Is oxytocin really the love and trust chemical? Or is it just the hype hormone? A new paper suggests that many studies of the relationship between oxytocin and behaviors such as trust have been flawed.
The paper is a meta-analysis just published by Norwegian researchers Mathias Valstad and colleagues. Valstad et al. found that the level of oxytocin in human blood, often used as a proxy measure of brain oxytocin, has no relation to central nervous system oxytocin levels under normal conditions. ...read more
(Credit: Champ-Ritthikrai/Shutterstock)
Your right brain is creative and your left brain is logical. This widely accepted dichotomy cleaves the brain neatly in two, but research has shown the actual division of labor in the brain is not nearly so straightforward.
Because the physical structures of both hemispheres appear identical, it wasn’t until the 19th century that scientists started hashing out the differences between brain hemispheres. That crucial insight came thank ...read more
Citizen scientists learn how algorithms affect their online shopping and help researchers break open the “black box” of price-personalization
By Chelsey Meyer
Have you ever wondered whether you see the same online prices as other consumers? If not, you may want to after hearing about price personalization. While many Internet users may understand that algorithms affect their social media feeds, few realize that algorithms also personalize their online shopping experiences. Researcher ...read more
Dendrochronologist Henri Grissino-Mayer and colleagues study the tree rings in the Karr-Koussevitzky double bass. Their analysis ultimately determined that the instrument was built much later than previously thought. (Credit: Henri Grissino-Mayer)
Modern science is full of surprising analytical techniques that can be used in a wide variety of remarkable circumstances.
My favorite technique is dendrochronology—the study of “tree time.” By assigning calendar-year dates to growt ...read more
(Credit: EJ Hersom/Department of Defense)
It’s a familiar scene that played out most recently at the London marathon: An exhausted runner staggers and falls in the home stretch, unable to will their legs forward another step. It’s an extreme example of a phenomenon endurance athletes come to know intimately, often called “hitting the wall,” or sometimes by the more offbeat term “bonking.”
The proverbial wall appears when our bodies have run out of store ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
