This one is hard to believe, but a new study suggests that if you're learning a new language, you're better off listening to recordings of your lessons while you're asleep rather than while you're awake.

According to a recent study conducted by researchers at the University of Grenoble in France, the results published were plain and simple - men who enjoyed dipping their food into hot, spicy sauce happened to have higher levels of free testosterone floating around their bloodstream after the meal. Salt preference, however, didn’t seem to have any link to testosterone levels. What does this correlation entail? Does capsaicin - the chemical responsible for spiciness - increase testosterone, or are those who are more likely to take risks possess higher levels of this potent male hormone? ...

According to a new study published in the journal PLOS One, it was found that identical twins are equally attractive to mosquitoes than fraternal - or non-identical - twins. This correlation lead researchers to conclude that mosquitoes might be making preferential choices based on differences in our DNA.

What causes this preferences? While it may be nice to believe that that mosquitoes are attracted to "sweeter blood", it's not true at all. Female mosquitoes - the ones that bite, in order to get protein necessary for egg development - are actually drawn to us by chemical signals related to body odour. ...

Sometimes it pays to have big, bad neighbors! Tiny black-chinned hummingbirds (shown above) have learned to build their homes near hawk nests. The hawks are too big to be interested in teeny hummingbird eggs, and they scare off the medium-sized birds that are.

According to the study, of the 342 hummer nests studied over three years, 80% were near hawk nests - and for good reason. The researchers monitored hummingbird egg and fledgling survival near six active and six inactive hawk nests. Those hummers unlucky enough to be near inactive nests lost all but 8% of their young, while those in a “good” neighborhood had a 70% success rate, they report.

Source: http://news.sciencemag.org/plants-animals/2015/09/why-hawk-hummingbird-s-best-friend ...

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but what’s influencing our eye? Scientists reveal that it’s not genetics but life experiences that lead us to find one face more attractive than another. This finding furthers the on-going debate of nature versus nurture.

Here's how the study went down: Researchers asked 547 pairs of identical twins and 214 pairs of same-gender fraternal twins to view 200 faces and rate them on a scale of one to seven, with one being the least attractive and seven the most attractive. A group of 660 non-twins then completed the same survey. If genes were more involved in facial preference, identical twins would have had similar ratings; if the influence of a familial environment carried more weight, fraternal twins w ...

Someone who greatly enjoys sweet foods is said to have a "sweet tooth." Experimental evidence now shows us that eating sweets forms memories that may control eating habits. In other words, people may enjoy eating sweets because the taste is correlated with positive memories.

The findings, published online in the journal Hippocampus, show that neurons in the dorsal hippocampus, the part of the brain that is critical for episodic memory, are activated by consuming sweets. Episodic memory is the memory of autobiographical events experienced at a particular time and place.

In the study, a meal consisting of a sweetened solution, either sucrose or saccharin, significantly increased the expression of the synaptic plasticity marker called activity ...

For decades, scientists have debated whether rapid eye movement sleep - the phase where dreams appear - is directly involved in memory formation. Now, a study provides evidence that REM sleep does, indeed, play this role in mice.

In this new study, the researchers used optogenetics, a recently developed technology that enables scientists to target precisely a population of neurons and control its activity by light. For this study, the neurons in the hippocampus were targeted (hippocampus being the structure that is critical for memory formation during wakefulness and is known as the 'GPS system' of the brain).

To test the long-term spatial memory of mice, the scientists trained the rodents to spot a new object placed in a controlled environm ...

Nearly one-third of women experience heavy periods each month. This means that unlike normal periods where women lose up to 40 mL of blood per cycle, some women lose as much as 80 mL (more than a quarter of a cup) in at least one cycle throughout their life. Scientists think they might have found the answer as to why this happens, and they are blaming it on a non-hormonal protein. A new small study suggests that low levels of a specific protein known as hypoxia-inducible factor 1 (HIF1, right) might be to blame.

HIF1 is a pretty handy healing molecule. When oxygen levels drop in parts of the body, a condition known as hypoxia, HIF1 activates more than 60 genes linked to tissue regeneration, and has already been shown to play a role in repai ...