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In an intriguing study, scientists have linked tart tastes with an unforgiving  mind. And the more conservative a person's views, the more their thoughts are  affected by their tastebuds.

The time: the early years of the 19th century. The setting an ancient manor house in an isolated valley in the west of England. A scientist is engaged in a very elaborate series of experiments with electricity. Outside the laboratory, copper wires suspended on poles run for more than a mile into the countryside. Inside, mysterious equipment - coils of wire, weirdly shaped jars, strange crystals, saucers of murky liquid - glows and pulsates. The few local people who dare to approach the mansion tell of explosions, of bolts of lightning that strike when no storms are near, and of the reclusive, secretive nature of the scientist himself.

Long thought to be off limits to science, morality has been considered the exclusive preserve of philosophers and theologians. Not any more. In this special report a new generation of scientists share their wide-ranging insights.

October 24, 2008 - Google Tech Talks June 16, 2008 ABSTRACT Explore the brain's amazing ability to change throughout a person's life. This phenomenon-called neuroplasticty-is the science behind brain fitness, and it has been called one of the most extraordinary scientific discoveries of the 20th century. PBS had recently aired this special, The Brain Fitness Program, which explains the brain's complexities in a way that both scientists and people with no scientific background can appreciate. This is opportunity to learn more about how our minds work-and to find out more about the latest in cutting-edge brain research, from the founder of Posit Science and creator of the Brain Fitness Program software, Dr. Michael Merzenich. Speaker: Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. Michael M. Merzenich, PhD: Chief Scientific Officer Dr. Merzenich leads the company's scientific team. For more than three decades, Dr. Merzenich has been a leading pioneer in brain plasticity research. He is the Francis A. Sooy Professor at the Keck Center for Integrative Neurosciences at UCSF. Dr. Merzenich is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including the Ipsen Prize, Zulch Prize of the Max Planck Institute, Thomas Alva Edison Patent Award and Purkinje Medal. Dr. Merzenich has published more than 200 articles, including many in leading peer-reviewed journals, such as Science and Nature. His work is also often covered in the popular press, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Time and Newsweek. He has appeared on Sixty Minutes II, CBS Evening News and Good Morning America. In the late 1980s, Dr. Merzenich was on the team that invented the cochlear implant, now distributed by market leader Advanced Bionics. In 1996, Dr. Merzenich was the founding CEO of Scientific Learning Corporation (Nasdaq: SCIL), which markets and distributes software that applies principles of brain plasticity to assist children with language

Researchers use functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan the brain of a student as he imagined each individual limb. Scientists mapped out his brain wave patterns, and translated them into commands to make the robot move. The student was then able to control the robot's movement entirely by thinking about moving.

A team of researchers in Germany have discovered the source of human awareness in the brain through the analysis of dreams.

Is free will an illusion? Some leading scientists think so. For instance, in 2002 the psychologist Daniel Wegner wrote, "It seems we are agents. It seems we cause what we do… It is sobering and ultimately accurate to call all this an illusion."

Ian McEwan is a world-renowned Booker Prize-winning English novelist and screenwriter. Steven Pinker is a Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author of popular science. Pinker is known for his wide-ranging advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational...

From virtual gaming to social media and smartphones, we are surrounded by online technology - and it's proving unhealthily addictive

It's been called the "warrior gene" - a mutation that seems to make people more aggressive. Now researchers report that people with this gene may not be aggressive, just better at spotting their own interests.

ScienceDaily (Jan. 12, 2011) - Scientists have found that the pleasurable experience of listening to music releases dopamine, a neurotransmitter in the brain important for more tangible pleasures associated with rewards such as food, drugs and sex. The new study from The Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital -- The Neuro at McGill University also reveals that even the anticipation of pleasurable music induces dopamine release [as is the case with food, drug, and sex cues]. Published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, the results suggest why music, which has no obvious survival value, is so significant across human society.

Your senses are your windows on the world, and you probably think they do a fair job at capturing an accurate depiction of reality. Don't kid yourself. Sensory perception - especially vision - is a figment of your imagination. "What you're experiencing is largely the product of what's inside your head," says psychologist Ron Rensink at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. "It's informed by what comes in through your eyes, but it's not directly reflecting it."

IF YOU want to lose weight, convince yourself that everything you eat is highly calorific. It could lower your levels of a hunger hormone, potentially suppressing your appetite. Alia Crum at Yale University and her colleagues gave 46 healthy volunteers the same 380-calorie milkshake but were told it was either a sensible, low-calorie choice or an indulgent, high-calorie one. The team also measured levels of ghrelin - a hormone released by the stomach when we are hungry - before and after participants drank the shake. Ghrelin levels have been shown to spike half an hour before mealtimes and return to normal after eating. Volunteers who thought they had indulged showed significantly greater drops in ghrelin levels than those who thought they had consumed less. The authors suggest that merely thinking that one has eaten something unhealthy can quell hunger pangs and perhaps help curb overeating (Health Psychology, DOI: 10.1037/a0023467). The study shows that food labels can affect consumption in unexpected ways, says David Cummings, an endocrinologist at the University of Washington in Seattle.

The Flynn effect has always been tinged with mystery. First popularized by the political scientist James Flynn, the effect refers to the widespread increase in IQ scores over time. Some measures of intelligence - such as performance on Raven's Progressive Matrices in Des Moines and Scotland - have been increasing for at least 100 years. What's most peculiar is how scores have increased:

Why are we all so different? Here is a toolkit for finding out what people are really like IN THE 4th century BC, the Greek philosopher Theophrastus, Aristotle's student and successor, wrote a book about personality. The project was motivated by his interest in what he considered a very puzzling question: "Why it has come about that, albeit the whole of Greece lies in the same clime, and all Greeks have a like upbringing, we have not the same constitution of character?" Not knowing how to get at the answer, Theophrastus decided to instead focus on categorising those seemingly mysterious differences in personality. The result was a book of descriptions of personality types to which he assigned names such as The Suspicious, The Fearful and The Proud. The book made such an impression that it was passed down through the ages, and is still available online today as The Characters of Theophrastus. The two big questions about personality that so interested Theophrastus are the same ones we ask ourselves about the people we know: why do we have different personalities? And what is the best way to describe them? In the past few decades, researchers have been gradually answering these questions, and in my new book, Making Sense of People: Decoding the mysteries of personality, I take a look at some of these answers. When it comes to the origins of personality, we have learned a lot. We now know that personality traits are greatly influenced by the interactions between the set of gene variants that we happen to have been born with and the social environment we happen to grow up in. The gene variants that a person inherits favour certain behavioural tendencies, such as assertiveness or cautiousness, while their environmental circumstances influence the forms these innate behavioural tendencies take. The ongoing dialogue between the person's genome and environment gradually establishes the enduring ways of thinking and feeling that are the building blocks of personality. This de

Psychologist and social scientist Dacher Keltner says the rich really are different, and not in a good way: Their life experience makes them less empathetic, less altruistic, and generally more selfish.

overactive amygdala interferes with decision-making, problem-solving

Pre Historic Puzzles: Rocking the Cradle of Civilization For more than a century, archeologists were convincing that the cradle of civilization lay in Greece, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. The learning of the advanced peoples of this region, it was thought, gradually moved west into Europe. But in the last few decades these theories have been overturned, thanks to Nobel Prize-winning physicist Willard F. Libby and a substance knows as carbon 14. Carbon 14 is a radioactive substance that exists in minute quantities. In the late 1940's Libby discovered that all plants and animals absorb it. When they die, the carbon-like all radioactive substances-begins to decay at a regular rate. Libby was able to measure this rate and could thus use carbon 14 as an archeological calendar. Today it is known that half of the carbon 14 in living organism disappears in 5,730 years, half of what remains in an additional 5,730 years, and so on. How old is old? Many of the items found at prehistoric sites are made of organic material. By measuring the amount of carbon 14 remaining in the shaft of an old ax or a piece of pottery, for example, scientists can accurately determine its age. Radiocarbon dating has proved to be phenomenally accurate: it can date to within 100 years going back to 50,000 B.C. It is particularly useful on wood because it can be checked against Dendron-chronology, dating by tree rings. A new ring forms every year in the trunk of a tree as it grows: counting the number of rings enables one to determine the age of any tree. Where did civilization begin?