Brain and Behavior
gregladen | May 12, 2009According to a study just coming out in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, "variations in emotional intelligence--the ability to identify and manage emotions of one's self and others--are associated with orgasmic frequency during intercourse and masturbation."
In short, the study found:
Emotional intelligence was not associated with ... age and years of education, nor did we find a significant association between emotional intelligence and potential risk factors for [female orgasmic disorder] FOD such as age, body mass index, physical or sexual abuse, or menopause. We found emotional…
gregladen | May 9, 2009Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's BoyfriendWhen I first received this book to review, I thought "Oh, great, another one of these pop evolutionary psychology books by some academic with a large mortgage payment" (or words to that effect). But then I read it and my attitude got better.
The theme of this book is as the title says, evil ... at several scales, and understanding evil from a neuro-psychological perspective. Here, the genes themselves are actually relatively unimportant except as part of the necessary steps to build a human…
gregladen | May 7, 2009As I write this, I am preparing for a trip up north. As we drive north we will follow the ecotone between the prairies and the deciduous woodlands, then track the ecotone between the prairies and the coniferous woodlands. Then we will make a turn and drive into the coniferous zone, cross the Mississippi, and then with a couple of small but palpable jumps in elevation and another hour and a half drive north, enter the lake region. Here, the primary vegetation cover certain times of the year is the nearly invisible diatom and algae layer on the top of the clear lakes, the bog plants, and the…
pharyngula | May 5, 2009The other day, I read this fawning review by Andrew O'Hehir of Terry Eagleton's new book, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, and was a little surprised. I've read a smattering of Eagleton before, and the words "brisk, funny and challenging" or "witty" never came to mind, and the review actually gave no evidence that these adjectives were applicable in this case. I felt like ripping into O'Hehir, but was held up by one awkward lack: I hadn't read Eagleton's book. Who knows? Maybe he had found some grain of sense and some literary imperative to write cleanly and…
clock | May 2, 2009Some Vocal-mimicking Animals, Particularly Parrots, Can Move To A Musical Beat:
Researchers at Harvard University have found that humans aren't the only ones who can groove to a beat -- some other species can dance, too. The capability was previously believed to be specific to humans. The research team found that only species that can mimic sound seem to be able to keep a beat, implying an evolutionary link between the two capacities.
Dinosaur-Bird Link: Ancient Proteins Preserved In Soft Tissue From 80 Million-Year-Old Hadrosaur:
Ancient protein dating back 80 million years to the Cretaceous…
khannula | April 30, 2009I should have finished designing the new version of my disasters class. I've been thinking about it forever. But then I was trying to get a paper written, and then I went to a conference, and then there were senior thesis presentations and end-of-semester grading and a six-year-old's birthday, and, well...
Yes, I am frantically trying to get a syllabus ready for class on Monday.
I've got three more days (though they include a discussion with my soon-to-graduate thesis student, graduation, and a birthday party, so it can't be non-stop syllabus work). That means that, although I should be…
clock | April 27, 2009Identifying Hyenas By Their Giggle:
To human ears, the laughs of individual hyenas in a pack all sound the same: high-pitched and staccato, eerie and maniacal. But every hyena makes a different call that encodes information about its age and status in the pack, according to behavioral neurologists from the University of California, Berkeley and the Université de Saint-Etienne, France. They have developed a way to identify a hyena by picking out specific features of its giggle.
How House-hunting Ants Choose The Best Home:
Dr Elva Robinson and colleagues in the University's School of…
sb admin | April 25, 2009
Are these two ants sharing an intimate moment?
No.
This is just one of a long series of Azteca ant-plant ants I shot while they were coming and going from their nest. The ants were running every which way, sweeping their antennae about, and I just happened to push the shutter when two of them chanced to have passed each other in an anthropomorphic arrangement.
Yet this image, no more or less representative of the ants' actual behavior than the dozens of other images in the series, generates far more attention that any of the others. This is the one people like. It taps into something in…
cortex | April 25, 2009Just when you thought people couldn't get any sillier or more confused, psychologists uncover yet another innate foible. This one is called "choice blindness," and it refers to the ways in which people are utterly blind to their own choices and preferences. We think we want X, but then we're given Y, and so we invent all sorts of eloquent reasons why Y is actually a much better alternative and how we wanted Y all along. (What sort of fool would choose X?)
Lars Hall and Peter Johansson explain:
For example, in an early study we showed our volunteers pairs of pictures of faces and asked them…
cwilcox | April 23, 2009I have to start work at 8 am every morning. I'm not sure exactly who decided that scientists should start early, but it seems to be a universal assumption. Throughout college my science classes were always first thing, and research efforts often seem to involve early morning work. But I've never really been a morning person. Last night is a great example: I had to clean up the house in preparation for Barry's brother coming to stay with us (which, with a dog and a cat and two messy people, is no small feat). We started when we got home and tackled room after room. As I looked up at the clock…
clock | April 23, 2009Just a collection of links to my and other people's posts/articles I need to have collected all in one place (I will explain later):
1.a.Breaking News
Scientific American Editor, President to Step Down; 5 Percent of Staff Cut
'Scientific American' Editor Out in Reorg
1. b.Death of print: how are newspapers and magazines different?
Defining the Journalism vs. Blogging Debate, with a Science Reporting angle
Rosen's Flying Seminar In The Future of News
Thinking the Unthinkable
2020 vision: What's next for news
Newspapers on the brink-where to next?
Could beautiful design save newspapers…
clock | April 23, 2009There are 23 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Innervation of Gonadotropin-Releasing Hormone Neurons by Peptidergic Neurons Conveying Circadian or Energy Balance Information in the Mouse:
Secretion of gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) produced in neurons in…
clock | April 22, 2009There are 24 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
When One Hemisphere Takes Control: Metacontrol in Pigeons (Columba livia):
Vertebrate brains are composed of two hemispheres that receive input, compute, and interact to form a unified response. How the partially…
developingintelligence | April 21, 2009One theoretical model of the prefrontal cortex posits that we can achieve goal-directed behavior via "biased competition" - that is, representations of our current goals and context are maintained in the prefrontal cortex and exert an influence on downstream areas, ultimately biasing our behavior in a goal-directed and context-appropriate way. By theory, this relatively simple function is enhanced by the anterior cingulate, functioning as a "conflict monitor" and upregulating the PFC when this so-called biased competition is a little too competitive, and not quite biased enough. However,…
grrlscientist | April 20, 2009tags: Scientia Pro Publica, Science for the People, biology, evolution, medicine, earth science, behavioral ecology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, blog carnival
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
This is only the second issue of Scientia Pro Publica, but I am so pleased with its progress so far. Not only are friends and colleagues contributing their essays to this blog carnival, but there is an impressive influx of "new blood", too. Together, all of us are helping to promote the value of…
laelaps | April 20, 2009
A giraffe, photographed at the Bronx zoo.
Why do giraffes have long necks? We know that modern giraffes must have evolved gradually, but figuring out what selection pressures influenced giraffe evolution is another story altogether. One of the most popular recent explanations is that giraffes have long necks as a result of sexual selection.
The "necks for sex" hypothesis is primarily inspired by the contests between male giraffes. In these duels the males stand side by side and whack each other with their necks and ossicones ("horns"). This can be seen in the video below;
What does this…
clock | April 19, 2009
I know it's been a couple of months now since the ScienceOnline'09 and I have reviewed only a couple of sessions I myself attended and did not do the others. I don't know if I will ever make it to reviewing them one by one, but other people's reviews on them are under the fold here. For my previous reviews of individual sessions, see this, this, this, this and this.
What I'd like to do today is pick up on a vibe I felt throughout the meeting. And that is the question of Power. The word has a number of dictionary meanings, but they are all related. I'll try to relate them here and hope you…
clock | April 14, 2009Deadly Parasite's Rare Sexual Dalliances May Help Scientists Neutralize It:
For years, microbiologist Stephen Beverley, Ph.D., has tried to get the disease-causing parasite Leishmania in the mood for love. In this week's Science, he and colleagues at the National Institutes of Health report that they may have finally found the answer: Cram enough Leishmania into the gut of an insect known as the sand fly, and the parasite will have sex.
Biochemical Buzz On Career Changes In Bees:
Adults facing unexpected career changes, take note. Scientists from Brazil and Cuba are reporting that honey bees…
clock | April 10, 2009 (First posted on February 5, 2007) Last week I asked if you would be interested in my take on this paper, since it is in Serbian (and one commenter said Yes, so here it is - I am easy to persuade):
Stankovic Miodrag, Zdravkovic Jezdimir A., and Trajanovic Ljiljana,
Comparative analysis of sexual dreams of male and female students (PDF). Psihijatrija danas 2000, Vol. 32, No. 4, pp. 227-242
Here is the English-language Abstract:
The subject of research is analysis of connection between sexuality as instinctive function and dreams with sexual content as cognitive function. The sample consisted…
clock | April 10, 2009What?....
There is a slang phrase in Serbo-Croatian that means "doing nothing; being idle; wasting time", and it is "hladiti jaja", which means "cooling (one's) balls". So, if you see a guy just sitting there, clutching a beer bottle and gazing into the distance, you may ask him "Hey, man, whatcha doin'?" and he may reply " 'ladim jaja", i.e., "I'm coolin' me balls".
Well, this slang phrase, indicating a thermoregulatory behavior, has its origin in the real theromoregulatory physiology. Yes, mammals have to cool their balls. That is why mammalian testes are located outside the body inside…