A DOMINANT male mouse won’t just turn a female on. He’ll make her brain grow. Just a whiff of his odour is enough to make the female’s brain sprout new neurons, and this growth drives her to want to mate with him.
Samuel Weiss at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, and his colleagues exposed 8 to 10-week-old female mice to soiled bedding from males of the same age. Two weeks later they found that the brains of females exposed to dominant male pheromones had grown significantly more new neurons in two key regions of the brain than those…
