What makes a people person?
Are you a 'people person?' Well science now has a way of knowing for sure.
Sadly, I have to admit I'm not. This is why I'm quite happy to be left alone to write my blog. In my, limited, experience people you don't know tend to be slice or two short of a loaf. So it's best to keep away.
But this is my problem and obviously loads of people out there really are very fond of other humans.
Cambridge University has a few as researchers say being a 'people person' depends on the structure of the brain.
The more tissue packed into particular areas of the old grey matter, the more likely you are to be a warm, sentimental person.
Volunteers had their brains scanned using an MRI. They also completed a questionnaire asking them to rate themselves on items such as 'I make a warm personal connection with most people', or 'I like to please other people as much as I can'.
The boffins found emotionaly warm people had more dense orbitofrontal cortex and ventral striatum areas of their noggins.
These terms mean nothing to me but they are the same areas of the brain thought to be important for processing sweet tastes or sexual stimuli.
I'll leave you to make your own conclusions.
Weird Science Factoid: The Earth weighs 6.6 sextillion tonnes, or 5.97 x 10 to the power 24 kg. And it's getting heavier at a rate of 40,000 tonnes a year. Pop quiz hotshots - anyone know why?
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Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
The earth is obviously getting heavier because people are getting fatter, it said so on the news.
Good effort but shoveling too much food in our mouths won't make the planet heavier, just the human race. The answer is meteorites - the Earth, just like our solar system, is still under construction!