What can small rodents tell us about the very human emotion of love?

Romantic attachments make you feel good.

And we know that these bonds also make bowls feel good. They find them highly rewarding and

highly motivating.

It's Monday, July 29th, and this is Science Friday. I'm Cyfry producer Charles Burgquist.

Prairie Vols are one of the few mammals that form monogamous pair bonds.

By studying these rodents, scientists have found that love leaves a mark on the brain, a flood of

dopamine and other feel-good chemicals that they think happen in our human brains too.

We'll talk about that story in just a bit,

but first a very important question.

If you squished Colorado into an ooey-goey brownie,

how big would that brownie be? Here's Ira.

Here to answer that very important question is Dan Boyce reporter at Colorado Public Radio and Colorado Springs.

Welcome to Science Friday.

Hello, Ira, great to be with you.

Nice to have you, Dan.

So where did this wild idea come from?

I love it so much.

We got the question from a listener, a Denver resident

named Howard Paul. I spent a lot of time in the outdoors and I think about brownies and

German chocolate cake and so on. How large would Colorado be if I used a giant rolling pin

and roll it flat to one inch thick?

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