Idyllic Modjeska Canyon

For the Times’ Janet Wilson and other canyon residents, it’s been a rough eight months. Janet gets personal. Check it out: Fire, rain, love, marriage—and an idyllic Modjeska Canyon to intensify it all

Casualty of the October fire.

The view from The Reb's neighborhood.

Still idyllic.

Sunny Girl, prowling in nearby Live Oak Canyon, twenty minutes ago. (All photos: Chunk, except top photo: LA Times.)

A little science for you

.....Here’s a little science for you this morning. A good place to go for science reporting is the British Guardian. This morning’s Guardian tells us that, according to Swedish scientists, Gay men have similar brains to straight women

.....Striking similarities between the brains of gay men and straight women have been discovered by neuroscientists, offering fresh evidence that sexual orientation is hardwired into our neural circuitry.
.....Scans reveal homosexual men and heterosexual women have symmetrical brains, with the right and left hemispheres almost exactly the same size. Conversely, lesbians and straight men have asymmetrical brains, with the right hemisphere significantly larger than the left.
.....Scientists at the prestigious Stockholm Brain Institute in Sweden also found certain brain circuits linked to emotional responses were the same in gay men and straight women.
.....The findings, published tomorrow in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest the biological factors that influence sexual orientation—such as exposure to testosterone in the womb—may also shape the brain's anatomy.
.....The study, led by the neurobiologist Ivanka Savic, builds on previous research that has identified differences in spatial and verbal abilities related to sex and sexual orientation. Tests have found gay men and straight women fare better at certain language tasks, while heterosexual men and lesbians tend to have better spatial awareness.
.....Savic and her colleague Per Linström took MRI brain scans of 90 volunteers who were divided into four groups of similar ages according to whether they were male, female, heterosexual or homosexual. The scans showed the right side of the brain in heterosexual men was typically 2% larger than the left. Lesbians showed a similar asymmetry, with the right hand side of the brain 1% larger than the left.
.....Scans on homosexual men and heterosexual women revealed both sides of the brain were the same size….

• From a couple of days ago (Guardian’s “Bad Science” column): How being swindled can make you feel better

.....…A paper currently in press for the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (available online) addresses this issue explicitly. Participants were given a quiz on American history, with the opportunity to win cash rewards for correct answers and the option to get advice for each question. The 'advice' was simply another student's answers, perfectly likely to be wrong, and the experimenters were quite clear about this.
.....The participants were either offered the advice for free, or they were offered the opportunity to buy it. It was made absolutely clear that the advice was of exactly the same quality, whether it was free or not. Participants were significantly more likely to change their answers in line with advice they had paid for, compared with advice they received for free. We are suckers.
…
.....A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in March subjected 82 healthy subjects to painful electric shocks and, in a lengthy and authoritative leaflet, offered them pain relief in the form of a pill which was described as being similar to codeine, but with a faster onset. In fact, it was just a placebo, a pill with no medicine; a sugar pill. The pain relief was significantly stronger when subjects were told the tablet cost $2.50 than when they were told it cost 10c.
.....Even better is a paper published in January in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Volunteers tasted and rated five wines, each individually priced, although in fact there were only three different wines, and two were tasted twice: once labelled at $90 a bottle, and once at $10. The results were clear: cheap wine really does taste better simply because we are told it's expensive….

• From Friday’s What’s New (physicist Bob Park):

.....After 99 years of trying, naturopaths in Minnesota can now call themselves "doctor."
.....That's OK, in Minnesota they call tag-team wrestlers "Governor."

• Listen to the Guardian’s Science Extra podcast from the 16th: MIT chemistry professor Dan Nocera tells Guardian science correspondent Alok Jha why chemistry can solve the energy crisis