Another study on the differences between men's and women's brains; this time the claim is that men score on average 5 points above women on IQ tests -- despite the fact that the researcher himself pointed out that there is no such difference between the genders at 14 years of age, and the awkward fact that women now outnumber men at every level of educational achievement except doctorates. The researchers explain this by suggesting that women can achieve more than men "possibly because they are more conscientious and better adapted to sustained periods of hard work"! It might be more plausible to note that lower scores of older women compared to girls presently in education point to what education can achieve.
The same researcher has achieved a level of notoriety for his claims that whites are more intelligent than blacks, and even that lighter skinned African-Americans are more intelligent than darker-skinned. Let's remember what IQ tests measure -- not "pure intelligence", because we have yet to define what that is, but a number of abilities which are heavily influenced by education. [BBC report; Guardian report]

The latest issue of the science & Consciousness Review is out, with some intriguing items. For example, have you ever wondered why the world doesn't go dark when you blink? (No, I hadn't, actually -- I assumed it just happened too fast to notice) Apparently part of our brain switches off at the same time. And there's a clinical condition where stroke victims deny they're paralyzed. No, they're not just "in denial"; there's a reason they don't think they're paralyzed -- the vagaries of the human brain, isn't it amazing?

And here's yet another article on gender differences, this time on the whole socialization question. I must say I'm in complete agreement with it. I'm fond of saying I believed completely in the "give me a child until he's seven" ideology, until I had children. When my male toddler -- raised in a tv-free household, only educational toys, friends all similarly inclined, etc -- started making guns out of his duplo blocks, I lost my faith!

A study of consumers' response to advertising has thrown up an intriguing result. The study involved showing people 8 tv ads, half of which were categorized as "emotional" (designed to elicit an emotional response) and half "informational" (designed to provide information). Oddly, while (thankfully) informational ads worked better with some consumers, those who were more skeptical and disliked advertising were more affected by the emotional ads! The researchers suggested that their inattention and contempt for advertising meant that they disregarded any information, but although they recognized emotional ads as being manipulative, they still succumbed to the manipulation. Kind of depressing really, but maybe the moral of the story is that too much skepticism can be a bad thing!

The Guardian has a couple of (completely unrelated) articles of interest. One is on that hardy perennial, birth order. An impressively large study may finally have given us a clearer answer to a question that has been plagued with ambiguity; the study involved analyzing the entire population of Norway aged 16-74, between the years 1986 and 2000. And the conclusion was that, regardless of family size or income, first-born children do indeed do better in terms of educational achievement than their younger siblings: equivalent on average to the first child gaining an extra year of schooling compared with the third child.

The second article discusses a breakthrough by British scientists: making the first pure batch of brain stem cells from human stem cells. This may help in the fight against neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and may also reduce the number of animals used in medical research.