Springfield, VA, USA. Society (the women and men around us) has always been more comfortable if its members fall within certain known, established patterns: this is how we dress, this is what we say, this is what we believe, this is how we look.

These are the standards by which a society defines itself and separates from the non-members (the other societies that may live around it — the proverbial they and them your mother warned you about).

Throughout human history, every society has had intrinsic cultural standards for beauty, especially beauty as it applies to women. Certain images are held up as examples of womanly perfection. Ancient Egypt, which placed a strong emphasis on images (statues, reliefs, wall paintings), provides hundreds, if not thousands of examples of their societal expectation for female beauty. [N1] Cultural emphasis on women's appearance is an ancient and ongoing story, perhaps one that is coded in our genes.

What is beauty? Like pornography, we know beauty when we see it but how shall we define it?

Attempts to reduce beauty down to binary data and mathematical models is nothing new. Two millennium ago, Pythagora

Bloomington, IN, USA. An international team of researchers has created the first complete high-resolution map of how millions of neural fibers in the human cerebral cortex — the outer layer of the brain responsible for higher level thinking — connect and communicate. They have identified a single network core, or hub, that integrates both brain hemispheres.

The map shows a core of brain regions with highly interconnected structures (the brain "connectome"). The groundbreaking work also describes a novel application of a non-invasive technique that can be used by other scientists to continue mapping the trillions of neural connections in the brain at even greater resolution, which is becoming a new field of science ("connectomics").

---

Mapping the Structural Core of Human Cerebral Cortex. Patric Hagmann, Leila Cammoun, Xavier Gigandet, Reto Meuli, Christopher J. Honey, Van J. Wedeen, Olaf Sporns. PLoS Biology 6(7) e159 doi: 10.1371 / journal.pbio.0060159 [ Download PDF ]

---

A map of the human cerebral cortex identifies a single network core that could be key to the workings of both hemispheres of the brain. Image courtesy of Indiana Univer