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In the March/April 2013 issue of Scientific American MIND, we unveiled a lively new design for the Head Lines section of the magazine, including a news ticker along the bottom of the page. Here are the articles that the ticker mentions in brief.
Whether reading French words or Chinese characters, people harness the same brain regions.
A mother's brain can harbor cells that originated in a fetus. If a woman conceives a boy, she can end up with male cells in her brain.
After blending 30 odors, researchers dubbed their new nondescript scent "olfactory white," akin to white light and white noise.
Humans are innately good at deducing what someone else is thinking. A single location in the brain, the right temporoparietal junction, tucked behind the right ear, is where this reasoning is centered.
Humans and katydids - but no other known insects - have remarkably similar ears.
Fluoxetine, the active ingredient in Prozac, can end up in waterways. The drug can cause male fathead minnows to ignore - or even kill - females.
Parrots parroting parrots: In the wild, parrots purposely mimic the calls of a specific individual to elicit a response from that other bird.
Apes experience a midlife crisis, too. Captive chimps and orangutans show a dip in well-being in their late 20s to mid-30s, their middle age, before rebounding in old age.
Guppies bred to have bigger brains also had smaller guts and fewer offspring than their dumber counterparts.
Sleep medications are the second most common drug taken by astronauts, after painkillers. Most astronauts are sleep-deprived, averaging six hours of sleep a night. New LED fixtures could help prevent their insomnia.
