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It's a cliché that men just don't understand women. Now, new research suggests men really do struggle to read women's emotions — at least from their eyes. The research, ... showed that men had twice as much trouble deciphering women's emotions from images of their eyes compared with those of men. Parts of the male brain tied to emotion also didn't activate as strongly when the men looked at women's eyes.(snip) To see whether men really did have trouble reading women's emotions, Boris Schiffer, a researcher at the LWL-University Hospital in Bochum, Germany and his colleagues put 22 men between...

NOW THAT California taxpayers know that the $3 billion ($6 billion with debt service) that they voted in 2004 to spend on stem-cell research may possibly be an outright grant of money for research rather than an investment, does it make a difference? Does it matter that Robert Klein, the author and chief promoter of Proposition 71, knew while he was promising the voters a return on their investment that the state might be forbidden to collect royalties from the biomedical research it invests in because of an arcane federal tax law? What was voters' intent in approving a plan...

A COMPLETELY blind British man had been shown to possess an apparent "sixth sense" which let him recognise emotions on people's faces, British scientists said in research released today. The 52-year-old was able to react to pictures of human faces showing emotions such as anger, happiness or fear, the researchers said. The man, identified only as "patient X", has suffered two strokes which damaged the brain areas that process visual signals, leaving him completely blind. However his eyes and optic nerves are intact, and brain scans showed that he appeared to somehow use a part of the brain not usually...