Eideard

A new meta-analysis study conducted by Syracuse University Professor Stephanie Ortigue is getting attention around the world. The groundbreaking study, “The Neuroimaging of Love,” reveals falling in love can elicit not only the same euphoric feeling as using cocaine, but also affects intellectual areas of the brain. Researchers also found falling in love only takes about a fifth of a second…

Results from Ortigue’s team revealed when a person falls in love, 12 areas of the brain work in tandem to release euphoria-inducing chemicals such as dopamine, oxytocin, adrenaline and vasopression. The love feeling also affects sophisticated cognitive functions, such as mental representation, metaphors and body image.

The findings beg the question, “Does the heart fall in love, or the brain?”

“That’s a tricky question always,” says Ortigue. “I would say the brain, but the heart is also related because the complex concept of love is formed by both bottom-up and top-down processes from the brain to the heart and vice versa. For instance, activation in some parts of the brain can generate stimulations to the heart, butterflies in the stomach. Some symptoms we sometimes feel as a manifestation of the heart may sometimes be coming from the brain.”

Other researchers also found blood levels of nerve growth factor, or NGF, also increased. Those levels were significantly higher in couples who had just fallen in love. This molecule involved plays an important role in the social chemistry of humans, or the phenomenon ‘love at first sight.’ “These results confirm love has a scientific basis,” says Ortigue…

RTFA. Fascinating research. Why try to keep romanticism divorced from science?

In fact, the sense of adventure, quest for knowledge, newer and greater understanding of life and living seems to me to be one of the romantic undertakings there could be. Dullards are the ones afraid of real science.

An analysis of sediment cores indicates that biological and chemical changes occurring at a remote Arctic lake are unprecedented over the past 200,000 years and likely are the result of human-caused climate change, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder.

While environmental changes at the lake over the past millennia have been shown to be tightly linked with natural causes of climate change — like periodic, well-understood wobbles in Earth’s orbit — changes seen in the sediment cores since about 1950 indicate expected climate cooling is being overridden by human activity like greenhouse gas emissions. The research team reconstructed past climate and environmental changes at the lake on Baffin Island using indicators that included algae, fossil insects and geochemistry preserved in sediment cores that extend back 200,000 years.

“The past few decades have been unique in the past 200,000 years in terms of the changes we see in the biology and chemistry recorded in the cores,” said lead study author Yarrow Axford of CU-Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. “We see clear evidence for warming in one of the most remote places on Earth at a time when the Arctic should be cooling because of natural processes…”

Axford emphasized the multiyear research project required expertise from each of the five institutions involved in the PNAS study. “This was a team effort all the way around, and each of the institutions has a unique set of skills that allowed us to carry out this study,” she said. “We needed people who understood algae, insects, glaciers and geochemistry, not to mention how to drive snowmobiles and extract the cores.”

You should RTFA.

Interesting multi-disciplinary approach and methods. And of course all the nutballs with whom you get to discuss climate change will NOT have read it. They don’t read anything.