Portside

The idea that people have either a “female” or “male” brain is an old one. To test the theory, scientists looked for differences in brain scans of 1400 people. They found that very few people had all of the brain features they might be expected to have, based on their sex. Averaged across many people, sex differences in brain structure do exist, but an individual brain is likely to be just that: individual, with a mix of features.

Fossils established the Brain Boom as fact. But they tell us next to nothing about how and why the human brain grew so large so quickly. In the last eight years, however, scientists have started to answer the “how” of human brain expansion — that is, the question of how the supersizing happened on a cellular level and how human physiology reconfigured itself to accommodate a dramatically enlarged and energy-guzzling brain.

Coffee and cigarettes. Well, it turns out that one of them is good for you. As for e-cigarettes ... hold the conclusions.

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A new study shows that two glaciers in Greenland are showing worrying changes, and that one has been retreating at an accelerating rate in recent years as it faces a dual attack by warm air from above and warm water from below. The glacier Zachariae has shrunk by 95 percent since 2002. The mass of miles-thick ice that covers most of Greenland could raise global sea levels by some 20 feet if it all melted.

Cooperative colonies — ants, termites, and some wasps and bees — have fascinated scientists for more than a century because they pose an evolutionary conundrum. Only a very small number of insects actually get to reproduce: the queens and their mates. The rest give up their chance to contribute to the gene pool, caring for the offspring of others instead. How did this lifestyle, known as eusociality, evolve?

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