Despite the internet being relatively new technology, your attachment to the web is genetic. According to a study conducted at the University of Bonn, researchers have found a biological link between Internet addiction and smoking addiction, pinpointing it to a specific gene—and it's usually found in women.


For the study, researchers interviewed 800 people about their internet habits, and how they felt if that access was denied to them. Of those, 132 people seemed most addicted, so their genetic makeup was compared to those of an Internet "healthy" control group. They found that many of the Internet addicts had the same genetic variant as nicotine addicts.

Dr. Christian Montag, said that subjects in the study who exhibited "problematic internet behavior" tended to be women and that "the sex-specific genetic finding may result from a specific subgroup of internet dependency, such as the use of social networks" like Facebook and Twitter. So all those pictures of people's meals and status updates about how they're at the gym or how much they love their moms? They're not merely unimportant, annoying details about someone's boring life—they're a symptom of a larger problem (that still mostly just clogs up your feed).


Image via pzAxe/Shutterstock

Addicted to the internet? It could be all in your genes [Telegraph]