Sarah Boseley A prenatal screening test for autism comes closer today as new research is published that links high levels of the male hormone testosterone in the womb of pregnant women to autistic traits in their children. The ground-breaking study, published in the British Journal of Psychology by some of Britain's leading autism researchers, was prompted by the fact that autism is four times more common in boys than in girls. It is linked with other traits that are found more commonly in boys, such as left-handedness. For more than eight years, a team at Cambridge University's autism research centre has been observing and testing the development of a group of 235 children whose mothers had an amniocentesis during pregnancy. The procedure involves drawing off fluid surrounding the baby in the womb using a fine needle and is offered by hospitals to pregnant women over 35 or 37 to test for Down's syndrome. The age and circumstances of the women have been taken into account in the research. Dr Bonnie Auyeung, Professor Simon Baron-Cohen and colleagues, who publish their findings today, say they have consistently found a link between higher testosterone levels in the womb and autistic traits, such as a lack of sociability and verbal skills, in the children. These are not autistic children, but many of us have traits that are more pronounced in those who have a medical diagnosis. Autism has been described as a consequence of an extreme male brain. Those affected do not empathise easily with other people (as girls tend to do more readily than boys). They cannot guess what other people are thinking or feeling. They have a much stronger drive towards analysis and constructing systems and can have a great ability to focus on something that absorbs them. People with autism include some brilliant, albeit eccentric and reclusive, mathematicians and musicians, as well as children who are never able to communicate and may end up in an institution. © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009

Keyword: Autism; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 12423 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Matt Kaplan Among most mammals, being the biggest and meanest is the only way to become the alpha male with a choice of mates. But in chimpanzee society, it seems that being nice can be just as powerful. Grooming among chimpanzees has been proposed by some primatologists to be a strategy for solidifying relationships within groups1. Yet in spite of the many studies exploring this, no one had determined whether chimpanzees use grooming as a tactic for obtaining alpha status. Indeed, the conventional view, based largely on anecdotal evidence, is that bigger and tougher is better. Researchers at the University of Minnesota's Jane Goodall Institute Center for Primate Studies have now collated ten years of behavioural data on three male chimpanzee in Gombe National Park, Tanzania. Chimpanzees within the park have been routinely weighed by park staff2, allowing Mark Foster and his team from the institute to work out which tactics chimpanzees of dramatically different sizes used both before and after they became alpha males. Carrying 51.2 kilograms at his peak, Frodo, the second-largest male ever weighed at Gombe, proved to be the quintessential bully. With consistent high rates of aggression, including attacks on the researchers, he was alpha male from 1997-2003. But one of Gombe's smallest males, a 37-kilogram chimpanzee named Wilkie, followed a different path. Foster and his team noticed that Wilkie was an obsessive groomer, attending to others far more often than his rivals did. He also spent most of his time grooming his female partners, unlike most alpha males who only receive grooming from their partners. Yet, in spite of his lesser size and gentler nature, Wilkie held alpha status from 1989–92. © 2009 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Aggression; Evolution
Link ID: 12422 - Posted: 06.24.2010

David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor In the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love ... but whither when the year is young? It matters not, for as long as the hormones are in tune, love can bloom at any time, say scientists who study the genetics and neurobiology of animals whose family lives shed new light on human sexuality. Larry J. Young, a Georgia neurobiologist, studies the genes and hormones of the cute but often pestiferous little beasts called prairie voles, which mate and bond for life. Those genes and hormones exist in humans, too, and in a uniquely literate essay in today's issue of the journal Nature, Young points to the role they play in animals and humans. "Poetry it is not. Nor is it particularly romantic. But reducing love to its comprehensive parts helps us understand human sexuality and may lead to drugs that enhance or diminish our love for another," he said. Young, a professor in the psychiatry department at Emory University in Atlanta and the Yerkes National Primate Research Center there, has discovered that two closely related peptide hormones called oxytocin and vasopressin play powerful roles in both animal and human sexuality. "I call oxytocin the motherly hormone," Young said in an interview, "because its release in the body of female voles is involved in uterine contractions, in lactation and in the mother's early bonding with vole babies. It's also the hormone responsible for lifelong pair bonding between males and females. © 2009 Hearst Communications Inc.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 12421 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Scientists have developed new ways to cool heart attack and stroke victims' brains to protect them from brain damage. UK doctors believe that cooling could save lives by slowing the release of harmful chemicals from nerve cells, and many hospitals have adopted the idea. Among the inventions, reported in New Scientist magazine, is a cap that blows cold air across the scalp. Other innovations include a chilling nasal spray and an icy lung injection. Many intensive care units across the UK now use cooling techniques to help heart attack patients after two major research studies showed significant benefits. This "therapeutic hypothermia" is normally induced using cooled pads, ice packs or even injecting chilled saline liquid into the blood stream. However, researchers are hunting for ways to achieve the necessary 4C drop more efficiently - or targeting only the brain itself. The first of the new devices, developed at the University of Edinburgh, is a cooling helmet which works by passing cold air across the scalp, exploiting the dense network of blood vessels there. Tests on volunteers, reported in The British Journal of Anaesthesia suggested that the hood was able to cool the brain by 1C per hour. In the US, scientists are working on other quicker ways to achieve this, one by spraying a fine mist of droplets deep into the nasal cavity. The liquid used, perfluorocarbon, evaporates rapidly, taking heat away from the area, and cooling the brain as a result - by up to 2.4C per hour. A trial in pigs suggested this might not just reduce the chance of brain damage, but also improve the chances of successful resuscitation. (C)BBC

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 12420 - Posted: 01.10.2009

by Celeste Biever Autistic savant Daniel Tammet shot to fame when he set a European record for the number of digits of pi he recited from memory (22,514). For afters, he learned Icelandic in a week. But unlike many savants, he's able to tell us how he does it. We could all unleash extraordinary mental abilities by getting inside the savant mind, he tells Celeste Biever Do you think savants have been misunderstood - and perhaps dehumanised - in the past? Very often the analogy has been that a savant is like a computer, but what I do is about as far from what a computer does as you can imagine. This distinction hasn't been made before, because savants haven't been able to articulate how their minds work. I am lucky that the autism I have is mild, and that I was born into a large family and had to learn social skills, so I am able to speak up. When did you first realise you had special talents? At the age of 8 or 9. I was being taught maths at school and realised I could do the sums quickly, intuitively and in my own way - not using the techniques we were taught. I got so far ahead of the other children that I ran out of textbooks. I was aware already that I was different, because of my autism, but at that point I realised that the relationship I had with numbers was different. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 12419 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Nathan Seppa Brain surgeon Kenneth Follett had never received thank-you cards from his patients after performing an operation — until he started putting electrodes in their brains. Follett, who holds positions at the University of Nebraska Medical Center and the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Omaha, is among a select group of surgeons who over the past decade have been treating Parkinson’s disease by installing two tiny electrodes in a patient’s brain. The change these devices induce can be astonishing, he says. Parkinson’s is characterized by brain degeneration, marked by a shortage of the neurotransmitter dopamine. That shortage results in movement problems. After surgery, many patients are suddenly able to get around, do household chores and even go shopping, Follett says. “It has the potential to change people’s lives.” Follett’s firsthand observations are now supported by clinical research. He and a team of fellow surgeons and scientists report in the Jan. 7 Journal of the American Medical Association that Parkinson’s patients randomly assigned to get medication plus the surgery show dramatic improvements, whereas patients getting just the best available medication do not. The surgery, called deep-brain stimulation, isn’t new, having been first approved by regulators in 1997. But only one other study — reported by German scientists in 2006 — has tested the surgery against medication in a large, randomized trial. That study also showed benefits in patients who received both surgery and medication (SN: 9/2/06, p. 149). © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2009

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 12418 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Doctors should try not to prescribe antipsychotic drugs for elderly people with Alzheimer's, geriatricians said following new research that concluded taking people taking the medications had double the risk of dying during the course of the study. Anti-psychotic medications are sometimes given to control symptoms of dementia in elderly patients, such as wandering and aggressiveness. Generally, the drugs work by subduing the patients, making them easier to manage in facilities such as nursing homes. In the study appearing in Friday's issue of the medical journal Lancet Neurology, researchers followed 165 patients in Britain aged 67 to 100 with moderate to severe Alzheimer's disease from 2001 to 2004. Half of the participants continued taking their antipsychotic medications, including Risperdal (risperidone), Thorazine (chlorpromazine) and Stelazine (trifluoperazine). The other half got placebos. During the three-year study, seniors given a placebo were 42 per cent less likely to die than those who stayed on anti-psychotic medications, Clive Ballard of the Wolfson Centre for Age-Related Diseases at King's College London and his colleagues said. "I definitely think the results here are significant, and they reinforce some previous studies," said Dr. David Conn, vice-president of medical services and academic education at the Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care in Toronto. "We definitely need to pay attention to the results." © CBC 2009

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Alzheimers
Link ID: 12417 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Constance Holden The next time you spot an old friend from across the room, thank oxytocin. Researchers have shown that the brain hormone helps us sense whether a face is familiar. Oxytocin is a powerful social chemical. In voles, for example, the hormone is key to attachment behavior: Males with higher levels of oxytocin are more likely to be faithful to their mates. Humans also make use of the hormone. Oxytocin helps us maintain our trust in others, even when they have done us wrong (ScienceNOW, 21 May 2008) Curious about other effects of oxytocin in people, psychologist Ulrike Rimmele of the University of Zurich in Switzerland and colleagues tested the hormone's role in social memory. The team recruited 44 heterosexual men and gave half of them a nasal spray spiked with oxytocin. The researchers then asked the men to look at 168 pictures--half of them of people and half of objects, such as houses and paintings--for a few seconds. The men then had to rate how much they would like to approach each person or object on a scale of one to seven. The next day, the researchers tested the men's memories by presenting them with the pictures they had already seen, along with 72 new photos. Oxytocin did not appear to affect subjects' approachability ratings, for either faces or objects, the researchers will report tomorrow in The Journal of Neuroscience. However, it did influence whether they recognized familiar faces. The oxytocin-treated subjects picked out 46% of faces they had seen before compared with 36% for the control group. And men who'd received oxytocin were more accurate than the controls in determining which faces they had never seen. There was no difference between the two groups in object recognition. © 2009 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Emotions; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 12416 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Laura Sanders Mosquitoes use their own kind of eHarmony to find a compatible mate. New research shows that male and female mosquitoes sing duets of matching love songs by vibrating their wings. The annoying recordings of mosquito duets aren’t likely to go platinum, but they give researchers some interesting new ways to think about courtship behavior in insects. The study, published online January 8 in Science, finds that male and female Aedes aegypti — carriers of dengue and yellow fever — change the pitch of their buzzing to match each other’s harmonics. The results go “way beyond the accepted dogma on hearing in mosquitoes and perhaps indeed in other organisms,” comments Daniel Robert, an expert on insect hearing at the University of Bristol in England. A female mosquito’s come-hither buzz, produced by vibrating her wings at a certain rate, is irresistible to males. Scientists have long thought that male mosquitoes could hear just enough sound to locate and home in on a female, says coauthor of the new study Ronald Hoy, of Cornell University. What’s more, females were thought to be totally deaf. The importance of female behavior in animals has been overlooked until the last few decades, says Hoy. “The assumption was that it’s all about the guys,” he says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2009

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Animal Communication
Link ID: 12415 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia are typically seen as afflicting the elderly, but new data suggests an increasing number of baby boomers are also being struck by the brain-destroying diseases. Of the half-million Canadians affected by various forms of dementia, about 71,000 — or almost 15 per cent — are under age 65, says a study by the Alzheimer Society of Canada. Of those, about 50,000 are 59 or younger. "We know that we're finding far more individuals in their 50s and 60s who have dementia," said society CEO Scott Dudgeon. "We're talking about dementia generally, including Alzheimer's disease." The rising tide of cases among these not-quite seniors as well as their older counterparts threatens to swamp the health-care system and severely affect the economy, Dudgeon warns. "I guess the thing that's most dramatic when you look at the numbers is this grey tsunami that people have been talking about … seems to be arriving now," he said. "And when you start looking at the number of people who are going to be developing dementia over the next few years, the impact is going to be tremendous." With Canada's aging population, the society predicts that within five years, an additional 250,000 people could be diagnosed with Alzheimer's or another dementia. By 2040, that number could swell to between one million and 1.3 million. © CBC 2009

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 12414 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By RONI CARYN RABIN Spikes in blood sugar can take a toll on memory by affecting the dentate gyrus, an area of the brain within the hippocampus that helps form memories, a new study reports. High glucose seemed to affect the dentate gyrus, part of the hippocampus (shaded). Researchers said the effects can be seen even when levels of blood sugar, or glucose, are only moderately elevated, a finding that may help explain normal age-related cognitive decline, since glucose regulation worsens with age. The study, by researchers at Columbia University Medical Center and funded in part by the National Institute on Aging, was published in the December issue of Annals of Neurology. “If we conclude this is underlying normal age-related cognitive decline, then it affects all of us,” said lead investigator Dr. Scott Small, associate professor of neurology at Columbia University Medical Center. The ability to regulate glucose starts deteriorating by the third or fourth decade of life, he added. Since glucose regulation is improved with physical activity, Dr. Small said, “We have a behavioral recommendation — physical exercise.” In the study, researchers used high-resolution functional magnetic resonance imaging to map brain regions in 240 elderly subjects. They found a correlation between elevated blood glucose levels and reduced cerebral blood volume, or blood flow, in the dentate gyrus, an indication of reduced metabolic activity and function in that region of the brain. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Stress
Link ID: 12413 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By PAM BELLUCK To learn more about the biochemistry of addiction, scientists in Australia dropped liquefied freebase cocaine on bees’ backs, so it entered the circulatory system and brain. The scientists found that bees react much like humans do: cocaine alters their judgment, stimulates their behavior and makes them exaggeratedly enthusiastic about things that might not otherwise excite them. What’s more, bees exhibit withdrawal symptoms. When a coked-up bee has to stop cold turkey, its score on a standard test of bee performance (learning to associate an odor with sugary syrup) plummets. “What we have in the bee is a wonderfully simple system to see how brains react to a drug of abuse,” said Andrew B. Barron, a senior lecturer at Macquarie University in Australia and a co-leader in the bees-on-cocaine studies. “It may be that when we know that, we’ll be able to stop a brain reacting to a drug of abuse, and then we may be able to discover new ways to prevent abuse in humans.” The research, published in The Journal of Experimental Biology, advances the knowledge of reward systems in insects, and aims to “use the honeybee as a model to study the molecular basis of addiction,” said Gene E. Robinson, director of the neuroscience program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a co-author with Dr. Barron, and Ryszard Maleszka and Paul G. Helliwell at Australian National University. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 12412 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jonah Lehrer THE CITY HAS always been an engine of intellectual life, from the 18th-century coffeehouses of London, where citizens gathered to discuss chemistry and radical politics, to the Left Bank bars of modern Paris, where Pablo Picasso held forth on modern art. Without the metropolis, we might not have had the great art of Shakespeare or James Joyce; even Einstein was inspired by commuter trains. (Yuko Shimizu for the Boston Globe) And yet, city life isn't easy. The same London cafes that stimulated Ben Franklin also helped spread cholera; Picasso eventually bought an estate in quiet Provence. While the modern city might be a haven for playwrights, poets, and physicists, it's also a deeply unnatural and overwhelming place. Now scientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are chastening. Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control. While it's long been recognized that city life is exhausting -- that's why Picasso left Paris -- this new research suggests that cities actually dull our thinking, sometimes dramatically so. "The mind is a limited machine,"says Marc Berman, a psychologist at the University of Michigan and lead author of a new study that measured the cognitive deficits caused by a short urban walk. "And we're beginning to understand the different ways that a city can exceed those limitations." © 2009 NY Times Co

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 12411 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Peter Aldhous When you're in love, everything seems different - and that includes your sense of smell. Women who are deeply in love struggle to recognise the body odour of male friends, but their ability to distinguish their partner's smell is unaffected. Body odours are known to play a role in human sexual attraction. But how does falling in love affect our perception and processing of these smells? To find out, Johan Lundström and Marilyn Jones-Gotman of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, asked a group of 20 young women with boyfriends to fill in a Passionate Love Scale questionnaire (pdf format) to determine just how much in love they were. Meanwhile, the women's partners and male and female friends slept for a seven nights in a cotton T-shirt with pads sewn into the underarms to soak up their sweat. In a series of trials, each woman was asked to pick out their lover's or a friend's T-shirt from three garments, two of which had been worn by strangers. The women's scores on the Passionate Love Scale made no difference to their ability to recognise a lover's shirt, or that worn by a female friend. But those who were more deeply in love were less good at distinguishing a male friend's odour from those of strangers. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 12410 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Erin Davis Each year, approximately one child in every 150 is diagnosed with autism. Eleven-year-old Andrew Skillings is one of those children. He has Asperger's syndrome, a mild form of autism. For Andrew's older sister Marissa, her brother's diagnosis has affected every aspect of her life from the time he was born. She was almost 5 and shared a room with Andrew. Marissa says she remembers those first few weeks he was home. "I decided he needed to go back where he came from, because as a baby he never, ever stopped screaming," she says. Then the Skillings found out Andrew had a mental disability. Recently, Marissa described what it's like to live with a little brother who has frequent meltdowns — and who she tries to protect. "I'd kill for him. But I could kill him, too. He talks. Nonstop. Talking and talking," Marissa says. "He'll tell anybody information about an animal, whether they want to hear it or not. People can tell Andrew has a disability because of his hand gestures and the way he moves when he gets nervous. "He moves his hands back and forth; and he'll walk with his hands down by his sides just shaking his hands; and he likes to crack his knuckles when he's nervous, and he'll keep doing the movement even if they don't crack." Copyright 2009 NPR

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 12409 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The odds of suffering a ruptured brain aneurysm go up sharply among people who smoke and have a family history of aneurysms, compared with all other people, whether or not they do or have smoked and have family aneurysm histories, a U.S. statistical study suggests. "While all people should be advised to quit smoking, our findings suggest that there is an interaction so that if you smoke and you have a family history of aneurysms, you are at an extremely high risk of suffering a stroke from a ruptured brain aneurysm," study author Dr. Daniel Woo said in a news release. The study set out to examine the connection between two independent variables — a heredity factor, namely family history of aneurysms, and an environmental factor, namely smoking — and to see how the risk of stroke from brain aneurysm changed with both factors present. The study found that smokers with a family history of stroke were more than six times more likely to suffer a stroke than those who did not smoke and did not have a family history of stroke or brain aneurysm. In the study, published online Dec. 31 by the journal Neurology, scientists with the University of Cincinnati looked at 339 people who had suffered a stroke from a brain aneurysm and 1,016 people who had not. © CBC 2009

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Stroke
Link ID: 12408 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By CAMILLE SWEENEY These are among the first things to become harder to read as people slide further into middle age and their eyes lose their ability to focus. What can begin as a gentle blur might end with not being able to make out the peas on your plate. This condition, known as presbyopia, is the slow deterioration of close vision and is most commonly attributed to aging. It is caused by a loss of elasticity of the crystalline lens, the structure behind the iris that enables the eye to focus on objects at various distances. The arrival of presbyopia can be “one of those ‘Whoa, I’m aging’ moments,” said Randy Savin, 50, president of an insurance agency in Solon, Ohio. For Mr. Savin, that moment came two years ago when he realized he had to hold the newspaper at a distance to read it. At the time, he could count on both hands the number of prescription glasses he used for distance: he had eight pairs that floated between his two cars, home and office. “I just couldn’t handle the thought of adding readers to my life,” Mr. Savin said. Until recently, there wasn’t much more one could do than to succumb to a pair of reading glasses, or try to correct the problem with either monovision contact lenses (one eye is corrected for distance, one for up close) or laser surgery. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 12407 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Anna J. Abramson. High-stakes democratic elections often boil down to a matter of trust. In this year's presidential race, for example, junior senator Barack Obama has routinely peppered his speeches with "you can trust me on that," or, "so you can trust me when I say...." Meanwhile, veteran senator John McCain has tried to convince Americans that he has "earned" their trust. "Trust is uniquely and especially prominent this year because it's an issue that rings so loudly when you talk about experience versus inexperience," says Democratic strategist Jake Maguire, who has worked on campaigns for John Kerry, John Edwards, and Obama. On the campaign trail, Maguire says, candidates often swap the suits and ties they wear at speeches and debates for rolled up sleeves and jeans. "Out there on the stump, the best way to look trustworthy is to seem like you're 'one of us,'" says Maguire. "The idea is: You can trust them. They're just like your neighbors, the people you know." Indeed, political operatives have worked since the dawn of democracy to make candidates look trustworthy—an effective strategy, according to cutting edge studies that may change the way we view campaigns and elections. In recent years, researchers have found that snap judgments of candidates, based on nothing more than their faces, can reliably and powerfully predict the outcomes of political elections. According to these studies, it only takes a tenth of a second for subjects to decide if a face is trustworthy or not.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 12406 - Posted: 06.24.2010

BRAIN activity that is "scrambled" in deaf cats develops normally if they are fitted with a cochlear implant shortly after birth. The finding may explain how deaf children given implants as babies can learn to speak almost as well as hearing children. In hearing animals, sound vibrates hair cells in the inner ear, triggering neurons to send impulses to the brain. In deaf animals, these hair cells are often defective; cochlear implants compensate by stimulating neurons directly. To see how this artificial stimulation affects the brain, Rob Shephard at the Bionic Ear Institute in Melbourne, Australia, and colleagues recorded electrical activity in the cortex of 17 8-month-old cats that were deaf from birth. As they monitored the cats' brains, they activated each cat's cochlear implant. Ten of the cats had received the implant relatively recently and their electrical activity was "completely scrambled", indicating that they did not perceive sound coherently: normal cortex activity is key to perceiving sound and, in humans, to developing speech. In the seven cats that received implants at 8 weeks old, however, activity was similar to that in hearing cats (The Journal of Comparative Neurology, DOI: 10.1002/cne.21886). © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Hearing; Robotics
Link ID: 12405 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Elizabeth Quill Eye candy might more appropriately be called brain candy. Seeing a pretty face is like eating a piece of oh-so-sweet chocolate — for the brain, if not for the stomach. In fact, attractive faces activate the same reward circuitry in the brain as food, drugs and money. For humans, there is something captivating and unforgettable about the arrangement of two balls, a point and a horizontal slit on the front of the head. The power of faces isn’t lost on psychologists. “Faces are interesting because they impart so much information — expression, attention — and these interact with facial beauty,” says Anthony Little of the University of Stirling in Scotland. So it’s no surprise that making faces attractive is big business. Each year, Americans spend more than $13 billion on cosmetic surgery and tens of billions on cosmetics and beauty aids. But while facial improvements leave those who subscribe to them with a healthy glow and the illusion of youth — subtracting a few years can bump you up a few notches on the hot-or-not barometer — studies of attractiveness have tended to leave the scientists who undertake them with puzzled looks, gray hairs and wrinkles. Recently, though, researchers seeking to unmask the essence of facial attractiveness have been using computer technology to isolate the characteristics long rumored to underlie beauty. New methods reveal that averageness, or a lack of distinctness, makes someone more appealing, while facial symmetry doesn’t automatically make a knockout, as most people believe. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2009

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 12404 - Posted: 06.24.2010