Hello and welcome to the briefing chat podcast, the Friday show where we give you a round-up of the latest science news,

courtesy of the Nature Briefing, which is Nature's daily email newsletter that tells you all about what's going on in the world of science.

And joining me to discuss this week is Shamney Bundell.

Hey, yeah. Yeah, I've got some brain science that I'm bringing to the briefing chat podcast this week.

And it's all about sex differences in our brains, which is, if you're not aware, kind of a

controversial topic. And this is some new research on that.

Yeah, because it's hard to figure out what causes these sex differences, right? Whether it's

like the environment, whether it's society or something like internal to us, right?

Yeah, huge questions about that. I went to the Wikipedia article on neuroscience of sex

differences. And the first paragraph is just different papers

that are sort of disagreeing with each other and no one's quite sure what they mean. And I don't

think this is going to magically solve anything, but it is interesting. I should say it's a pre-print.

It's on bioarchive. So it hasn't been peer reviewed and published in a journal. But this has been

reported by nature news. And basically what they've done in this study

is fMRIs of 1,286 people from the age of 8 to 100. And they are looking at sex differences.

They have sex at birth of these people. They don't have their gender. And it's just a little

snapshot of their brain at their current age and information about

different types of connections within the brains. So there's structural connections,

which is just literally like where the physical neurons are linked to each other. And there's

also functional connections. So that's more about what the

neurons are doing. And it's about synchronized brain activity in the neurons between different

regions when they're sort of synced up. So they looked at those two things. And they did in fact

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