There is a reason some schools on the coast of California only have a 25 percent vaccination rate. Not 25 percent exemption, 25 percent vaccination. In California overall, exemptions rates rose by 25 percent just between 2008 and 2010 and that trend has been mirrored in states like Washington and Oregon.

The recent rash in anti-vaccination hysteria can be mathematically modeled, say scholars from the University of Guelph and the University of Waterloo.

The anterior insula region deep inside the brain controls how quickly people make decisions about love, according to a new paper.

The finding, made in an examination of a 48-year-old man who suffered a stroke, is the first causal clinical evidence that the anterior insula "plays an instrumental role in love," according to Stephanie Cacioppo, Director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience Laboratory of the University of Chicago, lead author of the study who also helped create an evolutionary theory of loneliness.

First impressions are so powerful that they can override what we are told about people, say social psychologists. A new paper presented today at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) annual conference in Austin says that even when told whether a person was gay or straight, participants generally identified the person's sexual orientation based on how they looked.

Everyone feels neuroscience studies are biased, no matter how representative they try to be. But Roel Willems and colleagues from the  Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour at Radboud University Nijmegen,  and Max Planck Institute in Nijmegen say studies are flawed if they don't include enough left-handed people.

Because left-handed people have different brains.

Do television shows and magazines make you feel guilty for not wearing sexy lingerie, ladies? You may just need some marketing empowerment from academics in the humanities.

Luckily, at Valentine's Day, the Internet will be filled with insipid advice based on weak observational studies and surveys. So here it is: sexy lingerie may not help, but it sure won't hurt. 

Can data be a tactile experience?

The CEEDs project thinks it can be, and they want to use integrated technologies to support human experience when trying to make sense of very large datasets.

Jonathan Freeman Professor of Psychology at Goldsmith University of London, did an interview with youris.com to outline  how they believe this project can help present data better, depending on the feedback participants provide to data from their environment via monitoring of explicit responses such as eye movement, and their inner reactions, like rate. 

What inspired you to get involved in data representation?