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Looks aren't everything but love, it would seem, is far from blind. Across cultures and sexes, some features hold greater appeal. "More symmetrical faces do seem to be rated more attractive," says Tamsin Saxton, a senior lecturer at Northumbria University and part of the evolution, perception and behaviour research group. "The theory goes that your genes provide a template for symmetrical bodies, symmetrical face. [When] there's some sort of problem - you get ill or you encounter some problem with the environment - that can sometimes throw the symmetry off a little bit," she says. "So it might be that if you are picking a symmetric partner then you are actually picking somebody whose genes are fairly well suited to the environment around you."

Young men with an eating disorder are not getting the help and support they need because of a perceptions about a "women's illness", say researchers.

Maps of neural circuitry show women's brains are suited to social skills and memory, men's perception and co-ordination

Musical hallucinations, the experience of hearing music when none is being played, have been the subject of a study by Dr Sukhbinder Kumar, a research fellow at Newcastle University.

Neurologist and author Oliver Sacks brings our attention to Charles Bonnet syndrome - when visually impaired people experience lucid hallucinations. He describes the experiences of his patients in heartwarming detail and walks us through the biology of this under-reported phenomenon

A team of researchers who found that people think they are more attractive when drinking alcohol, have scooped an Ig Nobel prize for their work.

We studied the patient JP who has exceptional abilities to draw complex geometrical images by hand and a form of acquired synesthesia for mathematical formulas and objects, which he perceives as geometrical figures. JP sees all smooth curvatures as discrete lines, similarly regardless of scale. We carried out two preliminary investigations to establish the perceptual nature of synesthetic experience and to investigate the neural basis of this phenomenon. In a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, image-inducing formulas produced larger fMRI responses than non-image inducing formulas in the left temporal, parietal and frontal lobes. Thus our main finding is that the activation associated with his experience of complex geometrical images emerging from mathematical formulas is restricted to the left hemisphere.

You have three options on which to guess the winner of a classical music competition: audio only, silent video or video with sound. Can you guess who won a music competition based on short clips?

people drink more quickly out of curved glasses than straight ones.