LiveScience examines how and why rats are aroused by tiny vests:

In an unusual study, researchers allowed virgin male rats to have sex with females wearing special rodent “jackets.” Later, when scientists gave the males a chance to mate again, the animals preferred to mate with jacket-wearing female rats rather than with unclad ones.

The findings […]

Science Daily reveals that two kinds of phthalates – chemicals found in ordinary stuff like dryer sheets, soap, lipstick and vinyl fabrics – can drop IQ points off developing babies:

Since 2009, several phthalates have been banned from children’s toys and other childcare articles in the United States. However, no steps have been taken […]

New Scientist reveals how menthol – something originally added to cigarettes to soothe smokers’ throats – actually makes cigarettes more ‘cigarette-y’:

People who smoke menthol cigarettes often smoke more frequently and can be less likely to quit – and it could be because fresh-tasting menthol is changing their brains to more sensitive to nicotine.

How menthol […]

Science News breaks some scary news to the fungus-phobic and those of us living in old buildings or moist climates. Researchers at CUNY have discovered exactly *how* household mold is bad for your brain:

Cheryl Harding, a psychologist at the City University of New York, and colleagues dripped low doses of spores from the toxic […]

NPR goes, ahem, under the covers to trace the brain chemistry of sleep:

“One of the most profound effects of a night of sleep is the improvement in our ability to remember things,” says Ravi Allada, a sleep researcher at Northwestern University. Yet this connection hasn’t been well-understood, he says.

That’s changing, thanks to recent […]

CBC has more on a study that finds kids adopted from China in infancy still have native speakers’ brain responses to spoken Chinese – even if they can’t understand it:

Brain scans show that children adopted from China as babies into families that don’t speak Chinese still unconsciously recognize Chinese sounds as language more […]

Nature takes a second look at the neurology of feeling a presence right next to you:

Some people with relatively rare types of brain injury also experience this ‘feeling of a presence’. A study involving a dozen such patients, published today in Current Biology, suggests that the eerie feeling may arise when a person’s brain […]

Laboratory Equipment discusses research that’s found a low-carb, high-fat diet reduces seizures in hard-to-treat epilepsy:

“We need new treatments for the 35 percent of people with epilepsy whose seizures are not stopped by medications,” said study author Pavel Klein, of the Mid-Atlantic Epilepsy and Sleep Center, and a member of the American Academy of Neurology. […]

Science Daily has some cheerful news from Columbia University Medical Center neuroscience researchers, who’ve found that cocoa fights age-related memory decline:

Previous work, including by the laboratory of senior author Scott A. Small, MD, had shown that changes in a specific part of the brain — the dentate gyrus — are associated with age-related […]