Artists’ libido

Creative people have more sexual partners than the rest of us. Two British psychologists from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and Open University in Milton Keynes surveyed 425 professional visual artists and poets, amateurs and regular people and found that active artists had had an average of two more sexual partners than others.

Noise killer

A University of Washington study says a few nerve cells in the brain of mice focus exclusively on novel sounds and help them ignore predictable and ongoing noises. These “novelty detector neurons” can detect changes in pitch, loudness or duration of a single sound and stop carrying the ‘message’ of the noise. Humans, too, process noise in the same manner.

Coffee power

Now you know why a cup of coffee keeps you awake whole night. Researchers at the Medical University at Innsbruck, Austria, have shown how it improves short-term memory and speeds up reaction times by acting on distinct brain areas involved in memory and concentration. This tallies with anecdotal evidence of the drink’s “pick-me-up” effect.