The more things change...

A round of the science news reveals an equally brilliant follow-up to last week's article about drinking during pregnancy: Scotsmen show that pregnant women shouldn't be smoking pot either. What's a poor girl to do? Doctors complain about a bottle of pills called "Placebo" on sale in the US for $6/bottle (50 pills). They're right - Smarties would be way cheaper, equally damaging to your child's psyche, and, hey, if you're going to be a crap parent then you might as well go all out.

The story that most catches my eye is this one about differences seen in brain scans of homo- and heterosexual subjects. The first question I always think to myself when I read about research like this is "Why do people want to get themselves embroiled in this?" The research I do involves rats and cell cultures, not people and highly-charged issues like homosexuality and sexual arousal. I'd be scared of running a lab with so much emotional impact on people, not to mention counting on a Conservative government for funding.

I don't do brain scans, so I can't comment on this paper to the depth I could on something way less interesting (but I will inevitably end up talking about on day). But it all looks legit - there's a whole body a of research showing that men have asymmetrical brains (enlarged right hemisphere) compared to women, and these guys show differences in resting activity patterns and connectivity. However, we'll all be lot more impressed when researchers can look at a brain scan without seeing the patient and be able to predict whether they were looking at a straight or gay representative of a given sex. And why not? A group published last month on a study where they successfully predicted nouns the subjects were thinking about by their brain scans.

One of the most interesting things about the study was that subjects asked to sit and rest in a PET scanner to measure brain activity. They saw plenty in an area called the amygdala, which tends to go active in times of emotional arousal. Which is nice, because maybe it means that gay or straight, men and women are more alike than we like to think sometimes - scientific evidence suggests that either a) everyone gets nervous around doctors whilst in a brain scanner, or my preferred explanation b) left to our own devices, we all think about sex.