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August 20, 2007

New York Times

Is There Anything Good About Men? And Other Tricky Questions

By John Tierney


What percentage of your ancestors were men?

No, it’s not 50 percent, as I’ll explain shortly. But first let me credit the
source, Roy F. Baumeister, who answered that question – and a lot of other ones
– in an address on Friday at the annual convention of the American Psychological
Association in San Francisco. I recommend reading the whole speech: "Is There
Anything Good About Men?"

As you might expect, he did find something good to say about men, but the
speech wasn’t an apologia for the gender, or a whine about the abuse heaped on
men. Rather, it was a shrewd and provocative look at the motivational
differences between men and women – and at some of the topics (like the gender
imbalance on science faculties) that got Larry Summers in so much trouble at
Harvard. Dr. Baumeister, a prominent social psychologist who teaches at Florida
State University, began by asking gen…

Time changes modern human's face

By Rebecca Morelle
BBC News science reporter
Researchers have found that the shape of the human skull has changed significantly over the past 650 years. Modern people possess less prominent features but higher foreheads than our medieval ancestors. Writing in the British Dental Journal, the team took careful measurements of groups of skulls spanning across 30 generations. The scientists said the differences between past and present skull shapes were "striking". Plague victims The team used radiographic films of skulls to record extensive measurements taken by a computer.They looked at 30 skulls dating from the mid-14th Century. They had come from the unlucky victims of the plague. The skulls had been excavated from plague pits in the 1980s in London. Another 54 skulls examined by the team were recovered from the wreck of the Mary Rose which sank off the south coast of England in 1545. All the skulls were compared with 31 recent …

By Leigh DaytonAugust 21, 2007 02:00am
IT'S official. Blue is the most popular colour and women really do prefer pink, and reddish shades of blue like lilac and purple. And the preference isn't just a result of social stereotypes, pushing pink on girls and blue on boys. It's innate and occurs across cultures, claim British researchers who studied the colour preferences of 208 young adults: 171 Britons and 37 mainland Chinese. "Although we expected to find sex differences, we were surprised at how robust they were, given the simplicity of ourtest," said visual neuroscientist Anya Hurlbert of Newcastle University at Newcastle upon Tyne. Along with psychologist Yazhu Ling, Professor Hurlbert asked volunteers to select, as quickly as possible, their preferred colour from each of a series of paired, coloured rectangles. They reported yesterday in the journal Current Biology that the most popular colour by far was blue. "On top of that, females have a prefe…