A new study by Dacher Keltner has shown that Americans and Brits smile differently. From an article in Sunday’s Times Online >> While we British smile by pulling our lips back and upwards and exposing our lower teeth, Americans are more likely simply to part their lips and stretch the corners of their mouths. So […]

…or, what the #*!@% is wrong with paleoanthropologists?! From Saturday’s Guardian >> “History of modern man unravels as German scholar is exposed as fraud” It appeared to be one of archaeology’s most sensational finds. The skull fragment discovered in a peat bog near Hamburg was more than 36,000 years old – and was the vital […]

Research has suggested that women are attracted to masculine-looking men during the most fertile time of their menstrual cycle — presumably in order to secure the most robust genes possible for their offspring — whereas during the less fertile times, they tend to choose more feminine-looking men — kinder, gentler and more co-operative long(er)-term partners […]

There’s some good news and some bad according to this research [article in press] by Daniel Nettle: [P]ersonality axes such as extraversion can usefully be seen as dimensions of trade-off of different fitness costs and benefits. It is hypothesized that increasing extraversion will be associated with increasing mating success, but at the cost of either […]

Researchers at Duke University have proposed changes to the naming of bird neurosystems arguing that numerous studies demonstrate that various regions of avian brains are sophisticated processing regions that correspond in function to ones found in mammalian brains. These processing regions include areas that allow “sensory processing, motor control and sensorimotor learning just as the […]

Well, there’s been a lot of brouhaha lately over the president of Harvard’s comments on women in science/mathematics and the possibility of innate cognitive differences between men and women. Some people — scientists, in fact — seem to not even want to discuss the issue in a rational manner. Thankfully, some do. From a University […]

Just spotted this press release over at the National Institute of Allergy andInfectious Diseases (NIAID) site >> Scientists Discover Key Genetic Factor in Determining HIV/AIDS Risk “Individual risk of acquiring HIV and experiencing rapid disease progression is not uniform within populations,” says Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., director of NIAID. “This important study identifies genetic factors […]