1. Channel 4 broadcast an astonishing documentary "How to build a bionic man", in which psychologist Bertolt Meyer (who has a bionic hand) explored advances in prosthetics, and the psychological implications as they become ever more sophisticated and ubiquitous. The programme is now available on-demand.
2. After a Guardian blog post spread the most ridiculous gender neuromyths in its advice for encouraging more girls into science, thankfully balance was restored through Dean Burnett's Brain Flapping blog, in a satirical riposte Boys and science: The gender gap and how to maintain it. (see also: this on why pseudoscience won't help, and myths and facts about gender brain differences).
3. Vaughan Bell can't resist getting to the bottom of "the Kim Kardashian of neurotransmitters" - dopamine. Is it really the brain's pleasure chemical?
4. Mark Changizi had a theory that colour vision evolved for us to sense each other's emotions. I09 tells the amazing story of how this led to his development of glasses that solve the problem of colour blindness.
5. "you’d probably be better off learning the piano, or Japanese, or even playing the latest Call of Duty" - Matt Wall takes a sceptical look at the multi-million dollar brain training industry.
6. Neuroscientist David Eagleman (author of Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain) appeared on the latest Connectome Podcast.
7. Just how clever is your dog? Laurie Santos (Yale University) chatted with Brian Hare (Duke University, author of The Genius of Dogs) on BloggingHeads.TV.
8. "It is startling to realize that some of our most cherished memories may never have happened—or may have happened to someone else" - Oliver Sacks wrote on the distortions of memory for the New York Review of Books.
9. BBC magazine published an interesting analysis of whether anti-drugs ads actually work, including the long-running Talk To Frank campaign in the UK.
10. Beware, stalking the land is a new breed of rapists with three brain lobes.
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
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