working memory capacity – which is closely related to general intelligence – may sometimes be the deciding factor between being good and great. Wait, Hambrick also found more good news in his results: “If people are given an accurate assessment of their abilities and the likelihood of achieving certain goals given those abilities,” he said, “they may gravitate toward domains in which they have a realistic chance of becoming an expert through deliberate practice.” In other words, they won’t overreach. Read more from Michigan State.

Yes, calcium is good for your bones, but it’s also good for the amount of time you spend on earth. That, according to research conducted at McGill University. A McGill news release reports that researchers analyzed data from the large-scale Canadian Multicentre Osteoporosis Study, hoping to learn if calcium and vitamin D intake were associated with overall increased risk of death. And the answer is…complicated. The researchers found no evidence that vitamin D influenced mortality in any way. They also found that women who took up to 1,000 mg of calcium a day did live longer than those who took no calcium. And finally, calcium did nothing to improve the longevity of men. Read more from McGill University.

Researchers have long believed that calorie restriction is good for your body, and now, it appears, it may be good for your brain. Researchers at MIT’s Picower Institute For Learning and Memory figured that out when they decreased by 30 percent the normal diets of mice (yes, mice, not humans) that were genetically engineered to rapidly undergo changes in the brain associated with neurodegeneration. Science Daily reports that after three months of calorie restriction, the mice were given learning and memory tests. The researchers found that there was a delay in the onset of neurodegeneration in the calorie-restricted mice, and they also found that the animals were spared the learning and memory deficits of mice that did not consume reduced-calorie diets. Next, the researchers wondered if they could recreate the benefits of caloric restriction without changing the animals’ diets, so they gave a separate group of mice a drug that activates SIRT1, an enzyme that is normally activated by calorie restriction. Similar to what the researchers found in the mice exposed to reduced-calorie diets, the mice that received the drug had less cell loss and better cellular connectivity than the mice that did not receive the drug. Wait, there’s more: the mice that received the drug treatment performed as well as normal mice in learning and memory tests. Read more from Science Daily.